community managers documenting their overtime

Hi there,

I was curious: do any HOA Management Companies document their community managers' overtime through work orders?

Mike,
I rarely disagree with any advice Shelia offers. I think if you are a board member this is a valid question. Most PMCs have in the contracts that an overtime rate is X amount. This usually applies if boards are taking hours to get through the meetings. It can also be done for special projects. It also depends if you are a Portfolio Account meaning your PM has several other properties they are responsible for and yours is eating up more than the allowable time on a monthly basis.

If you have onsite management than I think it is a totally different thing. They should be able to manage time and complete the work of running the property with the hours allotted most of the time. It should be easy to tell what they are billing you for if they are invoicing it separately.

I learned many years ago that you need to keep your PMC in line and make sure they know that you and the rest of the board are watching.

I have said this many times to my boards if I was ever going to become a criminal I would seek out work in HOAs. It is easy pickings for Crooks and bad Contractors. The PMCs are looking for bids and hardly look at the bottom line. The boards in some cases are spending other peoples money and are not experienced in all the different areas they are receiving bids for. Perfect match for bad to take advantage of the people not guarding the henhouse properly.

Overtime? Managers are salaries. There is no overtime.

Thank you all for your time!

In my HOA's case we get billed both a monthly flat fee for all standard services in the contract, and we get a separate invoice for the extras, including mailings, printing flyers, and manager hours beyond what are standard.

The second invoice currently includes a calendar of activities for the extra hours. The idea that a director came up with was to instead have the manager create work orders for each type of activity that took place over the month (including one for each item on the Project/ToDo list we have) and then just have the manager add notes and hours to each of them as needed.

What I was wondering was, is that something that other boards have done by their full-service management companies, or is at least available as an option from them?

Our manager is based offsite and has a portfolio. We are, generally, quite happy with the company we use.

Hi Bill,

First to clarify, our PMC currently has an existing work order system for dealing with vendors. Directors are able to view them online.

Our treasurer wants to determine the "real cost" of every budgetary item. In his vision, time spent by the manager overseeing that item would have a work order made for it and that work order would have an account number attached to it. This would then presumably make it traceable and auditable. On its face, adopting this practice using the existing work order system would not seem like a big deal, but of course we don't really know our PMC's internal work flow.

My desire in this thread is to just gage how typical this practice is, or if it's done at all. I don't press my PMC for things unless those things have already been done in this line of work.

Thank you for your perspective!