Board Assurance Review

Condominium boards of directors and their property managers make decisions that directly affect their communities. These decisions may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, cause an increase in the common element fees, and/or have decades-long financial and operational consequences.

Most of those decisions are based on reports: reserve fund studies, engineering assessments, energy or EV infrastructure plans, governance analyses, and more. These reports are often long, technical, and full of specialized assumptions that most volunteer board members aren’t trained to assess.

How do you know that the report you're reading is right?  Is it 100% right? ....90%?   ...75%?

That’s where BAR comes in.

A Safe Space for Better Decisions

Board Assurance Review (BAR) provides an independent, intense, and neutral review of reports and their recommendations so boards and property managers can make confident, liability-hardened decisions.

We go through consultant reports line by line — confirming the math, the logic, and the methodology — and issue an independent BAR Score, ranking the reliability of the report on a scale from 1 to 10.

Each BAR Report includes:

• A clear, concise one-page summary

• Commentary on what was done well

• Identification of any gaps or inconsistencies

• Recommendations for improvement

A Win for Everyone

• Boards gain clarity, confidence, and documented due diligence.

• Consultants can address any identified gaps and strengthen their deliverables.

• Property managers can rest easier knowing external validation backs their advice.

And if a problem comes along down the road, boards can demonstrate that they acted responsibly — having relied on a verified, independent review process.

A small price to pay for peace of mind.

Boards often receive dense, long, jargon-heavy reports - which are often the basis of important planning and spending decisions.  But these reports would be a challenge for a industry professional to work through.  As a board director, you need to take reasonable care that the information provided to you makes sense, which is hard to do as a volunteer - unless you commit unlimited amounts of time to work through every page.   

Let us do the heavy lifting for you.

The BAR Methodology tests your report to see how solid it is.  We do this by verifying: data quality, accuracy, and integrity, assumption realism, and logic consistency. If the assumptions are realistic, the math check out and the logic is derived from the data, the report is likely sound and can be relied upon (note:  you may not like what it says, but you'll know it's valid). If we find any anomalies (things just don't add up), we identify where the report breaks down — clearly, respectfully, and in plain English.

Why this matters: You serve as a volunteer board directors. You are (probably) not engineers or accountants. And you make multi-million dollar decisions based on the reports provided to you.  

Rigorously testing a report's internal logic provides you, the corporation, and owners/members with the assurance that the board has conducted its due diligence and that the report can be relied upon for decision-making. 

We call this approach 'board intelligence' — providing insight to understand, question, and stand behind a report based on the quality of its internal structure. 

Get in touch with us to learn more about our approach.