Getting started

Flex Strata is the committee slice of the Strata Pages platform. Strata Pages itself is a full strata management system used by managers and self-managing owners corporations, covering everything including levies, budgets, cashbooks and bank reconciliation. Flex Strata takes the parts of that system a committee actually touches — meetings, ballots, maintenance, contractors, compliance, documents, notices, disputes, requests and access control — and packages them for committees at a committee price.

What it includes

• An overview dashboard with a chair panel showing what needs attention
• Building details, lots, insurance records and generated certificates
• A documents library organised into categories, with owner-facing permissions
• A maintenance board covering work orders, quotes, invoices and spend approvals
• A contractor register tracking licences, insurance cover and job history
• A compliance register with assignments, due dates and reminders
• Meetings with agendas, proxies and resolutions, plus ballots for votes between meetings
• Committee Hub — private threads that keep decisions attached to their discussion
• Notices, disputes with breach notices, shareable request forms and action items
• People and per-page access control, an audit log, and a guided setup wizard

What it deliberately leaves out

Flex Strata does not include levies, budgets, cashbooks, bank reconciliation, fee notices or arrears tracking. Those stay in the full Strata Pages product. If your committee later needs full financial management — for example if you're moving away from a manager and taking on the accounts yourselves — you can move up to Strata Pages without losing your history, because it's the same underlying platform.

Who it suits

Flex Strata suits committees running self-managed buildings, committees working alongside a strata or building manager who want their own record of decisions, and any chair or secretary tired of being the single point of failure for where the building's information lives.

Setting up a strata committee portal for the first time can feel like a bigger job than it is, mostly because committees imagine they need to digitise years of paper before they start. You don't — you can bring records across over time.

Steps to set up Flex Strata

• Start the free trial (no card required)
• Work through the setup wizard: building name and address, lot numbers, and any existing insurance details
• Upload your most important documents first — by-laws, the last AGM minutes, and current insurance certificate of currency
• Invite the rest of the committee with their roles (chair, secretary, treasurer, member)
• Decide, page by page, what your strata or building manager can see if you're keeping one
• Move any open maintenance jobs or compliance dates into the maintenance board and compliance register

What to bring across first

Don't try to migrate everything on day one. Prioritise anything with a deadline: expiring insurance, upcoming essential services checks, open maintenance jobs waiting on a quote, and any dispute that's already underway. Historical documents can be added progressively — owners will thank you more for a well-organised recent record than a dumped folder of everything since 1998.

Getting the committee comfortable

The biggest risk to any new system isn't the technology, it's adoption. Send a short message to the rest of the committee showing them the overview dashboard and the chair panel, and ask each person to look at just the pages relevant to their role — the treasurer doesn't need to learn the contractor register on day one. Because access is controlled per page, everyone can be added immediately without overwhelming them with everything at once.

After setup

Once the building, committee and starting documents are in, the natural next step is either your next meeting (bring the agenda in and let minutes draft themselves as you go) or clearing the maintenance backlog into tracked jobs with owners and due dates. Either way, you don't need to have everything perfect before you start using it — most committees find the system becomes more useful as records accumulate rather than needing to be complete on day one.

Running your first meeting through a new system is a good forcing function for tidying up how you've been doing things — most committees discover their old process had gaps once they try to formalise it.

Before the meeting

• Confirm quorum requirements for your scheme and check who's attending or sending a proxy
• Build the agenda from any open action items, maintenance decisions and compliance items due
• Send the agenda and any supporting documents (quotes, reports) ahead of time
• Note which motions need an ordinary, special or unanimous resolution

During the meeting

Record motions as they're moved, seconded and voted, capturing proxies against the right names. Doing this live, rather than reconstructing it from someone's notebook afterwards, is the single biggest time-saver committees report — minutes end up close to finished by the time the meeting closes rather than being a follow-up task competing with everyone's day job.

After the meeting

• Finalise and distribute the minutes promptly — owners are entitled to timely records, and delays erode trust
• Turn any resulting actions into tracked items with an owner and a due date so they don't fall through the same cracks that group chats create
• If a decision needs to happen before the next meeting, that's what a ballot is for rather than an unminuted phone poll

A note on proxies

Most state strata legislation limits how many proxy votes a single person can hold at one meeting, and requires proxies to be in a particular form. Check your state's rules before the meeting rather than at the door — a proxy rejected on the day can throw out a vote you were relying on.

Almost every committee we hear from is running some combination of a shared drive, a group chat and one volunteer's personal email as the de facto record system. It works, until that volunteer moves house or the group chat's history disappears into an app update.

Why the switch is worth it

The core problem with spreadsheets and chat threads isn't that they're free — it's that the information is scattered by person rather than organised by building. When a secretary or treasurer steps down, whatever lived in their head or their inbox often goes with them. A structured record that belongs to the building survives every committee turnover.

