Commercial Utility & CAM splits + receipt attachment

[João Barquinha]

Hey everyone,

I help manage a few small commercial retail plazas. Doing the monthly pro-rata utility and CAM bill-backs is draining my soul, and I'm trying to figure out if there's a better way to do this.

The pro-rata math in Excel is annoying, but the real time-suck is the "proof". My commercial tenants are super nitpicky and demand to see the original city bills so they know they aren't being overcharged.

My current workflow is: 1) Calculate the splits in Excel, 2) Generate the individual PDF invoices, 3) Manually stitch/combine the original city water/trash PDFs to the back of every single tenant invoice so they have the proof.

It takes hours every month. Migrating our entire accounting setup to a massive ERP like AppFolio or Yardi just to fix this chore is an overkill for our size and budget.

Is there a lightweight tool out there that does the math and stitches the receipts together? Would love to hear how you guys optimize this workflow.

[Michael K Gallagher]

It sounds like you are splitting month by month the utilities between tenants is that correct?  Generally my experience with retail/retail leases is that the tenants generally are responsible for their own untilties to the suite, ie there is a separate meter for each suite, and that there is an annual per sf estimated cost for CAM and that the TT can audit these charges, but generally I've seen it work similar to an escrow account where the TT is paying an estimate and at so many intervals throughout the year or even only annually the charges are "validated" and the PSF payment is adjusted for the next period accordingly.  

My point being if you are also splitting utilities, in this way I can see your struggle.  Candidly I think the expectation that each specific bill is split precisely each month is a bit much.  I'd rather have a quarterly reconciliation or even semi annually, and work off historical data to set the initial rate.

I obviously dont know your location laws or regulations or what is in your leases, but that's what I'd work towards along with separate meters if not already in place.