About Payment Due Dates and Plan Dates
The account due date has no relationship to your plan dates
The due date for paying the body corporate’s fee for access to Plan Heaven has no relationship to the start date of your plan. The due date for payment is 30 days after you have created the body corporate account, whether or not you have chosen a trial. But you get to decide what the start date of your plan will be.
So if you create a body corporate account on 15 September 2015 - either as an active account or to commence a 30 day trial - the fee is due to be paid on 15 October 2015. After that the next due date will be 15 October 2016.
Find out more about trials here.
But what about your plan start date?
The body corporate can choose the start date for its LTMP. However, it’s logical that your LTMP covers the same period as your body corporate financial year, so that the LTMP funding budget is in sync with your operating budget. That means, if your financial year ends on 31 March, we suggest that your annualised LTMP should also cover the period from 1 April to 31 March.
From a compliance perspective, you can have any start date on your LTMP. But it does need to be approved by the AGM and as we say, it appears logical to sync it with your financial year and get your LTMP and funding approved at the AGM at the same time your operating budget is approved.
Let’s run an example
Let’s say you created a body corporate account in Plan Heaven on 15 September and the end of financial year for this body corporate is 31 March 2016. This gives you about six months to plan and get your LTMP set up in Plan Heaven so it’s ready to be updated from 1 April 2016. You might actually need those six months. But if you don’t need that much time and want to delay the payment to Plan Heaven, you can wait for a few months and create the body corporate in Plan Heaven at a time much closer to the end of the financial year.
It comes down to how much time you need to set up your LTMP. If you already have a current LTMP in hardcopy and/or a spreadsheet, you can start migrating the data from that plan into Plan Heaven at any time but you probably want to be set up well before the financial year end when you are going to be more busy.
If your body corporate doesn't yet have an LTMP, the sooner you start the better but ultimately it comes down to how much time you need to set up the plan the first time. After that, each year rolling the plan over won't take much time at all.
There is more information here on the planning & approval process
If you have any feedback or questions please use the feedback form.
The Plan Heaven team.
Disclaimer. Plan Heaven is not qualified in law and any comments made on this website are only the opinion of Plan Heaven and should not be regarded as legal advice. Our comments are merely providing some thoughts on how the legislation might be interpreted and how we go about attempting to meet its requirements. You should not rely on this information in isolation and do you own homework and at all times if you wish to be sure of your position relating to legal matters you should seek advice from a suitably qualified lawyer.