Category: board of directors

Providing Services under Covid-19

~ C.O.R.E. Beliefs by John ~ Leave a comment

It has been awhile since I have written here – mostly because I blog at www.core-acct.com/core-beliefs.   There we share lots of ideas on how condominiums can successfully run regardless of what pressure the rest of the world is under.

Today I thought I would share how we are responding on behalf of our clients.  Most of these items we have had in place for at least 6 months and were beginning to roll out to our clients.

  • zoho meeting and webinar.  The webinar approach allows us to have the board act as co-presenters and the condo owners to log in and watch the proceedings.
  • Board briefing books.  An e-book sent to the board about a week to 10 days in advance of the board meeting with all the information they will need to have for the agenda.  This includes the financial statements, committee reports, management reports and suggested motions.
  • E-Voucher system for bill payment.  Some of our association still require a board officer (the treasurer) to counter-sign checks.  Our e-voucher system automatically sends an email to the required board officers to review the documents and then e-sign their approval.  This allows us to then either pay by ACH or check without requiring a business officer to find time to meet with us.
  • Service request system.  Unit owners can go online and report an issue and our system automatically logs it and starts a workflow which takes us all the way through vendor billing.  This includes getting all necessary approvals from our team as well as the board.
  • Our HOA Fiscal system to manage assessments and owner payments.  We designed it to allocate the assessments in accordance with the CC&R’s and ensure that owner payments are easily tracked and recorded against the correct assessment.

The team tracks everything in our database.  And yes, we spent a great deal of time and energy on customizing our CRM system to work this way – but it is so worth it.  Our emails are automatically recorded as well, eliminating the need for any of us to CC another team member.  We record phone calls and can even receive text messages.  All this means that the account manager has everything at his or her fingertips they might need to know what is going on with their assigned client – which leads to more effective and timely decisions.

And we think the best part is that this is at no additional cost to our clients.  By eliminating the non-value added time wasters we can leverage our time more effectively which means more work in the same amount of time per month.  We win – we can work from home and reduce travel time: Clients win – they get superior service with no additional cost.  They can talk to any of us and know that it will be taken care of.

In short, peace of mind for the boards.  They see everything they want to see in order to make the best decision for their association and they know we are on top of everything that is going on.  And all at no additional cost to their association.

If you are a service business and are still trying to meet with clients physically and sending emails to everyone in your organization to try and find a document, perhaps you need to re-evaluate your process.  Consider:

  • Moving away from landlines to virtual phone systems which can tie into your CRM
  • Ensuring you have a project/client work management system which allows you to track the steps your team needs to take and also where you are in the process.
  • Set up a record management system where the team (and maybe even clients) can upload documents so that they are in one place.  Move away from unmanaged record storage on your local or even network drive.  Save it to the database!
  • License Zoom, Gotomeeting, zoho meeting (plug, we use zoho) or some other meeting software which allows you to set up both group meetings, classes, or on-demand one-on-one meetings.  Even within your office, it is superior as you can share documents, jointly change the document, and share screens without having to get out of your chair.  Efficient use of time.
  • Stop sending emails.  License Slack, use Teams, Yammer or the like to let people share ideas in a social way.  Zoho and RingCentral (plug, our phone system) both offer means for us to share documents outside of the database as well as simply have a free exchange outside of email.
  • And lots more.  Everything you are currently doing that takes more than one person to do should be in some sort of workflow/document management system.  Period.  If you don’t want to license something industry specific, use Access and interface with Sharepoint (if you are using Microsoft 365).  Anything but the constant extra work that your current process requires that slows down your ability to respond to clients and keeps you from scaling without extra costs.

Welcome to the new normal.  Take the time to plan and fix one area of your business at a time and you will soon be ready for whatever the future offers you.

 

The Contract, Control and Your Condo Accounting

~ C.O.R.E. Beliefs by John ~ 1 Comment

Theoretical question: Does an HOA or condominium association ever try to enhance its accumulated assets?  Or, is the association’s sole purpose to breakeven, that is cover its expenses over the long-term so that unit owners do not have to continually reach deep to pay bills?

I follow the later theory.  When you think about the association and its reason to exist, you will be hit by the fact that it budgets for breakeven and it attempts to accumulate assets only in sufficient amounts to satisfy potential future claims.  Specifically, the operating assessment is designed to cover all of an association’s expenses and the reserve assessment to accumulate assets to deal with the inevitable problems of owning things.  Over the life of the co-owned assets, the reserve should have only enough in the fund to pay for the expected future repair and replacement value of the shared assets.

What does this mean to an association and the upcoming changes under ASC 606?  You will likely not have a statement of revenue, expenses and changes in fund balances that means a great deal.  I say this because as we move towards the control principle of revenue recognition, it is highly likely that assessments (revenue) will only be recognized as a specific expense is recognized.

Under ASC 606, your budget should not only be a bunch of numbers, it should also be a bunch of performance expectations.  Thus, for every expense items, such as landscaping or management, you will want to identify when you believe you have “gotten what you paid for”, so you can recognize the revenue.  And some of you will even say, “This isn’t a problem, we have a contract.”

