Preparing a Hausgeldabrechnung yourself in Germany

The shoebox of receipts has been sitting on the kitchen table since November. Bank statements, the roofer's invoice, the heating cost breakdown, three till slips from the DIY store, and somewhere in the middle a note with the Wi-Fi password that does not belong there. It gets dark early outside, the coffee has long gone cold and the laptop shows a blank spreadsheet. This is how the annual statement begins in many self-managed buildings: not in a law office, but after hours, with a folder full of paper and the question of where to start.

The reassuring news first: preparing a Hausgeldabrechnung yourself is entirely legal and quite doable for a small community. The most expensive mistake is not in the arithmetic: it is in the vote. Since the 2020 reform of German condominium law, owners no longer approve the whole annual statement; they resolve only on the Abrechnungsspitze, the balancing figure of arrears and credits against the budget. Put the entire set of accounts to a vote and you make the resolution vulnerable to challenge.

What goes into a Hausgeldabrechnung?

A complete statement is not a single number but several parts that build on one another. The total statement (Gesamtabrechnung) pulls together every actual income and expense of the community for the past financial year, everything that went in and out of the community account, line by line. From it flow the individual statements (Einzelabrechnungen): each flat receives its share of those costs, allocated by the applicable key. And since the reform there is a third element that many self-made statements simply forget: the Vermögensbericht, the asset report. It shows the balance of the maintenance reserve and the community's essential assets at year-end and it is no longer optional but mandatory.

Every owner may inspect the receipts behind the numbers.

That right of inspection is not a vote of no confidence: it is their entitlement and for whoever prepares the statement, the best reason to sort everything cleanly from day one.

What are the steps to prepare the statement?

Whether a community runs entirely without a manager or just prepares the statement itself, the path from the box of receipts to a finished set of accounts is the same, with software as with a spreadsheet. Five steps, in this order:

• Gather and order the receipts: the community account statements are the basis, not your memory. You account for what actually moved.
• Build the total statement: all income (advance payments, interest) and all expenses of the year, grouped by cost type.
• Derive the individual statements: allocate each cost type by the correct distribution key, usually by co-ownership shares (Miteigentumsanteile) and for heating and hot water by the Heating Costs Ordinance.
• Keep the maintenance reserve separate: its additions, withdrawals and closing balance belong in their own section, never mixed into the running costs.
• Prepare the asset report and lay everything out for the owners to inspect.

A free Excel template can carry this structure and works out the shares reliably. What it cannot do is decide which expense belongs in the reserve and which in the running costs, or notice that a distribution key was changed by resolution. Those judgements stay with you. A community-management software such as Vecinly at least brings the bookkeeping, the key and the receipts into one place, useful when nobody does this for a living.

Why do owners vote only on the Abrechnungsspitze?

This is where the break with old practice lies. Under § 28 WEG, since 2020 owners no longer resolve the annual statement as a whole, but only the additional contributions and the adjustment of the resolved advance payments: that is, the difference between what the budget foresaw and what actually came in. That difference is the Abrechnungsspitze.

The detailed total and individual statements are still required: they are the reasoning, the working behind the figure. But only the result is voted on. Germany's Federal Court of Justice has confirmed this split several times and made clear that a challenge is correspondingly limited to the Abrechnungsspitze (partial challenge, or Teilanfechtung), among others in the decisions V ZR 102/23, V ZR 195/23 and V ZR 96/24.

In practice this means one thing: word the motion as a resolution on the additional contributions per unit, not as approval of the annual statement. A wrongly worded motion is one of the most common reasons a technically correct statement ends up in court anyway.

Which mistakes make a statement challengeable?

Most challenges do not fail on the maths but at the same recurring points. Know them and you avoid them:

• The wrong distribution key: allocated by co-ownership shares when the community resolved something else for particular costs.
• The maintenance reserve drifts into the running costs, or appears twice.
• The resolution covers the whole statement instead of only the Abrechnungsspitze.
• The asset report is missing or never drawn up.
• Inspection of receipts is obstructed, though every owner may demand it.

And then there is the deadline that sharpens everything: a resolution on the additional contributions can only be challenged in court within one month of the meeting. That clock runs relentlessly, even when an owner notices only late that their share is wrong. The seasoned treasurer therefore puts the statement out for inspection a few weeks before the meeting: mistakes caught beforehand cost a correction; mistakes caught in the vote cost a lawsuit.

Preparing a Hausgeldabrechnung yourself is no dark art: it is orderliness, a clean distribution key and a correctly worded resolution. Gather the receipts, build the total and individual statements, keep the reserve separate, do not forget the asset report and in the end put only the Abrechnungsspitze to a vote. Follow that sequence and you save not just the manager's fee but the aggravation that a challengeable statement brings.

Information updated. This article is for information only and does not constitute legal advice.