Fictional client
Ardenvale issued the certificate on time and banked the fee inside a week. What never happened was the last two steps of the transfer, so five months later the strata roll still shows the seller — every levy notice has gone to him, interest has been accruing against a lot whose owner has never been contacted, and the woman who actually owns it is about to get her first ever letter from her strata manager. It will be a debt recovery notice. Twenty-three of 187 transfers last year were never closed out, and $18,400 of interest was written off because the agency could not show the notice had reached the person being charged.
Ardenvale Strata Management does not exist. We cannot show live client systems, so this study is built around a fictional agency — invented firm, invented managers, invented schemes, invented owners and invented figures. What is not invented is the work: the transfer steps, the two funds, the trust reconciliation, the meeting lifecycle and the failure modes are all real, and the screens are genuine working pages rather than pictures of pages. Every mockup on this page opens and responds to clicks.
On scope: this is written for strata management in New South Wales. Terminology, certificate types, fund names, reporting returns and levy interest all differ between states, and the specifics change — in a real build those are configuration rather than code, and nothing on this page is advice. All figures are Australian dollars.
Ardenvale manages 214 strata schemes across Sydney — 8,940 lots, $38.2m of levies a year and $9.14m sitting in trust at any moment. Eight strata managers carry about 27 schemes each. The work is not complicated in the way a legal case is complicated; it is complicated in the way an airport is, where two hundred small things all have to happen on time and nobody notices any of them until one does not. The agency's problem is that the software it inherited treats each of those things as a separate errand rather than as one record with consequences.
Strata has a particular shape of failure: the money is somebody else's, the deadlines are statutory, and the person who finds the mistake is usually an owner who is already angry.
Two ideas. First, the strata roll is not a list, it is the thing that decides who is owed a notice, who may vote and who can be charged interest. So a transfer cannot be closed while a step is unevidenced, and an unclosed transfer sits on somebody's screen every morning until it is. The roll stops being a spreadsheet somebody updates when they remember.
Second, the budget, the levy schedule, the notices, the allocations, the trust balance and the financial statements are one calculation seen at six points. Change an uplift on a budget line and every lot's quarterly amount moves with it. Receipt a payment and both fund balances move. Nothing is re-keyed, which is why nothing disagrees.
Twelve screens follow. Each one opens as a real page — click through them.
Opens on Needs attention — three columns, overdue, due soon and waiting on you — so all three bands are visible at once rather than one pushing the others down the page. Every row is a count with the plans behind it and a place to go: two plans with no AGM in twelve months, nine lots past ninety days, six resale cases stalled past a step.
Below it, four charts that answer the questions a principal actually asks — money in against money out for twelve months, arrears by age, this quarter's collection as a gauge, and net cash by plan with the one negative plan at the top.
One strata plan on one long page — four summary cards, then a stack of panels that each answer one question: plan details, lots, the strata committee, chart of accounts, levy schedules, creditor invoices, work orders, meetings, financial statement, budgets, resale cases, the agency agreement, insurance, documents, correspondence, activity.
Nothing is hidden behind a tab. The levy-schedule row carries its own notice status — Send notice for 01/10/2026 — so the next thing to do is on the row it belongs to.
A lot changing hands as five numbered step cards, each turning green when it has left something behind — a tax invoice PDF emailed to the settlement agent, a receipt number, two uploaded certificate parts, a new owner on the roll, a creditor invoice for the fee. 3 / 5 steps complete at the top.
Step four is where Lot 14 stopped: settled 166 days ago, form still empty, and every levy notice and the AGM pack since then addressed to the seller.
The step between deciding a levy and posting it. A summary bar — type, frequency, instalments, first due, lots, entitlements, the two fund totals — then every lot with its entitlement share, the four instalments each with its due date, and the fund totals per lot, footing exactly to the plan totals.
The post button says what it is about to do: Post 192 levies. Forty-eight lots, four instalments, nothing typed twice.
Two columns side by side, the way an accountant lays it out: the bank statement's closing balance adjusted for outstanding deposits and unpresented withdrawals, against the ledger's cash at bank adjusted for direct deposits and charges. Two adjusted figures, and a verdict banner that is green only when they agree.
