A building's common area

The common area of a building is the space no tenant rents on its own, such as corridors, stairwells and lobbies, whose costs the tenants share. Flowtly works it out from the areas you already record, so nobody has to type it in, and it always agrees with the units on file.

How it is worked out

• The building's common area is its full area less the areas of its rentable units.
• A tenant's share of it is in proportion to the area of the units the tenant has booked in that building. Only bookings active today count.
• Vacant units stay in the rentable area. Their part of the common area is carried by the landlord, not spread over the tenants.
• Shares are rounded so they add up exactly to the building's common area.

A figure Flowtly cannot work out is left out, never shown as 0.

Setting it up

The building's full area and each unit's area are attribute values, recorded under the Attributes tab of the building and of each unit. Which attributes hold those two figures is set up by Flowtly for your organization, on request, and the figures appear only once it is. Your organization also needs to use property management.

Where it appears

On the building. The building's overview shows Common area in m². It appears for a building that has units below it and a full area recorded. Two notes can follow the figure:

• (unit areas exceed the building's full area): the units add up to more than the building, so the common area reads 0. Check the full area and the unit areas.
• (no unit under this building has an area yet): the common area equals the full area, because no unit has an area to subtract. Record the unit areas.

In the building's components. The components table gains an Area column and a Common area share column, showing each unit's own area and its share of the common area. A unit without a figure shows a dash. The columns appear only when at least one listed component has a figure. On a phone, each card shows both figures as labelled lines.

On the project. A project booked in the building shows its Common-area share in m² among its area figures, followed by its percentage of the common area when the project and its phases are booked in one building only. See Add (Edit) Project.

Example use cases

• Checking how many square metres of common area a building has before setting the service charge for its tenants.
• Seeing which share of the common area each unit in a building carries, straight from the building's components.
• Confirming the percentage of the common area a tenant's project is invoiced by.
• Spotting a building whose unit areas add up to more than its full area, which points at a mistyped figure.