How do we instruct our manager on disputes and breach notices?

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.