Splitting Costs

When dealing with a multi-schedule budgets each schedule is, in essence, its own budget. This means you should be able to identify the costs pertaining to that schedule and justify them. You may find on budgets you inherit that a previous Property Manager has split costs between schedules based on an arbitrary percentage – this is likely wrong. If a lease specifics such a split, then follow it (although i have never come across such a lease). Or possibly a tribunal could have decreed such a split, in which case follow it. Otherwise the previous property manager was trying to be clever or lazy, either way it isn’t good.

If you place a cost in a schedule then you should be able to state exactly why, you need to evidence or justify why the cost in schedule 1 is X and in schedule 2 its X. For example if you have cleaning in multiple blocks, each with its own schedule, you may be tempted to split the cost equally or divide by the number of flats in each block – but is that correct? No, the only way to know is to ask the cleaner to give you the price for each block.

We will cover this in more detail in the next lesson.