Glossary

The vocabulary, with the Ontario and Florida words side by side

A status certificate in Ontario is an estoppel certificate in Florida. Core records there are official records here. This is every term the product uses, defined once, with both jurisdictions named.

Defined terms

63 terms

Allocation basis: The rule that turns a total into per unit charges. A corporation can hold several: one for general common expenses, another for a service only some units receive.
Application order: The order in which a payment is applied to interest, fees, costs and assessments. It decides whether a paying owner is catching up or falling further behind.
Audit chain: An append only, hash chained record of what happened in the corporation, anchored nightly to an external timestamp. A board cannot rewrite it, and an export ships with the script that recomputes it.
Board Scorecard: Nightly derived tiles covering financial health, governance, compliance, transparency, procurement integrity, operations and controls. The board cannot edit it, which is what makes it worth showing an owner.
Budget authority: Spending authority that comes from an adopted budget line rather than from a separate decision. It is the reason routine spending does not need a vote every month.
Capital project: A major repair or replacement run as a project, with a budget, a contract, draws and a holdback. It is where a reserve plan turns into work on the building.
Common elements: Property owned in common by the owners and maintained by the corporation. Exclusive use portions such as a balcony are still common elements even though one unit uses them.
Common expenses: The shared costs of running the corporation, apportioned to the units. They are what an owner's regular contribution pays for.
Competitive bid threshold: The spend level above which a statute or a policy requires competitive bids. Below it a board can still choose to run one, and most well run boards do.
Component: One reserve item with a useful life and a replacement cost, such as a roof or an elevator cab. The component list is what turns a building into a funding plan.
Conflict of interest: A director's material interest in a contract or a transaction the board is deciding. Disclosing it and recording the recusal is what keeps the decision standing later.
Connected account: The corporation's own payment account under the Board Butler platform. Owner money settles into the corporation's account, never into a Board Butler account.
Consent resolution: A board decision made in writing without holding a meeting. It still has to be recorded, and in Board Butler it still produces a decision record with the same evidence trail as a vote at a meeting.
Consequence: The plain language answer to what happens if the board does not do this, carried by every obligation with its citation. It is why a compliance calendar in Board Butler ranks by exposure rather than by date alone.
Continuity file: The handover package generated when directors turn over. It is produced from the work already recorded rather than assembled by the outgoing treasurer on a weekend.
Core record: The Ontario subset of records an owner may examine on a shorter turnaround and usually without a fee. Everything else is a non-core record with a longer response period.
Corporation: The legal entity that owns the common elements and levies fees on the units. It is also the accounting entity inside a Board Butler tenant, so every ledger, budget and obligation belongs to one of them.
Covenant: A lender condition tested against live data after funding, such as a minimum reserve balance. Board Butler tests them from the ledger rather than waiting for the lender to ask.
Credit file: The standardized lender package assembled from live data rather than retyped into a form. The board sees exactly what a lender will see before it consents to share it.
Decision register: The numbered list of every board decision, each with its authority, its vote and the evidence behind it. Money cannot move in Board Butler without a decision reference pointing into it.
Delegation: A standing authority for a role or a person to spend up to a limit, granted by a board decision. It is what lets a treasurer act between meetings without inventing authority.
Director training: The education a newly elected or appointed director must complete. Missing it is one of the few compliance failures with a personal consequence rather than a corporate one.
Disbursement: Any initiated outflow of the corporation's money. Board Butler treats it as a single choke point, so every payment out passes the same rules whatever screen it started on.
Draw: A progress payment on a capital project against work an engineer has signed off, or a drawdown on a lending facility. Both run through the same sign-off and holdback checks.
Dual authorization: Two different people approve and release a payment. It is the single control that stops most of the fraud that hits small self managed boards.
Estoppel certificate: The Florida statement of what a unit owes the association as at a date, given to a purchaser or a closing agent. It binds the association to the figures it states.
Evidence: The artefact that proves an obligation was met: a notice delivery set, a minute, a certificate, a signed contract. Board Butler attaches it to the obligation rather than filing it separately.
Facility: A loan or a credit line from a partner lender to the corporation. It is drawn against a project rather than taken as a lump sum, so interest starts when the money is needed.
Holdback: The percentage of a construction payment withheld until the lien period closes. Releasing it early is how a corporation ends up paying twice for the same work.
Hybrid assessment: A special assessment where each unit chooses to pay in full, pay by instalment, or finance its share through the corporation's borrowing facility. Owners with cash are not forced to borrow, and owners without cash are not forced to sell.
In camera: A board session closed to owners, with a restricted minute stream. Personnel matters and litigation advice are the usual reasons.
Legal hold: A suspension of the normal retention schedule when litigation is anticipated. It stops a routine disposition from destroying something a court will later ask for.
