How to read your Buildium owner statement

What you are looking at

The Buildium statement opens with your beginning cash balance: money of yours the PM was already holding. Below it, income lines (rent, late fees, other receipts), then expense lines (bills the PM paid on your behalf, their own fees), then owner draws, and finally the ending balance.

Each property you own gets its own grouping, and the statement carries printed balances. Those printed balances are the answer key: the document can be checked against itself, no portal login required.

The one equation that checks the whole statement

Beginning balance + receipts − disbursements = ending balance. Run it across the statement, to the cent. Every audit Blotter performs starts with exactly this check, and a Buildium statement that has been assembled honestly passes it exactly.

When it fails, the usual suspects: a payment reversed after the statement was cut, a draw that posted in a different period than recorded, or lines netted together that should have been listed separately.

The reserve: not an expense, but it moves your money

Most Buildium PMs hold a property reserve: a few hundred dollars of your cash kept back for surprise repairs. The reserve is not an expense and should never appear as one. What it does is lower your draw.

Check that the reserve level matches your management agreement and that it is not quietly creeping upward. A reserve that grows $100 every few months is a fee with better manners.

Annual statements: the rollup trap

Buildium year-end statements often summarize: twelve months compressed into category totals, with draws and contributions sometimes appearing only as summary figures rather than dated lines.

Two consequences. First, the balance equation still must hold across the year, and summary cash movements count: if the annual statement shows total draws, those belong in the math. Second, date-less rollup lines are useless for verifying any specific charge. The monthly statements remain the real record; the annual is a convenience document. Keep both.

• Run the balance equation across the annual statement including summary draws and contributions.
• Check that the sum of your twelve monthly statements matches the annual rollup.
• Never accept a rollup line as proof of a specific charge. Trace it to the month.

Inspection and ancillary fees: where the rate quietly rises

The management fee line on a Buildium statement is usually computed correctly. The spread between what was advertised and what you actually pay comes from everything else: inspection fees, lease renewal charges, maintenance coordination, administrative items.

One manager in our founding portfolio advertised a single-digit percentage and billed inspection fees that pushed the effective rate more than half again higher. Each line looked small. The total did not. Add up every PM-billed line each month and divide by collected rent: that number, not the contract percentage, is what management costs you.

Owner draws: match them to deposits

The draw on the statement should appear in your bank account, at the stated amount, within a few days of the statement date. This is the one check that requires nothing from your PM and catches the widest range of problems, from clerical errors to genuinely serious ones.

The five-minute monthly routine

You do not need to study every line every month. You need a routine that catches the expensive patterns. Five checks, in order:

• Run the balance equation. If it fails, stop and ask why before reading anything else.
• Compare this month’s opening balance to last month’s closing balance. A gap means a missing statement.
• Recompute the management fee against collected rent and your contract percentage.
• Scan for charges against any unit that collected no rent this period.
• Match the owner draw on the statement to the deposit that actually hit your bank.

More guides on Learn, including what management actually costs.