Thus, today’s exercise.  Do your contracts actually spell out performance obligations so that you can easily determine when the provider delivers and your association has met a performance obligation to those with whom you contract (the Owners)?  I think you are going to be both surprised and horrified as to how little thought goes into most contracts and how your management and board can identify if and when revenue should be recognized in your Association financial statement.

We obviously read a ton of contracts.  We produce them as well – an audit engagement letter for instance is a contract.  So, taking the audit ELA as our first example, lets walk through this to determine when and how an association will likely have to address revenue recognition.

In 2020, you prepare a budget and your budget calls for $5,000 for your annual audit of the 2019 year end.  Your auditor sends you the retainer agreement in January 2020 for $2,500.  The entry, done properly, would be

  • Prepaid expense – audit              $2,500
    • Accounts Payable                                $2,500

You also bill your owners for the audit.  Sometimes this is done through an annual budget process but in this particular case, the owners all agreed that bills would be split up and charged to the owners as they come in.  The 50 owners each receive their bill for $50.  How do you recognize it?

This is where the new ASC comes into play.  There are 5 steps you will need to go through to determine how you recognize revenue going forward:

  1. Identify the contract.  In this case, the owners agreed (contracted) to have a specific service performed and to pay the charge.  So, it appears we have a contract.  And, by the way, contracts are very liberally identified.  So if it looks like an agreement, it is likely a contract, even if it is not in writing.
  2. Identify the performance obligations.  You need to first understand that we are talking about the performance obligations that your customer, i.e. the owners, expect.  In this particular case, the owners expect the completed and issued audit report.
  3. Determine the transaction price.  In this specific instance, the price charged to the owners is identical to the price charged from the vendor so the completed audit report has a price of $5,000.
  4. Allocate the transaction price to the performance obligation. Since there is only one performance obligation (completed audit report) and the transaction price is for the completed audit report, the price per performance obligation is $5,000.
  5. Recognize revenue when (or as) the entity satisfies the performance obligation.

In our particular example, the invoice sent in by the vendor is for a retainer so the invoice to the owners is for the retainer – that is, the billing to the owners is not yet earned.  Thus, the entry is

  • Owner receivable                 $2,500
    • Unearned revenue                       $2,500

Notice that the charge to the owners sits in unearned revenue.  Since the performance obligation, that is the completed audit report, has not been presented, the revenue is not recognized.  When the audit report is completed and issued, the auditor sends in their final bill for $2,500;

  • Audit expense                           $5,000
    • Prepaid expense – Audit                $2,500
    • Accounts payable                            $2,500

And, since the audit is done, that is, the performance obligation has been met, you would record the revenue;

  • Unearned revenue                     $2,500
  • Owner receivable                       $2,500
    • Revenues                                            $5,000

This isn’t so bad right?  True, but I set you up with the easiest one first.  In this instance, the Association billed the owners directly for the costs.  But what happens when the audit is but one component of a $500,000 budget assessment?

You guessed it.  It is quite possible that your association is going to create, during its budgetary process, specific performance obligations for each of those contracts and, potentially pass those same performance obligations to the owners through your budgeting.

So, the more detailed your budget is, the greater the possibility that you are creating multiple performance obligations which require your assessments (the transaction price) to be allocated over those performance obligations.  And it is very unlikely that your auditor, those nice ladies and gentlemen looking out for your financial well-being, are going to accept the mere passage of time as a performance obligation.

ASC 606 is not something to ignore and hope your financial management team can figure out on the fly.  We talk with these managers and they either show incredible contempt for the change in how revenues are recognized or are thinking they can safely ignore it because their boards are not paying attention.  The one thing they are not doing is planning for this change.  You, as a board, need to start having this conversation, ESPECIALLY if you are obligated to issue financial statements prepared in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

Next up, looking at how ASC 606 performance obligations and assessments might work for you.

 

 

Impact of New Accounting Standards on Condo Associations Chapter 1.

~ C.O.R.E. Beliefs by John ~ Leave a comment

During our weekly meetings, we identified the upcoming changes to revenue recognition codified in ASC 606 could likely be a significant disruption for community associations and how they report activity.  Currently, condominiums and HOA’s follow the guidance provided in ASC 972-605 for reporting revenues.  Beginning in 2020, this industry specific guidance goes away and associations will need to follow ASC 606 Revenues from Contracts with Customers.

The first thing to understand is that ASC 606 will apply to associations.  Associations enter into contract agreements with their unit owners which state that unit owners will agree to provide resources to pay for the expenses incurred for the common good.  Since it is an agreement between the parties it is considered a contract.  Since you have identified the existence of a “Contract”, the next big question is, “Now what?”

First, it depends on whether you identify a single contract or n number of contracts where n represents the number of units in your association.  Our take on it right now is that there is a single contract between the association and its unit owners.  We believe this is conceptually correct as the unit owners, as a group, vote to ratify the budget.  Plus we believe it fits since the association has a single contractual purpose which is to maintain the common elements.  But you can see that, right off the bat, there is a basis for a disagreement.

