Every committee meeting has a moment where somebody asks a reasonable question, and nobody can answer it. When was the fire pump last serviced? What have we spent on the lifts this year? Did the roof contractor ever come back? The question gets noted, someone agrees to find out, and it reappears on the agenda next quarter.
That gap between a question a committee is entitled to ask and a record somebody has to go and assemble, is where most of a committee’s time goes. It is also the thing building management software is actually for.
The honest answer to “how much does it save” is that it depends on how bad the starting point is, and that anyone quoting you a universal percentage is guessing. What follows is one measured result, and a method for working out your own number before you commit to anything.
Building management software saves an owners committee time in three specific places: preparing for meetings, chasing the status of works, and answering owner enquiries. The clearest measured example available is a 128-apartment Sydney building where report preparation fell from two days to two hours. The saving is largest for committees currently working from spreadsheets, email threads and a caretaker’s memory, and smallest for those already running a well-maintained system.
Committees are volunteers. In Victoria, an owners corporation with more than 100 occupiable lots must elect one; between 10 and 100 lots it must also elect one; below that it is optional. (Consumer Affairs Victoria, accessed September 2026). Nationally there are 367,970 strata schemes covering 3.17 million lots, and around one in six Australians live in one. (UNSW City Futures Research Centre, Australasian Strata Insights 2024, reissued October 2025).
Most of those committees are small groups of owners doing this around a job. Their time disappears into four things:
At The Berkeley, a 128-apartment, 22-level Sydney building, The Strata Collective cut report preparation from two days to two hours after moving onto MYBOS.
That is a 16-fold reduction on one recurring task in one building. It is a real, attributable, published customer result rather than a modelled projection, which is why it is the only headline number in this article.
Read it with the appropriate caution. It measures report preparation specifically, not total committee workload. It reflects The Berkeley’s starting point, not yours. And it comes from a professional strata business with a building manager on site. A self-managed six-lot scheme will not see the same shape of savings, because it does not have the same volume of reporting to compress.
What it does demonstrate is where the saving comes from: not from doing the work faster, but from the record already existing when the report is due.
MYBOS stood out as a robust, user-friendly solution, aligning perfectly with our vision for efficient strata management.
Rod Smith, Managing Director, The Strata Collective
For a committee overseeing one building, the saving is measured in hours per meeting cycle. Across a portfolio, the shape changes.
BFMS, a PICA Group subsidiary, consolidated case management, work orders, invoicing, communications, asset registers and document libraries off Excel, Word, email and multiple third-party apps, across more than 50 strata plans. The saving there is not primarily hours. It is that the fifty-first building is onboarded into a system rather than into somebody’s head, so the cost of managing each additional building stops rising in step with the count.
MOCS describe the effect as liberating the building manager from their desk.
That is the portfolio-scale version of the same mechanism: one way of working, applied consistently, so that comparison between buildings becomes possible at all. A building falling behind on maintenance is invisible when every building is recorded differently.
Do this before you buy anything, and do it honestly. It takes about twenty minutes in a meeting.
Then set that against the quoted cost, including implementation and the time your people will spend on setup. If the vendor will not give you a straight figure for both, that is information.
If you want a defensible before-and-after rather than a feeling, capture these four things for one full cycle before you change anything.
| Measure | How to capture it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Hours to produce the meeting pack | Ask whoever prepares it to time it once | The clearest single indicator, and the easiest to compare |
| Open items carried over between meetings | Count them on the agenda | Falling carry-over means things are actually closing, not just being recorded |
| Days from an owner reporting an issue to it being closed | Pick ten recent items and check the dates | Measures the operational loop, not the admin |
| Requests you could not answer from existing records | Tally them for one cycle | The compliance exposure nobody counts until it costs something |
A committee that captures these four numbers has a real basis for judging any platform, including this one. A committee that does not will be arguing about impressions in eighteen months.
Worth being direct, because committees are routinely oversold here.
MYBOS is built for building operations: cases, work orders, assets, inspections, contractors, communications. It is not a trust accounting platform and does not try to be. Levies, disbursements and the statutory financial obligations stay where they are. Most strata businesses run both, and that is the normal configuration rather than a workaround.
Approving a capital works quote is still a committee decision requiring a properly constituted vote. What changes is that the information in front of you is current, and that the vote itself can happen without waiting for the next meeting. MYBOS includes a voting poll that lets owners vote from a phone.
If nobody has ever kept an asset register, software gives you somewhere to put one; it does not populate it. That first pass is real work, and any assessment of the savings should include it as a cost in year one.
There is no universal figure, and treat any vendor quoting one with caution. The clearest published example is The Berkeley in Sydney, where report preparation fell from two days to two hours. The saving is concentrated in assembling information rather than doing the underlying work, so it is largest where records are currently scattered across spreadsheets, email and individual memory.
It depends on how much reporting and how many recurring works the scheme actually generates. A two-lot or six-lot scheme with little common property and few contractors may reasonably decide the administrative overhead does not justify a platform. Under Victoria’s tier system, schemes of nine lots or fewer are not required to elect a committee, prepare a maintenance plan or audit financials at all. Larger schemes carrying mandatory maintenance plan obligations have a stronger case.
It is normally an owners corporation operating expense, approved the same way as any other recurring service contract. Confirm the approval threshold in your own scheme’s rules before committing.
No. It covers building operations: the works, assets, inspections and communications side. Trust accounting, levy administration and statutory financial reporting sit with your strata manager or their accounting platform.
Ask to see a report produced live from data, not a prepared slide. Ask what happens to your records if you leave. Ask what the implementation actually involves in hours from your side. And ask for a customer of roughly your size, not their largest.
Capture a baseline before you start: hours to produce the meeting pack, items carried over between meetings, days from report to close, and requests you could not answer from records. Re-measure after two full cycles.
If your committee is about to have the software conversation, the most useful thing you can do first is not to compare vendors. It is to time how long the meeting pack takes to produce, and count how many questions last meeting went unanswered. Those two numbers will tell you more about whether you have a problem worth solving than any demo will.
If you want help preparing for the meeting itself, our AGM prep checklist for strata committees and owners covers the ground. If you have decided the records are the problem, why every building needs an asset register is the place to start.