Contractor sign-in for Victorian owners corporations
A sign at the door of your building. Contractors sign in on their own phone, and a record of who was in the building lands in your inbox every Monday.
In Victoria it is an owners corporation
Victorian strata buildings are run by an owners corporation, under the Owners Corporations Act 2006. It is the same thing the rest of this site calls a body corporate or a scheme, and Strata Check-In works the same way for it.
Who uses it in Victoria
- Owners corporation managers and building managers running one building or several, with one login across all of them.
- Caretakers and onsite managers, who are the first to be asked when something has gone wrong.
- Committees of self-managed owners corporations, with no manager on site and nothing at the door but a paper book.
The number I need, and it is two numbers
A Victorian building is identified by its plan of subdivision number, and by which owners corporation on that plan is paying. One plan can carry several owners corporations, numbered 1, 2, 3, each with its own money and its own manager. An invoice that quotes the plan number alone does not say which one it is for.
So copy it off the levy notice exactly as it is printed, owners corporation number included, for example Owners Corporation 1 PS123456M. It goes on your tax invoice, and a strata manager will not pay an invoice that does not say who it is for.
If your plan starts with RP or SP
That is correct. Plans registered under the Subdivision Act 1988 start with PS. Older buildings subdivided under the Strata Titles Act 1967 carry RP or SP, and those plans are still in use. Copy what is printed.
An SP number is also what New South Wales calls its strata plans. The two are unrelated, so I go by the building address to tell which state a building is in, never by the letters on the plan.
What Victorian law requires
No law in Victoria requires an owners corporation to keep a contractor attendance register. Strata Check-In is useful because knowing who was in your building is useful, not because a regulation demands it. Anyone who tells you it makes the building compliant is selling something.
Strata Check-In is run from the Gold Coast by Jeff Blaszkowski. There is nothing to install and nobody needs to visit, so the distance makes no difference. When you ring or email, you get me.
How it works
- Sign up and print. Your building’s code is generated when you sign up, and the signage is kept in your account: A4 for a noticeboard, A5 for a door, a small label for a gate.
- The contractor signs in. They scan the code and fill in three fields on their own phone, four if the building asks which part of the building they are going to. No app, no account. They get a text with a link to sign out when they leave.
- The record arrives. Every Monday morning a report of the week lands in your inbox, with a spreadsheet attached. Anything left open at the end of the day is marked as closed automatically.
Try the demo on your own phone, or see a sample Monday report.
What it records
Six things a visit, seven if you ask where. The contractor types the business name, their name and their mobile. It records the time in, the time out and the building on its own. The seventh is where they are headed, a tap from a list you write, and only if you switch that on. Any place on that list can ask for a unit or lot number as well, which most buildings leave off. No licences, no insurance certificates, no photographs, and the register is purged every 90 days. The one thing kept longer is a key you have issued and not had back, if you switch the optional key register on.
One price, whatever the size
$39 a month per building, billed yearly. That is $468 a year plus GST, or $514.80 including GST, for twelve units or three hundred. You get a tax invoice with fourteen days to pay, and the building goes live the day it is paid.