What to prioritise

• Anything with a hard deadline: insurance renewal dates, essential services checks, contractor insurance expiries
• Open items: maintenance jobs waiting on quotes or approval, disputes in progress
• Foundational documents: by-laws, the strata plan, recent AGM minutes
• Contact details for your committee, manager and regular contractors

What can wait

Ten years of old invoices, superseded versions of documents, and historical email threads don't need to move on day one. If they matter later, they can be added when someone has time, without blocking the committee from using the current system now.

Handling the group chat problem

Group chats are genuinely useful for quick coordination, but they're a poor place for decisions because there's no clean record of what was actually agreed. Committee Hub is built to solve exactly this — a private thread the committee can use for discussion, with the decision attached to the discussion that produced it, rather than buried forty messages up.

A realistic timeline

Most committees find the mechanical part of moving core documents and open items takes an hour or two. The bigger shift is habit — training everyone to make decisions and store documents in one place instead of six. That typically settles within a meeting cycle or two, especially once people notice they stop being asked "does anyone have that PDF?"

Committee handover is where most informal systems fail. A secretary resigns, a treasurer moves overseas, and whatever lived in their personal inbox or laptop leaves with them — sometimes permanently.

The traditional handover problem

Under the shoebox-of-PDFs model, an incoming committee typically inherits an incomplete picture: some documents on a USB stick, some in an old email account nobody can access, and institutional knowledge that was never written down at all. New committee members spend their first few months rediscovering things the outgoing committee already knew, and mistakes get repeated because nobody remembers why a decision was made a particular way.

How it works differently on Flex Strata

Every meeting, decision, document, maintenance job and compliance item is attached to the building's record, not to an individual's account. When a committee position changes hands:

• Remove the outgoing member's access
• Invite the incoming member and assign their role
• They see the full history immediately — past meetings, minutes, open maintenance jobs, compliance status and documents

There's no export, no handover meeting required to transfer knowledge that only exists in someone's head, and no risk of a gap if the outgoing person is unreachable.

What still needs a real handover conversation

The system preserves the written record, but it can't replace context that was never documented — an informal understanding with a neighbour about a shared fence, or why the committee decided against a particular contractor last year. It's worth the outgoing and incoming office-bearer having a short conversation covering anything that isn't already written down, even with a good system in place.

Elections and AGMs

Handover typically follows the AGM, where committee positions are elected or re-elected under your scheme's rules. Once the new committee is confirmed in the minutes, updating access in the portal takes a couple of minutes rather than a working bee.

Whether a scheme needs a professional strata manager is a legal and practical question that goes well beyond software, but it's a common one when committees start looking at tools like this.

What a strata manager actually does

Depending on the management agreement, a strata manager typically handles levy collection and arrears, budget preparation, trust accounting, insurance placement, meeting administration, and acting as the scheme's point of contact for statutory notices. Many of these duties — particularly trust accounting and levy collection — carry legal obligations that a committee taking on self-management needs to understand fully before stepping away from a manager.

Where Flex Strata fits for managed schemes

If you keep a manager, Flex Strata gives the committee its own record of meetings, decisions, maintenance and compliance that sits alongside whatever the manager runs — useful for committees who feel like they only see the building's story through a monthly report. Your manager can be given a seat with view-only access by default, extended to whatever pages the committee decides.

Where it fits for self-managed schemes

Self-managed buildings — those that have chosen not to engage a manager, which is legal in every Australian state within scheme size and complexity limits — use Flex Strata as their core committee record: meetings, maintenance, compliance, documents and communication. But self-managed committees still need somewhere to handle levies, budgets and trust accounting, since Flex Strata deliberately doesn't include those. That's what the full Strata Pages product, a bookkeeper, or a hybrid model with limited managing agent services covers.

The honest answer

Flex Strata is not a substitute for the statutory and financial duties a manager performs. It's a substitute for the group chats, shared drives and personal inboxes that otherwise hold a committee's operational record — whether or not you have a manager.

Committees are understandably wary of trials that quietly convert into paid subscriptions. Flex Strata's trial is structured to avoid that.

How the trial works

You start the 7-day trial without entering payment details. During that time you have full access to set up your building, invite your committee, upload documents, and run through a real meeting or maintenance job to see whether the workflow suits how your committee actually operates.

At the end of the trial

Because no card is on file, nothing charges automatically. If you want to continue, you choose a plan — priced per building, covering the committee and an included number of lots, with a small per-lot amount added above that threshold — and everything you set up during the trial carries straight through.

If you don't continue

If the committee decides not to proceed, the trial simply lapses. There's no cancellation call required and no charge to dispute, because none was ever taken.

Making the most of the seven days

The trial is short enough that it pays to be deliberate. Set up the building and lots on day one, invite the committee in the first few days, bring in your current maintenance backlog and compliance dates, then run something live — a real meeting, ballot or maintenance quote — so the decision about continuing is based on real use rather than a guess.

Switching plans later

Pricing is based on lot count and billing frequency (monthly or annual, with annual priced at ten months for twelve). If your building's lot count changes, or you decide annual billing suits your budgeting better, you can adjust at renewal.