Strata managers

Strata Pages is the full strata management system used by managers and self-managing owners corporations to run the financial and administrative side of a scheme, including levies, budgets, cashbooks, bank reconciliation and fee notices. Flex Strata is built on the same underlying platform but deliberately leaves the accounting engine out, focusing on the tools a committee itself uses.

What Flex Strata includes

• Committee Hub private threads
• Meetings, proxies, resolutions and ballots
• Maintenance board: work orders, quotes, invoices and spend approvals
• Contractor register with insurance tracking
• Compliance register, documents and certificates
• Notices, requests, action items and workflow boards
• Per-page access control and an audit log

What stays in full Strata Pages

• Levies and budgets
• Cashbooks and bank reconciliation
• Fee notices and arrears tracking

Why the split exists

Most committees don't need to run a trust account or reconcile a bank feed — that's usually a manager's job, whether that manager is a professional firm or a self-managing treasurer using the full product. Flex Strata gives the committee its own record of decisions and operations without paying for, or having to learn, a full accounting suite.

Can the two work together?

Yes. A building can run its financial administration in full Strata Pages — whether through a manager or self-managed — while the committee uses Flex Strata for its own working record, with the manager given whatever page access the committee decides on.

Moving between them

Because it's the same platform, a committee that starts on Flex Strata and later takes on full financial self-management can move up to Strata Pages without losing its Flex Strata history — meetings, documents, compliance and maintenance records carry across rather than needing to be rebuilt.

It's a fair question, given how much of a manager's day-to-day work — meetings, maintenance coordination, compliance tracking, communication — overlaps with what Flex Strata covers.

What Flex Strata takes care of

• A structured place for meetings, resolutions and ballots
• Maintenance tracking, contractor records and compliance reminders
• Notices, documents and a shareable request form for owners
• A record that survives committee turnover

What a strata manager still typically provides

• Financial administration: levies, budgets, arrears and trust accounting
• Statutory knowledge of your state's strata legislation and its practical application
• Issuing legally compliant breach notices and managing enforcement processes
• Acting as an independent point of contact for disputes between owners
• Experience across many buildings that a single self-managing committee doesn't have

Committees that do go fully self-managed

Some smaller or more engaged committees do take on full self-management, using full Strata Pages (rather than Flex Strata) to also handle the financial side. That's a bigger step than simply adopting Flex Strata, and it's worth weighing your scheme's size, complexity and the committee's available time before deciding.

The common middle ground

Most committees using Flex Strata keep a professional manager for the financial and statutory work, while using Flex Strata to keep their own clear record of decisions, maintenance and compliance — and to reduce how often they're chasing the manager for basic status updates.

Deciding what's right for your building

There's no single right answer here; it depends on scheme size, the committee's capacity, and how comfortable owners are with reduced professional oversight. A conversation with your existing manager about what Flex Strata would and wouldn't change for them is a reasonable starting point.

Self-managed schemes vary widely in how they handle the financial side, and that determines whether Flex Strata alone is enough.

Where Flex Strata fits well for self-managed schemes

• A committee handling its own financial administration through a separate accountant, bookkeeper or simple bank account, and wanting a proper operational record for everything else
• Smaller schemes with straightforward finances that don't need budget tracking or arrears management inside the same system
• A committee that has just left a manager and wants its meetings, maintenance, compliance and documents organised immediately, while it decides on a longer-term financial approach

Where full Strata Pages is the better fit

If your self-managed scheme needs to raise levies, track a budget, reconcile a bank account and issue fee notices within the same platform, that's the job of full Strata Pages rather than Flex Strata — it's built for exactly that financial administration.

Self-management responsibilities don't go away

Software doesn't remove a self-managing committee's statutory obligations — meeting requirements, record-keeping, insurance, and compliance obligations under your state's legislation still apply, and self-managed schemes carry more of that responsibility directly than schemes with a manager. Flex Strata helps track and evidence that compliance; it doesn't replace the need to understand what's required.

Moving between the two

Because Flex Strata and Strata Pages share a platform, a self-managed committee that starts on Flex Strata and later decides it needs full financial tools can move up without rebuilding its existing meetings, documents and compliance history.

Strata managers commonly act on a committee's instructions when issuing breach notices or managing a dispute, but the instruction itself is easy to lose track of if it only ever happened in a phone call or a one-off email.

What to record before instructing the manager

• The committee's decision, ideally minuted at a meeting or recorded as a ballot outcome for anything formal
• The specific action being requested — issuing a breach notice, following up an unresolved complaint, escalating to mediation
• Any deadline the committee expects the manager to act within

Keeping the instruction on record

Logging the instruction against the dispute record, or in a Committee Hub thread the manager can see if they've been invited into it, means the committee has its own account of what was asked and when — useful if the matter is later challenged or simply takes longer than expected to resolve.

