Strata Committee Roles and Responsibilities Explained

Why committee roles matter

Every owners corporation or body corporate elects a committee (sometimes called an executive committee, strata council or committee of management, depending on the state) to make day-to-day decisions on behalf of all owners between general meetings. Understanding who does what stops the same one or two volunteers carrying the whole building.

Committee positions are usually filled at the AGM, and most schemes elect a chairperson, secretary and treasurer, plus a number of ordinary members. Some smaller buildings run with only these three named roles filled and no separate ordinary members at all.

The chairperson

The chairperson runs committee and general meetings, keeps discussion on track, and often acts as the public face of the committee to owners and the strata manager. In practice the chair:

• Sets or approves the meeting agenda with the secretary
• Runs the meeting, manages debate and calls votes
• Has a casting vote in some jurisdictions if a motion is tied
• Represents the committee in day-to-day dealings with the manager and contractors between meetings

The chair does not have unilateral authority to make decisions for the committee — motions still need to be put and carried by the committee as a whole.

The secretary

The secretary is usually the record-keeper and correspondence hub. Typical duties include:

• Issuing meeting notices and agendas within the required notice period
• Taking and distributing minutes
• Managing incoming and outgoing correspondence, including notices to owners
• Keeping the register of owners, by-laws and other statutory records up to date

Because so much strata knowledge lives with the secretary, this role tends to become a bottleneck — and a risk — when everything sits in one inbox and one filing cabinet.

The treasurer

The treasurer oversees the financial side: budgets, levies, invoices and reporting to owners. Flex Strata is built for the non-financial side of committee work — meetings, maintenance, compliance, documents and communication — and deliberately leaves levies, budgets, cashbooks and reconciliation to the full Strata Pages platform used by treasurers and managers who need that accounting depth.

Ordinary committee members

Ordinary members vote on motions and often take on informal portfolios such as maintenance, gardens or building presentation. They don't need a title to be useful: showing up, reading the papers before the meeting and following through on action items is most of the job.

Collective decision-making, not individual authority

A recurring source of strata disputes is a single office-bearer acting as though they can decide things alone. In reality:

• Decisions are made by resolution of the committee, not by any one person
• The committee itself only has the powers given to it by legislation and the scheme's by-laws — some decisions must go to a general meeting of all owners
• Spending limits, restricted matters and by-law changes typically sit outside ordinary committee authority

Setting clear spend thresholds and requiring sign-off before work is committed keeps this collective principle real rather than theoretical.

Handover: the perennial weak point

Committees turn over every year, sometimes completely. The biggest governance failure isn't a bad decision — it's losing the last five years of decisions when a secretary retires and takes their filing system with them. A new committee that inherits nothing but a shoebox of PDFs will repeat old mistakes and miss compliance deadlines nobody warned them about.

This is where structure pays off. A record that belongs to the building — not to whoever happened to hold the secretary role — means an incoming committee can see meeting history, open maintenance jobs, compliance due dates and past decisions from their first login. Flex Strata's Committee Hub, meetings and compliance register are built around that principle: the discussion, the decision and the evidence stay attached to each other and stay with the building.

Getting the balance right

A well-run committee usually shares the load rather than letting one person do everything:

1. Agree who owns which portfolio at the start of the year
2. Put every decision in writing, even informal ones made between meetings
3. Set spend thresholds so nobody has to guess what needs committee approval
4. Keep a shared register of compliance dates so nothing depends on one person's memory
5. Review roles at each AGM rather than assuming the same people will run forever

None of this needs to be complicated. It needs to be visible, shared and kept somewhere the next committee can actually find it.

Where Flex Strata fits

Flex Strata gives every committee member their own login with page-level access, so the chair, secretary, treasurer-adjacent roles and ordinary members can each see what's relevant to them without one person being the only source of truth. Meetings, the compliance register, maintenance board and Committee Hub threads keep the record with the building, not the volunteer.