There are a number of benefits to a Community when conducting and maintaining a professional Reserve Study or Maintenance plan.

BENEFIT: Understanding the Community's reserve expenditure requirements to optimize member contributions.

Most communities recognise the need to do some provision for reserve expenditure, which is in our minds, any expenditure not forming part of the standard operating budget. The methods applied to calculate the provision amount for reserve expenditure varies from "a % of the operational budget" to detailed professional reserve studies and funding plans (we naturally recommend the latter).

The reality is the end result remains an estimate and will never be 100% accurate. For this reason a reserve study is referred to as both a science (doing reserve planning by applying best practice methods and tools) and an art (having the experience and know-how to make good assumptions and estimates through the understanding of the Reserve Planning and Community environment).

One benefit of following the professional reserve study option in determining the required reserve contributions, is the exercise in itself identifies the items and components in the community that needs to be maintained and/or replaced, and specifies when and how often this needs to happen. This is called the Component List Compilation Phase of a professional Reserve Study.

A well defined Reserve Component List becomes an excellent 'blueprint' to Community Management, detailing what needs to be done when (up to a monthly level for the following 30 years in a detailed study), minimizing the chance of 'surprise' maintenance or replacement requirements.