The manager's response

Where practical, note the manager's action and any outcome back against the same record — a notice issued, a response received, or an update that the matter has been referred further. This closes the loop and avoids the committee having to reconstruct the sequence of events later from memory or scattered emails.

Why the committee's own record still matters

Even with a manager handling the formal process, the committee benefits from a plain, dated account of its own decisions and instructions — managers change, and a committee's institutional memory of "we already told them to do this in March" shouldn't depend on a particular manager still being on the file.

Staying within legal boundaries

The committee can instruct a manager on what outcome it wants, but the manager (or a lawyer, for anything complex) is generally better placed to determine exactly how a breach notice or dispute process should be run to comply with your state's legislation.

Because Flex Strata is built around page-level access control, a manager's visibility isn't a fixed package — it's whatever the committee configures.

Common manager access patterns

• Full visibility, mirroring what the committee itself sees, for committees that want the manager fully looped in
• Operational pages only — maintenance, contractor register, compliance and documents — while Committee Hub stays private to the committee
• Read-only access to specific pages, useful where the manager needs visibility but the committee wants to retain control of edits
• No standing access at all, with the manager instead invited into individual Committee Hub threads as needed

Why committees often keep Committee Hub private

Committee Hub is generally the one area committees keep to themselves even when a manager has broad access elsewhere, since it's where candid internal discussion happens before a position is settled — the manager can still be invited into a specific thread where their input is useful.

Changing access over time

Manager access isn't locked in at setup. It can be widened if the relationship develops, or narrowed if the committee wants to bring more of the work in-house, without disrupting the manager's or committee's existing records.

What happens if you change managers

Because access is a permissions setting rather than a copy of your data handed to the manager, replacing a manager is a matter of removing the outgoing firm's access and granting it to the new one — your committee's records stay put throughout.

Changing strata managers is one of the more disruptive events in a scheme's life, often made worse by records being scattered across the outgoing manager's own systems and email.

The usual pain points when changing managers

• Requesting a full handover file from the outgoing manager, which can take time and sometimes arrives incomplete
• Historical documents, meeting minutes and correspondence that only existed in the outgoing manager's own portal
• A gap in continuity while the incoming manager gets up to speed on the building's history

How it's different when the committee runs its own record

Where the committee has been using Flex Strata independently of the manager, the committee's own meetings, documents, compliance register and maintenance history don't sit inside the outgoing manager's systems at all — they've been the committee's record throughout. Changing managers means:

• Removing the outgoing manager's access
• Granting the incoming manager whatever page access the committee decides
• The incoming manager reviewing the committee's existing record directly, rather than waiting on a handover package

What this doesn't cover

This doesn't replace the outgoing manager's own obligation to hand over financial records, levy history and anything specific to their engagement — that handover still needs to happen through the normal process and your management agreement's terms. Flex Strata covers the committee's own operational record, not the manager's financial administration.

A smoother transition

Committees that have kept their own record throughout a manager relationship generally find changing managers considerably less stressful, since the incoming manager isn't starting from zero and the committee isn't dependent on the outgoing manager's goodwill to get its own history back.

It's worth being precise about the boundary, so committees don't assume Flex Strata covers something it deliberately doesn't.

Financial administration stays with the manager

• Raising and tracking levies
• Preparing and managing the annual budget
• Trust account management and bank reconciliation
• Issuing fee notices and managing arrears

Statutory duties that typically stay with a professional manager

• Formal issuance of legally compliant notices under your state's strata legislation
• Managing the specific legal process for by-law enforcement and disputes
• Advice on the scheme's statutory obligations, particularly for anything unusual or high-stakes

What Flex Strata does provide alongside this

Flex Strata gives the committee visibility and its own record of meetings, maintenance, compliance and documents that sit alongside whatever the manager is doing on the financial and statutory side — the two aren't in competition, they cover different parts of running the scheme.

Why this split is deliberate

Financial administration for a strata scheme carries specific regulatory obligations — trust accounting rules, for example — that a manager (or a self-managing committee using full Strata Pages) needs to be set up to handle properly. Flex Strata is scoped to avoid pretending to be a substitute for that, rather than offering a partial version that might create a false sense of coverage.

If you're unsure where something sits

If a task feels like it should involve money changing hands with owners — a levy, a fee, an arrears letter — it almost certainly belongs with your manager or in full Strata Pages, not Flex Strata. If it's about tracking a decision, a job, a document or a compliance date, that's squarely what Flex Strata is for.