Last February I ended up at a treasurer's kitchen table in Purvciems, helping her sort a shoebox of bank statements. A five-storey building, 48 apartments, one lift that works most of the time. She runs the invoicing entirely by hand: meters are read on the 20th, she copies the numbers into an Excel sheet built in 2014, calculates the water split by hand, prints 48 invoices at the neighbourhood print shop, folds, stickers, envelopes. The whole board does deliveries on Saturdays.
She asked me — half joking — whether she should just keep doing this forever, because "the system already works".
Here is the uncomfortable answer: yes, it works. And it costs the association roughly three weeks of full-time labour a year, plus materials, plus a slow drip of errors that nobody notices until there's a dispute.
The math nobody runs
Let's count. Meter collection — she waits for paper slips left in mailboxes and chases the six households that never leave one. Two evenings a month, minimum. Data entry and the water calculation: another two. Invoice generation in Word or Excel, one by one: three hours, sometimes more whenever someone demands a corrected breakdown. Printing and stuffing: one Saturday morning. Cash collection from the handful of owners who still pay at board meetings: another evening. Then reminders to the four or five chronically late payers — a phone call, an awkward conversation, a note taped to a door.
Fifteen hours in a good month. Twenty in February, when heating invoices land and half the building wants to know why their bill jumped.
Multiply by twelve: 180+ hours a year. More than a full working month spent on logistics software does in minutes.
Not life-changing money, but nobody volunteered to lick envelopes.
Add printing, paper and stamps — €0.85 per stamped letter in Latvia at the moment — and a 48-apartment building quietly spends €500–700 a year on envelope logistics.
What manual billing quietly gets wrong
Wrong water splits. Enter one meter into a column shifted by a cell, and two neighbours get each other's consumption. It takes weeks to spot, usually when one of them calls, rightly furious. Latvia's Law on Residential Property Management requires that invoices show a clear breakdown of charges, so a correction means reprinting, re-explaining and apologising on a staircase landing.
Debtor lists taped to entrance doors. The classic OSMD move: print the arrears list and pin it by the mailboxes. Since GDPR came in, that is a personal-data problem — a list of names with amounts is a disclosure to the whole staircase, and we went through the details in an earlier post on that exact topic. The uncomfortable truth is that manual processes push boards towards these shortcuts, because there is no cheap, private way to nudge a debtor when everything runs on paper.
Cash drifts. If a fifth of invoices are settled in cash, recorded by hand, reconciliation between the Excel sheet and the bank account becomes guesswork. Auditors ask about it. Owners ask louder.
What "digitised" actually means for a small association
Not a dashboard with graphs nobody opens. For a 40–60 apartment building the change is narrower and more boring than the brochures imply:
- Owners record meters in an app or on a web page between the 15th and the 20th. The ones without smartphones call a neighbour, exactly as they do today.
- The system does the splits — per-meter consumption where meters exist, per-square-metre shares for services allocated that way — and generates every invoice in one run, itemised the way the law expects.
- Invoices go out by email, with a one-click print batch for residents who genuinely need paper. In the Latvian buildings I've watched through this switch, that is 5–10 households and it shrinks on its own.
- The bank connection pulls payment confirmations automatically, so arrears are a report instead of a memory test. Reminders go out on schedule, politely, without anybody taping anything to a wall.
That's the whole picture. What you're buying back is the fifteen hours.
But will it work with our owners?
The question the Purvciems board actually asked. Fair one. Half the building is retired, some don't trust anything online, and you can't leave anyone behind — a management law that demands itemised invoices equally for all owners doesn't have a clause that says "except the ones with flip phones".
What has worked in the transitions I've seen up close:
Run one billing cycle in parallel. Keep the paper slips AND the app. When both give the same totals twice in a row, the paper slips quietly retire. Nobody notices, nobody resists.
Test with three residents, not the whole building. Pick the young couple in apartment 12 and the neighbour who distrusts everything. If the sceptic can do it, everyone can.
Never go email-only. The print batch stays for whoever needs it. The interesting part is psychology, not logistics: people convert when a neighbour shows them at the stairwell, five minutes, on a specific date.
Keep a human in the loop. The treasurer still reviews and approves the final invoice run. That five-minute check is the difference between automation and abdication.
The part nobody advertises
Estonia got here slightly faster. With roughly nine out of ten apartment buildings sitting in a korteriühistu and associations that are decades old, electronic billing is unremarkable in Tallinn's Mustamäe and Lasnamäe blocks — meters go through an app the same way tram tickets do.
Latvia's thousands of OSMDs are a messier mix. Riga's centre buildings with professional managers handle payments online and life is fine. The Āgenskalns house down my street, meanwhile, still takes cash on Tuesday evenings.
The digital gap in Latvian apartment management isn't technical literacy. It's that the person doing the work is a volunteer with a full-time job somewhere else, and nobody's job description includes "implement new software in my free time". The board decides in November, plans for January, and by March the Excel sheet is still there because it's already there.
So the real first step isn't picking software. It's assigning one board member — by name, minuted in the general meeting as part of the agenda — to own the transition. With a deadline. Everything else follows from that single sentence in the minutes.
If I could go back to that February table
I'd tell her what I'd tell any treasurer half-buried in shoebox receipts: your Saturday mornings are a donation, not a duty. The law asks the association to keep records, distribute costs transparently and keep owners informed. It doesn't ask you to fold envelopes.
Digitise the invoices. Keep the Saturday coffee. One of those parts is voluntary.
