PRINTABLE CHECKLIST
CAM Reconciliation Checklist
Work through this once per property per reconciliation year. The order matters: expenses first, then lease rules, then allocations, then tenant communication. Skipping ahead is how a reconciliation gets rebuilt in March.
1. Close the expense year
- Pull every operating expense for the reconciliation period from the bank feed, statements, or ledger, with the invoice or receipt for each.
- Separate recoverable operating expenses from non-recoverable (HOUSE) costs: capital items, leasing commissions, owner overhead, debt service, depreciation.
- Confirm the management fee treatment: recoverable up to the lease's stated percentage, if any, and excluded above it.
- Tag each expense to a category that matches the lease's recoverable-expense definitions (taxes, insurance, CAM, utilities, security, landscaping, snow, repairs, administration).
- Reconcile the category totals back to the bank: total spend minus HOUSE costs should equal the recoverable pool.
2. Confirm each lease's rules
- For every tenant, confirm the pro-rata denominator the lease uses: total rentable area, leased area, or a gross-up to an assumed occupancy.
- Note any cap on controllable expenses (cumulative or non-cumulative), and which categories the lease treats as uncontrollable (usually taxes, insurance, utilities, snow).
- Note any base-year or expense-stop provision and the base-year amount.
- Note exclusions specific to the lease (roof, structure, parking lot resurfacing, capital improvements, prior-year costs).
- Note the administrative fee percentage, if any, and what it applies to.
- Confirm occupancy dates for tenants who moved in or out during the year, for proration.
3. Calculate and check
- Compute each tenant's share of each category using its own lease rules, not one property-wide formula.
- Apply caps, base years, and exclusions per tenant; record the uncapped figure alongside the capped one.
- Total estimates billed to each tenant during the year, and payments actually received.
- Derive the true-up (share less estimates paid) and check that all tenant shares plus the landlord's vacancy share sum back to the recoverable pool.
- Compare each tenant's share to last year's and explain any change over 10% before the tenant asks.
4. Communicate and record
- Send each tenant a reconciliation statement within the deadline the lease specifies (often 90–180 days after year-end), showing the pool, the share calculation, estimates paid, and the balance.
- Include the lease section references the calculation relies on.
- Set next year's monthly estimate from this year's actual, adjusted for known changes (a tax reassessment, an insurance renewal).
- Log the date each statement was sent, and calendar the tenant's audit-right window if the lease grants one.
- Archive the workpapers: expense detail, lease rule summary, allocation schedule, statements, and correspondence, in one folder per year.