Create and compare funding plans for your next budget year

Overview¶

Goal. Build several funding plans for an upcoming fiscal year, compare them on one chart, and record the plan your association selects.

Audience. Property managers, finance managers, CFOs, and account admins who set an association's reserve contributions for a budget year.

A funding plan is a multi year contribution strategy for your reserves.

Each plan belongs to one property and one fiscal year. The plans you build for next year use that year's component data.

You can hold several plans at once, see them on one chart, and then record the one your board selects.

Setup¶

View access. The Plans page opens for anyone with Financial Management view access.

Edit access. Creating, saving, and removing a plan needs Financial Management edit access. Without edit access, the controls for adding, saving, and removing plans are not shown.

Where Plans appears. Plans appears in the left navigation when the fiscal year selected in the top navigation is a future planning year.

Planning inside a year that has started. For the current year, Plans appears only when SmartProperty has turned on current year planning for your property. To plan inside a year that has already started, contact SmartProperty.

The first time you open a planning year. When you select a future year that has no plans yet, SmartProperty walks you through a planning setup: Review anticipated expenditures, Verify financial details, Complete.

Finishing the setup creates a copy of your component data for that year. You can then test scenarios without touching your live components.

Select Start planning at the end. Doing so opens Plans.

How-to¶

Set your shared assumptions¶

Every plan builds on the same set of numbers.

Set them in one place before you create plans. Your plans then differ only in the strategy you are testing.

On the Plans page, select Financial Assumptions at the top right.

You can set the annual assessment fees for the year, Reserve Balance on the fiscal year start date, annual reserve contributions, Component Inflation Rate, Interest Rate on Reserve Funds, and Rate of Annual Reserve Contribution Increases.

Show Advanced Options adds forward planning assumptions (additional units phased in over steps) and additional revenue sources.

Before saving, answer Do you wish to apply these assumptions to all of your existing plans?

Yes shows a confirmation listing each plan that will be updated. On a ladder plan, the individual step contribution amounts and increase percentages are left as they are.

No saves the assumptions without touching existing plans.

Add a funding plan¶

On the Plans page, select the + Plan tile.

This opens a dropdown listing the default plans for your property, with Add New at the bottom.

The page has room for five funding plans. Once five exist, the tile for adding another is no longer shown.

Starting from a default plan¶

Select a default plan in the dropdown.

Doing so creates the plan immediately, with no wizard and no save step.

See Default plans in Reference for the plan names and for what you can change on a plan created this way.

Building your own¶

Select Add New. This opens the Create a Plan wizard.

Step 1, Plan Info. Pick a Plan Type and give the plan a name.

The type list includes Current Funding, Threshold Funding, Targeted Funding, Cash Flow Funding, 50% Funded, and Ladder Funding. Loan / Special Assessment Funding is shown when Loan Analysis is set up for your portfolio.

Plan names must be unique for the property and fiscal year, and cannot reuse a default plan name such as Current, Minimum Threshold, or Cash Flow.

Step 2, Funding Details. The fields here depend on the type you chose. See Plan types and their funding details in Reference for the fields each type asks for.

Step 3, Financial Details. Set Reserve Balance on the fiscal year start date, Plan Duration (20 or 30 years), Interest Rate on Reserve Funds, and Component Inflation Rate.

Show Advanced Options adds the forward planning and additional revenue sections.

Find Create Plan at the bottom of step 3. Until the form is valid, the button is not available.

Compare your plans¶

On the Plans page¶

Every plan for the selected year is shown together.

The chart plots Ending Reserve Balance by year, one line per plan. A dashed line at zero shows where a plan crosses it.

The legend lists the plan names.

Below the chart, a row per plan shows that plan's figures. See The comparison table in Reference for each column.

The Compare tab¶

Loan Analysis adds an Overview tab and a Compare tab to the Plans page. SmartProperty sets up Loan Analysis for your portfolio.

The Compare tab lines the plans up in columns.

Use the By dropdown to switch what is being compared. The dropdown includes Monthly Avg Homeowner Payment, Total Avg Homeowner Additional Payment, Total Association Borrowing Cost, and Homeowner Payment Detail: Monthly Avg Payment.

View As PDF renders the comparison as a PDF.

Without Loan Analysis, the Plans page opens straight to the overview described above.

Looking at one plan in detail¶

Select a plan name from the tile row or from the comparison table. The plan opens with these tabs:

Funding Report, the year by year projection for that plan, with a View As PDF option. On a Loan / Special Assessment Funding plan, and only when Loan Analysis is set up for your portfolio, an Export to Excel option appears alongside it.

