Cost recovery

Some bills are not only yours to pay. A tenant breaks a window. A resident locks themselves out at midnight. The water bill is shared by every unit in the building. Cost recovery is the part of a vendor bill that a resident or a unit owner owes back to the owner who paid it.

What inletAP does with it:

• Marks the part of a bill your tenant or unit owner owes back.
• Hands your PMS a ready-to-post charge sheet, with the invoice attached.
• Tags recoverable expenses into your CAM pools and totals them.

The owner still pays the vendor in full. The bill in your ledger stays at the vendor's full amount. A recovery is a separate record of who owes part of it back, and it never reduces what you owe the vendor.

Cost recovery is on every plan, including Free. There is no charge per recovery.

The five cases, and the limit on each

Each case is the same idea: part or all of an approved vendor bill is owed back by somebody else. inletAP copes with all five. Each one has a limit, and the limit is stated here so you know where your own judgment still does the work.

Before you start

• Your role. Admin, Controller Approver and AP Specialist can add, confirm and waive a recovery. A Viewer can read the recoveries on an invoice they can open, and cannot change them.
• The invoice is read and coded to a building. A recovery is carved out of a cost, so the cost has to be coded first. An invoice with no building is refused with "Code this invoice to a building before recording who owes part of it back." An invoice that is still being read, is held, filtered or quarantined, or is marked a duplicate cannot carry a recovery yet.
• The unit exists. A recovery is always addressed to a unit. Add units under Units, or load them with importing your data. A retired unit is refused.
• For a unit owner, the building's type is Condo / HOA. Set the type on the property under Properties. A property has no type until somebody sets one.

1. Add a recovery on the invoice screen

Open the invoice from the Inbox. The Owed back panel sits below Split coding. Add a recovery there and fill in:

• What it comes from. The whole invoice, one printed line, or one slice of the split.
• The unit. Only units of the building the cost is coded to are offered. A slice coded to one building cannot be owed back by a unit in another.
• Who owes it. The resident, or the unit owner. The unit owner is offered only on a property whose type is Condo / HOA. On any other building the answer is "Set this property's type to Condo / HOA first."
• The reason. Tenant damage, a service call, a utility, a chargeback to a unit owner, or something else.
• An amount or a percent. A percent is worked out to the cent on the cost it is taken from, rounded half-up.
• An optional reference. A tenant name or a lease id, if your PMS needs one. inletAP keeps it as typed and never matches it against anything.
• A fee, only if your workspace uses them. Fees are off unless an Admin turns them on. A fee is kept apart from the cost, in its own column, so no report mistakes a fee for a cost.

A chip reads Owed back $X of $Y: the total of the recoveries that are not waived, against the cost. The total owed back can be less than the cost, because the owner keeps the rest. It cannot be more. The chip turns amber, and the save is refused, when the total goes above the cost.

Recording what is owed back does not reopen the approval of the bill. The approver agreed to pay the vendor, and that has not changed.

Anything inletAP suggests starts as proposed. A person confirms every recovery. Nothing is confirmed for you.

2. Write the note and the memo

The two text fields do different jobs, and the labels say which is which:

• Note (only your team sees this) — what happened and what supports it. "Tenant reported the lockout at 11pm; second this year." "Photos in work order 4471." It stays in inletAP and in the evidence packet. It is not a charge sheet column unless you add it on purpose.
• Memo on the charge (your PMS may show this to the tenant) — the short text that goes on the charge. Some property management systems show it to the tenant, so write it for the tenant to read. inletAP fills in a default: the reason, the vendor and the invoice number.

The note is required before you confirm a damage charge or a chargeback to a unit owner. The field is marked required from the start, and a confirm without it is refused with "Add a note saying what happened before you confirm a damage charge." It is optional for the other reasons.

The memo has a counter. It is at most 1,000 characters, and an Admin can set a lower limit for the workspace to match what your PMS accepts. A memo over the limit is refused. inletAP does not cut it short for you. The note is at most 5,000 characters.

3. Confirm it

A new recovery is proposed. Confirm it when you agree that this party owes this amount. Confirming copies the charge code for that reason from the workspace settings, unless the recovery already has one.

If you change the amount, the unit or the reason of a confirmed recovery, it goes back to proposed and needs confirming again.

To confirm several at once, use Confirm several… on the invoice, or tick proposed recoveries on the Recoveries list and press Confirm selected. Each one is checked as if confirmed on its own; the ones that are refused stay proposed and say why in their row.

When a second person must confirm

A workspace can require a second person for large recoveries. This is a setting in Settings → Recoveries, and only an Admin can change it.

• It is off until an Admin sets an amount. inletAP suggests no number. The right amount depends on your portfolio, and a default would be a figure we made up.
• At or above that amount, the person who added the recovery cannot confirm it. Somebody else must, and that person must be an Admin or a Controller Approver.
• It is checked per recovery, not on the total of the invoice.
• A suggestion counts too. For a recovery that inletAP proposed, the first person to edit or accept it counts as the person who added it.
• It does not hold the vendor bill. Paying the vendor and recovering the cost are separate decisions. The recovery shows as waiting for a second person, and the vendor bill can still be approved.

