The maintenance cheque that is not your money

As a project nears possession, a new kind of money starts arriving: advance maintenance, a one-time corpus or sinking fund, the first months of common-area maintenance. It lands in the builder's account and, on the bank statement, it looks exactly like cash in hand. It is not. Under RERA it is money you hold in trust for the residents until you hand the project over to their association — and the day you hand over, every rupee of it has to be accounted for.

This is one of the most misunderstood pots of money in Indian real estate. Booked as revenue, it quietly becomes a liability that surfaces at the worst possible moment: handover, when the newly formed association asks for the corpus and the maintenance accounts, and both have to reconcile to the rupee in front of an audience of owners who are already primed to suspect a builder.

What RERA actually expects

RERA is unusually specific here. Section 11(4)(e) requires the promoter to enable the formation of the allottees' association, and in most states this is expected within about three months of the majority of units being booked. Until the project is handed over, the promoter must provide and maintain the essential services on reasonable charges under Section 11(4)(d), and must meet the outgoings on the amounts collected until physical possession passes to the association under Section 11(4)(g). Section 17 then requires the common areas — together with the documents, sanctioned plans and maintenance records — to be handed over to that association. Many state rules go further and expect separate bank accounts for the maintenance corpus and for the maintenance charges, precisely so the two never blur together.

Maintenance and corpus collected per unit, with dates, kept apart from sale collections.
What was actually spent running common services, itemised rather than netted.
The live balance of the corpus or sinking fund, reconciled to the bank account.
The association-formation trail and the Section 17 handover documents.
Outstanding maintenance dues per unit, so the society inherits a clean ledger, not a mystery.

The association does not want a net number. It wants the corpus intact and the maintenance accounted for — separately, and to the rupee.

Why generic accounting hides the problem

A general-purpose ledger books maintenance as income and expenses as cost and shows you the difference. That is exactly the wrong shape for this money. When maintenance, corpus and sale collections all flow into one account and net against one another, untangling them at handover becomes a manual, dispute-prone exercise — usually conducted under pressure, months after the fact, with residents reading the worst into every gap. The problem is not dishonesty; it is that the tool was never built to keep trust money visibly separate, so nobody did.

There is a reputation dimension that builders consistently underrate. Handover is the single moment when your standing is cemented or damaged in the eyes of an entire society at once. A clean, itemised maintenance account handed over without drama does more for word-of-mouth in a locality than any hoarding or portal listing. A messy one becomes the founding grievance of the residents' WhatsApp group — and that group will outlast your next three launches in the same market.

The interest angle people forget

There is also a growing view, reflected in several RERA authority and tribunal orders, that a promoter is accountable for the maintenance and corpus money held — not to divert it, and in places to account for interest on deposits kept. The letter varies from state to state, but the direction of travel does not: regulators increasingly treat this as trust money and expect it to be handled like trust money. Keeping the corpus visibly ring-fenced is therefore not just good hygiene; it is protection against a claim you would otherwise struggle to answer.

From launch to handover: the mid-market builder BizRevolt is built for.

How BizRevolt handles maintenance and handover

BizRevolt's real-estate workspace keeps maintenance, corpus and sale collections as distinct ledgers from the first receipt — per unit, per head, each reconciled to its account. Common-area maintenance billing runs on its own schedule, the corpus balance is always visible rather than reconstructed, and the handover pack — collections, spends, balances, per-unit dues and the supporting documents — assembles itself from the same data instead of being rebuilt by hand the week before you meet the association. Live unit availability, construction-linked demand letters and co-buyer splits live in the same system, so the whole project tells one consistent story from booking to handover.

It is priced per user — 999, 1,599 or 2,499 rupees a month — so a one-to-three-project builder pays for a handful of seats, not an enterprise contract. Horizontal CRMs like Zoho and enterprise platforms like Sell.Do each have their place, above or to the side of the mid-market; what we do is fit the builder for whom a clean handover is a real, near-term event rather than a distant abstraction.

The interim period is messiest of all. Between the first families moving in and the formal handover, you are running maintenance for a half-occupied building — some owners paying, some not, some flats still unsold and quietly consuming services you are funding. That in-between phase can last a year or more, and it is exactly when a single blended account becomes an unanswerable question. Who has paid, what the empty flats are costing you, how the corpus is holding up — that has to be visible in real time, not reconstructed at the end from memory and bank statements.

Clean records also settle the argument every society eventually has: the maintenance rate itself. When residents can see what the common services genuinely cost — the lifts, the pumps, the security, the diesel for the gensets — a proposed rupee-per-square-foot figure stops being a suspicion and becomes a conversation. A builder who hands over that itemised history gives the incoming association a running start, and gives himself an exit free of the accusation that the numbers were never real in the first place.

If maintenance money and the eventual handover are a fog in your current books, that fog is exactly what we clear. WhatsApp the founder, or call +91 91 0657 4865, and we will show you how it looks when the corpus is ring-fenced from day one — usually a reply within about fifteen minutes on a working day.