Lender questionnaire: The form a mortgage lender sends to establish whether units in the corporation qualify for its loan programmes. It asks about litigation, arrears, insurance, reserves and owner occupancy.
Lien: The corporation's registered charge on a unit for unpaid common expenses. It has a deadline, and a corporation that misses it loses its priority.
Mandate: The document in which an owner authorizes a pre-authorized debit or an ACH debit and names the corporation as payee. Without a current one, a pull is unauthorized.
Milestone inspection: A Florida structural inspection of buildings three storeys and higher once they reach a statutory age. It is an inspection of the structure, not a financial study.
Obligation: A dated duty instantiated from a rules pack definition for one corporation. It carries a due date, a responsible role, the evidence it needs and what happens if it is missed.
Occupant: A person who occupies a unit under a lease and is not an owner. They receive notices that affect occupancy and do not vote.
Official record: The Florida set of records an owner has a statutory right to inspect. What is excluded from it matters as much as what is in it.
Owner portal: The owner facing side of the product: statements, payments, documents, requests and the Trust Report. Owners see what the governing documents and the statute say they may see, and no more.
Percent funded: The reserve balance divided by the fully funded balance, expressed as a percentage. The number only means something when the methodology behind it is disclosed alongside it.
Percentage interest: The share of the common elements and the common expenses that attaches to one unit. It is fixed by the declaration and is the usual basis for allocating a budget.
Pre-authorized debit: An owner's standing authorization for the corporation to pull a regular contribution from a bank account. It is the cheapest way to collect and the one that fails most quietly when a mandate lapses.
Prequalification: An always on indicative borrowing capacity computed from the corporation's own ledger. It is frequently zero, and Board Butler shows that rather than hiding it.
Proxy: A written appointment of another person to vote for an owner. The form matters: a proxy that does not match the prescribed form can be rejected at the meeting.
Quorum: The minimum attendance needed for a meeting or a vote to be valid. A meeting that never reaches it produces nothing a board can rely on.
Records request: An owner's formal request to examine or copy the corporation's records. The clock starts when it is received, not when the board next meets.
Requisition: Owners compelling a meeting by signing a request that reaches a statutory percentage of units. It is the owners' main lever between elections.
Resale package: The bundle of governing documents and disclosures a purchaser receives. It travels with the status certificate or the estoppel certificate rather than instead of it.
Reserve fund: Money set aside for the major repair and replacement of the common elements. It is a separate fund with its own balance, not a line inside the operating account.
Reserve study: The engineering and financial study that lists the components, their remaining life and their replacement cost, then sets a contribution plan. Everything a board says about the reserve fund should trace back to one.
Rules pack: Versioned reference data for one jurisdiction: the obligations, the statutory periods, the forms and the retention rules. Changing what the law says means shipping a new pack, not editing code.
Segregation of duties: Keeping incompatible powers in different hands, so the person who approves an invoice is not the person who releases the payment. On a five person volunteer board it takes deliberate design rather than headcount.
SIRS: A structural integrity reserve study, required for certain Florida condominium buildings. It sets reserve amounts for the structural components a general reserve study may treat more loosely.
Special assessment: A levy raised outside the regular budget for a specific purpose, such as a roof replacement the reserve cannot cover. It is the single most contested thing most boards ever do.
Special resolution: A vote that needs a higher threshold than a simple majority. Substantial changes and amendments to the governing documents usually sit here.
Status certificate: The corporation's written statement to a purchaser about a unit's standing and the corporation's affairs. A purchaser, a lender and a lawyer all rely on it, so an error in one is expensive.
Tenant: The login and billing boundary in Board Butler, holding one or more corporations. A management company or a two building complex can sit in one tenant while each corporation keeps its own books.
Three-way match: Checking an invoice against the purchase order or rate card and against the record that the service was received. A mismatch is the earliest signal that a vendor is billing for work nobody saw.
Trust Report: A quarterly and annual plain language statement to owners that cites the scorecard tiles behind every claim. It is written for the owner who does not read financial statements.
Unit: The separately owned parcel that is billed and that a lien attaches to. Parking spaces and lockers are recorded separately and are not units for the purposes of a statute that counts them.
Unit factor: The apportionment weight a declaration gives each unit, used to turn a total into a per unit charge. Two units of the same size can carry different weights if the declaration says so.
Warrantability: Whether units in the corporation qualify for mortgages backed by the United States government sponsored enterprises. A corporation that loses it finds its owners cannot sell to a financed buyer.

Jurisdictions

Why both jurisdictions are on every entry

Most condo and HOA writing is written for one jurisdiction and does not say so, which is how a Florida board ends up reading Ontario advice. Every entry here names the Ontario term, the Florida term, and says plainly where a concept does not exist on the other side.

Where a section number is one the rules pack records as needing a lawyer's confirmation, the entry says so instead of stating it as settled.

The vocabulary is the product

Board Butler uses the word your jurisdiction uses, on every screen, in every generated document, and shows the other one where a purchaser or a lender will meet it.

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