Common Area Maintenance Management

Common Area Maintenance, or CAM, charges are fees incurred in a commercial lease. They cover, as the name suggests, the maintenance of common areas, such as elevators, grounds, and parking lots, to name a few. While this idea is commonplace on many leases, actually calculating and setting it up can be extremely challenging and time consuming. Luckily, with online property management software, implementing your own CAM charges can be simple and easy to connect everything together!

Why CAM Charges?

To start off, CAM charges are important, especially in commercial or shared space leases, to cover anything not explicitly within your tenants’ units. For example, they might have their own features to their own unit, but there are plenty of parts of the property that they might use along with all the other tenants, like a dumpster, sidewalks, or security teams. For these additional features of your properties, you want to charge all of your tenants fairly. The trouble with this is that in properties or areas with a lot of different setups for units and spaces, not all tenants will use all of these features, and tenants will not use all of these features the same amount. Units on the ground floor, for example, will not be using the elevators in the building. A unit triple the size of another will produce more trash for the dumpsters and have more cars in the parking lot. Having to set up fees based on every specific unit makes creating CAM charges tricky and tedious, especially when doing it by hand. That’s where online property management software comes in, to lessen the load and help create accurate and fair charge structures for all of your properties!

Charge Creation

With online property management software, you can create a CAM charge structure for anything you want, and with any parameters. Rather than having some prefilled options or some rudimentary proportionality calculations, you can utilize a whole CAM charge editor, replete with variables, action, system fields, and even operations such as ‘SumIf’ and ‘Calculation!’ With this advanced builder, you can pull information about units and their usage of different common area amenities, as well as their area, directly from the property management software. You don’t have to calculate each unit individually or try to think about who is using what, just have that information set up on the unit’s page and let the CAM editor do the rest! This way, the pro rata share per unit and tenant can be calculated and automatically charged based on the variables and operations you feed it, with you having to do anything past the initial assembly! Evolve working with CAM charges from a difficult and lengthy process to a one time setup for continued usage!

Bill Matching

Along with the creation of your own custom CAM charge structures, you can also set up bill matching, will look for the specific property and item in vendor bills to automatically connect the bills you need to pay with the CAM structures. This way, when you have to pay a vendor for elevator maintenance or dumpster service, the CAM charge is automatically run and billed to your tenants, in the proportional way that you have previously set up. Now, you won’t even have to worry about running the CAM charges when a specific bill comes in from a vendor - the system can do it all on its own! Save time running and working on common area maintenance to devote that time to running the rest of your business!

Common Area Maintenance, Simple Solutions

CAM charges can be one of the most confusing and complex portions of property management, especially as your company increases in scale and scope. You would previously have to do hundreds of calculations, and if you got even one number wrong, there could be big consequences. Now, with online property management software, you can still set up the charge structures exactly as you need them, but you only have to do it once, rather than hundreds of times. Here at Property Matrix, we know how valuable your time is, and we want to help you save as much of it as possible! Schedule a demo with Property Matrix today to see how else we can give you time back in your day!