Plan Details, where you change the plan's settings and select SAVE. This tab also has Plan Notes (shown on report) for context you want carried onto the report.

Remove a plan¶

Each row in the comparison table has a remove control.

The confirmation names the plan and warns that it cannot be recovered.

Removing your last remaining plan in a planning year shows an extra warning: the planning process restarts and you lose any component changes you made for that year.

On a year that is not a planning year, the remove control is disabled when only one plan is left.

Record the plan your association selects¶

Your association selects its own funding plan.

The recommended plan setting records that selection. Reports then feature the plan you record there.

Open the Reserve Analysis report.

Select Edit Report Settings.

Choose from the Recommended funding plan dropdown.

Until you choose one, the panel shows a reminder to select a recommended funding plan.

Advance to the next planning year¶

Once the year you planned for has begun, a banner appears: Advance to planning for [year] budget year, with an Advance button.

Before you advance:

Advancing cannot be undone. Review your choice on each step before you submit. To reopen a year after advancing, contact SmartProperty.

Advancing also ends planning on the year you are leaving. The Plans page for that year then stops appearing in the left navigation. Finish any plan edits for that year first.

A year that has already been advanced cannot be advanced again, and you cannot advance a year that has not started yet.

A year cannot be advanced while plans exist for a later year. Remove those later year plans first.

Select Advance. Doing so opens a window with these steps, followed by a confirmation.

Select funding plan. Each plan is shown as a card with its name, type, and annual reserve contributions. Pick the one your board selected.

Verify plan details. Review the financial details of that plan as of the fiscal year start date. No, Edit this plan takes you back to Plans. Yes, Continue moves on.

Submit. Enter the total assessments for the year, then select Submit plan selection.

A confirmation screen follows. Select Close \& reload property to finish.

Submitting updates that year's financials and components to match the plan you chose, and marks the plan as adopted.

In the Reports list, a badge then appears on the adopted plan: [year] approved budget.

Reports that show a single funding plan use the adopted plan first.

If you are not ready, each step has a link to close the window without submitting. Until you submit, the banner is still shown.

Reference¶

Plan types and their funding details¶

The Step 2, Funding Details fields in the Create a Plan wizard depend on the plan type.

| Plan Type | What the type asks for |

| --- | --- |

| Current Funding | Annual Reserve Contributions, Rate of Annual Reserve Contribution Increases, and Additional Funds to Reserves. |

| Targeted Funding | Target % and Target Year, plus the same rate and additional funds fields. |

| Threshold Funding, Cash Flow Funding, and 50% Funded | You select the method for your minimum reserve balance (Percent of Current Replacement Cost, or Dollar Amount) and the threshold value, plus the same rate and additional funds fields. |

| Ladder Funding | A series of steps. On each step you enter Annual Reserve Contributions, Rate of Annual Reserve Contribution Increases, Duration, and Additional Funds to Reserves. The starting fiscal year for each step is filled in for you. Select the plus button below the last step to add another. |

Default plans¶

The default plan names are Current, Minimum Threshold, 100% in 10 Years, 75% in 10 Years, 50% in 10 Years, Fully Funded in 30 Years, Cash Flow, and 50% Funded.

A default plan already on your page appears grayed out in the dropdown.

On a plan created this way, Plan Type and Plan Name are locked, along with the values that define the strategy: Target % and Target Year on a targeted plan, and the threshold method and amount on a threshold plan.

You can still edit the financial fields, including the starting balance, the rates, plan duration, contributions, and additional funds.

The comparison table¶

| Column | What the column shows |

| --- | --- |

| Funding Plan | The plan name, color matched to its line on the chart. |

| Annual Reserve Contributions | For the first year of the plan. |

| Per unit contribution | Labelled with your property's assessment collection frequency. |

| Solvent | Yes when no year in the displayed duration ends with a reserve balance below zero, and No when at least one year does. |

| Percent Funded | For the first year of the plan. |

| Remove control | Covered under Remove a plan in How-to. |

A one line summary of the plan's settings is shown under each row.

Troubleshooting¶

Create Plan is not available on step 3 of a ladder plan. If you built a ladder plan and the step durations do not add up to the plan duration, step 3 shows that message and Create Plan is not available. Go back to step 2 and adjust the steps.

[Financial Management](https://smartproperty-admin-guide.pages.dev/financial-management/)

[Reports](https://smartproperty-admin-guide.pages.dev/reports/)