4. Decide whether to recover the tax

By default, a recovery includes the tax the owner paid. That is the cost the owner actually bore.

• Three levels. A workspace default, an optional override on each property, and an override on each recovery. The most specific one wins.
• Off means pre-tax. The tax is taken out in proportion to the amount: amount × subtotal ÷ (subtotal + tax), rounded half-up to the cent.
• No tax on the invoice. If the invoice has no tax amount, turning tax off is refused with "This invoice has no tax amount; confirm it or recover the full cost." A missing tax is never read as zero.
• The decision is kept. The choice is copied onto the recovery when it is worked out, so a later change to the setting never changes a recovery you already made.

Whether the charge to the tenant carries its own sales tax is decided in your PMS or your ledger when the charge is posted. inletAP does not decide it.

5. Choose how it is settled

Each recovery says how your PMS should settle it:

• Charge now — a charge on the tenant's or owner's account. This is the default.
• Deduct from deposit at move-out — for a resident only. A unit owner has no security deposit, so this choice is refused for one.

inletAP does no deposit accounting either way. The choice is one more column on the sheet you hand off.

6. Hand off a charge sheet

An Admin or a Controller Approver makes a charge sheet from the confirmed recoveries: pick them one by one, or by property, reason or the date they were confirmed. Making the sheet moves every recovery on it to handed off.

The charge sheet is a CSV your PMS can import or you can key in. The default columns are:

Property, Unit, Party, Party reference, Charge date, Service from, Service to, Charge code, Amount, Fee, Tax included, Settle from, Memo, Vendor, Invoice number, inletAP recovery id, Invoice in inletAP.

• The charge date is the date set on the recovery, or else the invoice date.
• The last column links to the invoice inside inletAP. It opens only for a person who signs in. It is not a public link, because a CSV gets forwarded.
• Unit-owner rows start their memo with "PROPOSED - subject to the corporation’s process." A condo or HOA charge stays proposed until the board follows its own process.
• The note is not a column unless an Admin adds it to the format. The settings warn you when you do, because the note then leaves inletAP.
• You can change the layout. In Settings → Recoveries an Admin can reorder the columns and rename the headers to match what your PMS import expects. The recovery id column cannot be removed.
• A cell a spreadsheet would read as a formula is written with a leading apostrophe, so a typed reference cannot run as a formula.

Each recovery goes on exactly one sheet. The recovery id is the key. Downloading a sheet again gives you the same file, byte for byte.

Recoveries to settle from a deposit go on a separate move-out sheet. The steps and the columns are the same.

7. Mark them recorded

When the charges are in your PMS, mark them recorded: one at a time, or a whole sheet at once. An Admin or a Controller Approver does this. inletAP cannot see your PMS, so this is the only way a recovery becomes recorded.

A recorded recovery cannot be waived in inletAP. Reverse the charge in your PMS. inletAP keeps the record of what was sent.

Statuses

A recovery moves from proposed to confirmed, then handed off, then recorded. It can be waived at any point before it is recorded, and waiving needs a reason. There is no status that says the money has arrived. inletAP does not know, and it does not track payment.

Changing a recovery after hand-off

• The amount and the memo are frozen once a recovery is handed off. The sheet you sent must not be contradicted without a trace. To correct one, waive it and add a new one.
• The note stays editable at every status, because it was never sent. Every note edit is audited with the old and the new text, so the record of why a charge was made cannot be rewritten quietly.

Every step writes a row to the audit trail: proposed, confirmed, edited, note edited, waived, handed off and recorded.

The evidence packet

Each recovery has an evidence packet: a ZIP file with the invoice, the memo, the note, how the amount was worked out, and the recovery's audit trail. It is what you need when a tenant or a board disputes a charge. It carries the internal note, so treat it as an internal file.

Who can do what

The Recoveries list shows every recovery across the workspace, with filters for status, property, unit, reason and date. It follows the same property scope as the rest of the workspace.

What inletAP never does

inletAP decides, records and hands off. It stops there.

• It holds no tenant ledger, no lease, no rent roll and no balance a tenant owes.
• It sends nothing to a tenant or a unit owner.
• It does not collect money, and it does not track whether a charge was paid.
• It does no CAM year-end true-up, no check of a utility split against local law, no deposit accounting, and no legal steps against an owner's unit.
• It never reduces the payable to the vendor. The bill in your ledger stays at the vendor's full amount.

Limits

See plans and limits for the rest.

Where to go next

• Cost recovery for property managers — the product page, with a 78-second video of the whole flow.
• CAM pools — tag commercial spend as recoverable and total it by pool.
• Recovery profiles — share a utility bill across a building's units, and the suggestions inletAP reads off an invoice's lines.
• Splitting an invoice across properties — the coding a recovery is carved from.
• Roles and permissions — what each role can do across the workspace.
• Audit trail — where every recovery step is recorded.