Below it, the imported statement lines auto-matched to receipts and paid invoices, with the one unmatched line highlighted and a link dropdown beside it. The help panel underneath names the five kinds of reconciling item and where each one is fixed.
One meeting record: type, date, status, venue, chair across the top; then the minutes panel with attendance (present, by proxy, absent — and why) and every motion with its for, against and abstain counts and its outcome; then the notice panel showing the pack was distribution-ready and how it went out.
Motion seven needed a special resolution and did not reach it. It is recorded as Not Carried with the note re-list, which is the honest version of a by-law change that got a simple majority.
The portfolio view: every current policy across every plan, expiring first, filterable by plan and type. Plan, type, insurer and policy number, sum insured, expiry, and a status pill that turns amber inside thirty days.
The banner above it is the part that matters on a Monday — two renewal invoices are sitting in Awaiting approval, and the link takes you straight to that filter rather than to the invoices page in general.
The online pre-poll for the August AGM, closed the day before the meeting: seven motions, each with a for/against bar, the count of eligible lots that voted, and an outcome pill. Proxy-appointed lots are excluded here because their proxy votes in the room.
Eleven lots voted online. Two years ago this scheme failed to reach a quorum twice; the pre-poll is most of the reason it did not fail a third time.
Fourteen numbered modules — reading, a video, a hands-on exercise against a test plan, then a quiz at 80% to pass. A module is locked until the one before it is passed, and the screens a module covers are locked until the module is. Here a newer manager has passed five, has one to retry at 70%, and cannot yet open meetings or resale cases.
Strata has high staff turnover. The training lives in the system rather than in whoever trained the last person.
The top of the money chain. Every expense account in each fund with its prior-year actual, the budgeted figure, actuals to date and the variance — then the asset replacement contingency: each asset's cost today, its replacement year, inflation, and the annual contribution that produces. The contingency total plus the fund lines is exactly the $149,800 capital works levy struck at the AGM.
The button in the top right is the point: → Generate levy schedule. The levy is derived from this page, not typed on the next one.
One dispatch, opened up: the template, the audience it was resolved against, the subject as sent, the PDF it was filed under, and four numbers — 48 recipients, 44 emails sent, 2 failed, 2 for print. Then every recipient with their channel, status, time and, for the failures, the bounce message.
Both failures are the same two lots whose levy notices bounce, and the first error line says why: lot sold 12/03/2026, roll not updated. The same fault, seen from a third screen.
A separate front door with its own top bar — Dashboard, Documents, Maintenance, Voting, Profile — and a welcome by name. The one table an owner actually wants: their lots, the past-due balance, accrued interest, and the next levy with its date.
Three quick links underneath: the scheme's documents, report common-area maintenance, update contact details — with the last one saying plainly that changes go to the agent for approval.
Four phases of two weeks each — eight weeks end to end. The roll goes in first because it decides who is owed a notice, who may vote and who can be charged; the trust account goes in beside it because nothing else can be trusted until the balances are proved. Each phase ends with something the team actually uses, not a demo.
Weeks 1–2.
Weeks 3–4.
Weeks 5–6.
Weeks 7–8.
Eight weeks is possible because most of it already exists. The entity and contact records, document handling, obligation and expiry tracking, escalation rules, the messaging engine and the portal are running in production across six sectors already, and the conversational SMS and email layer is a product we already sell. What actually gets built for a strata agency is the sector core: the roll and its consequences, two-fund levy accounting, trust reconciliation, the meeting lifecycle and the resale pipeline. That is the part this study is about, and it is the part we would spend the eight weeks getting right.
One note on the screens: the left-hand rail shows the whole system, and twelve of those screens are built out here. The greyed entries — receipts, invoices, payments, reports, work orders, agency renewals, the maintenance inbox, contact updates, the audit log — are real parts of a build of this kind, not decoration. We have shown the twelve that carry the argument.
This took a fictional agency and made its process visible. The same exercise works better with a real one. Tell us how your agency actually runs and we will build a working mockup of it — your plans, your funds, your brand — before anybody commits to a build.
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