We believe the next step would be to record the following transaction once the budget is approved and ratified:

Owner Contract Asset                   $XXX,XXX
Unearned Contract Revenue                         $XXX,XXX

This identifies that the association expects to receive, as payments from the unit owners as the party to the contract, a certain amount to address the expenditures to maintain the common elements.

I can see the confused looks.  It’s ok, we understand.  Think about it this way:

Your association has a fiscal year which begins January 1 and ends December 31.  In November the board passes a budget for $250,000 in assessments.  The owners meet and ratify the budget on December 1.  Because the association passes the budget for the annual cycle, it is creating the claim for the contract which begins January 1.  Since it won’t begin to perform work until January 1 the association would not recognize the revenues until that date.  Never-the-less, because the final step of the contract, its ratification, happened in December, we believe it is appropriate to record the transaction as stated above on the date of ratification, even though it is clearly not effective until January 1.

On a practical basis, what this means is that your management company should be changing its account structure and its memorized transactions – ASSUMING you want your manager to report the association’s accounting information in accordance with GAAP.  If you want to follow some other accounting principle, well this blog is not for you.

What does this mean to you as a board? That the issuance of a paper statement, a coupon book, a web portal, no longer dictates when something is revenue.  All these items do is determine the timing of when payments are received.  What you will be most focused on, as a board, is this series of transactions

Owner Receivable                       $XXX
Owner Contract Asset                         $XXX

Followed by this when payment is received:

Operating Bank Account         $XXX
Owner Receivable                             $XXX

We will delve more into this over the next 10 days, but the key takeaway today is that your association will still invoice unit owners when you want payment and the money will still be deposited to your bank.  How and when it is recognized as revenues will be independent of the billing.

Obviously, even at this point you can see where there could be lots of opportunity for confusion.  We have always been taught that it is revenue when invoiced.  While I can prove that this is hardly ever the case, it is what has been treated as truth for as long as I can remember.  And moving away from this will require boards and management to think long and hard about the process.

Next up: Performance Obligations for associations – No more “Net Income” on your Management Reports.

Have a great weekend.  If you have questions or would like to participate in a discussion about how ASC 606 will impact community associations, feel free to email me for an invitation to our next webinar on the subject.

 

Why GAAP matters

~ C.O.R.E. Beliefs by John ~ Leave a comment

Sadly I am not allowed to say too much about today’s meeting as the board was in executive session but the gist of the other accountant’s opinion is that economic reality doesn’t matter only the legal form of a transaction.

Really?

When pressed about how that could possibly be the case since contractors obviously have earned a certain amount of revenue based upon an economic theory, the reply was, “Well you can’t confuse for profit with non-profit.”

Really?

When asked how, when a contract shows the total amount due or, if you elect you can pay a sum each month over XXX number of months and it includes interest at Y%, this someone does not create a sum certain for accounting purposes,  there is not somehow some understanding that the sum certain is a receivable, the replay was, “The contract says it is revenue only upon the payment of the monthly amount.”

Really?

The board naturally is confused.  Rightly so.  Two professionals, two different opinions, one type of transaction.

Except that one professional has a position backed up by research on the application of GAAP and how the Accounting Standards Codifications call for the transactions to be recorded.  The other is an opinion based upon his 30+ years of experience so he doesn’t need to know GAAP.

Honestly, if I were the board I would fire us both.  Me for yelling at a dumbass accountant who thinks that if he appeases his fired client he will continue to reap referrals and the other accountant for being a dumbass and trying to provide accounting 101 lessons.

I was wrong to lose my temper.  At the end of the day the treatment we selected is appropriate and consistent with GAAP.  But there was almost $2,500 of billing listening to a lecture of how debits are on the left and credits are on the right.  I was infuriated not for myself but the fact that these board members have owned and run businesses, sat on boards and really do understand the basics of accounting theory.  They paid $2,500 to listen to a self-proclaimed expert prattle on how form matters over substance.

Each person in the room understands that Enron happened.  That WorldCom cost them and their friends dearly.  When no matter how you cut it, you can’t incur an expense without the expectation that there exists a pool of resources to pay the attendant liability. And one expects their financial statements to reflect the reality of that situation.

GAAP exists for a reason.  GAAP doesn’t reflect – or rather should not reflect – the mere form of a transaction.  GAAP reflects economic reality.  And it does matter.  Because the next time you go to buy a home and you look at the books and it shows zero receivable from the owners and a bank liability of any amount, please understand, you are likely facing a special assessment only no one wants you to know.  And, had those books been properly kept on GAAP, you would have known the problem exists.  You probably still would have bought but at least you won’t be able to say (with a straight face) that you weren’t warned.  Which is the whole point of a financial statement anyways – to help you make better investing decisions.

So, GAAP is GAAP.  If you are bothered by the fact that your accounting is complex, look to the reality of your transaction as it is likely complex.  The further you get from doing work and billing for it, the more complex you make accounting in addressing your transactions.  Don’t blame the accountants… We are simply the messengers.