You get elected in March. Nobody gives you a calendar.
Which is a problem, because your building is already on one. Several, in fact, running simultaneously in the background, statutory obligations with dates attached, most of which nobody will remind you about until one of them has been missed.
The compliance year is the least glamorous thing in strata and it is quietly the most expensive to get wrong. Here's roughly what's in it.
Fire safety, which is different in every state
This is the one with the hardest edges, and where you live changes the answer completely.
In New South Wales, buildings need an Annual Fire Safety Statement. The assessment must be done by an Accredited Practitioner (Fire Safety), who must physically attend the site within three months before the statement is issued. The declaration is signed by the owner or their authorised agent, and deliberately cannot be the same practitioner who did the assessment. The statement is lodged with the local council, a copy goes to Fire and Rescue NSW, and a copy of the statement plus the current fire safety schedule must be prominently displayed in the building.
If it's late, councils issue escalating penalty notices, commonly $1,000 at one week overdue, rising to $4,000 at four weeks or more. Prosecution exposes far larger amounts.
There's also a significant change most committees haven't registered: AS 1851-2012 became mandatory in NSW on 13 February 2026 for all Class 1b and Class 2–9 buildings, which is every apartment building in the state. Records are kept for at least seven years. And, genuinely, the standard still requires a hard-copy logbook to be left on site; the regulator is explicit that an electronic register can't replace the physical book yet. So NSW simultaneously requires your strata records to be electronic and this particular record to be paper. Both apply to your building.
In Victoria, the equivalent is the annual essential safety measures report, and Regulation 223 is specific: it must be prepared within 28 days before each anniversary of the relevant date. Regulation 225 is the one to know, an owner must produce, within 24 hours of a request from a municipal building surveyor or chief officer, the annual reports from the past ten years, plus maintenance schedules, determinations, and records of inspection, testing and maintenance.
Ten years, in twenty-four hours. That is not a request you can answer by going through somebody's inbox.
In Queensland, it's the Occupier's Statement, prepared yearly, kept with the maintenance records, and submitted to the commissioner within ten business days of being prepared. Records for each prescribed fire safety installation must include the maintenance person's name and licence number, the date, a description of the work, and a signed statement from that person certifying the record is accurate. Retention: two years.
Two, seven, ten. Same equipment, often the same contractor, three different memories.
The financial year, which nobody schedules
Capital works planning has its own clock, and it's slower, which is exactly why it gets missed.
In NSW, a ten-year capital works fund plan must be reviewed at least once every five years. From 1 April 2026, when a plan is revised or replaced it must use a standard form. Five-year cycles are long enough that the person who knew the last review happened has usually left the committee before the next one is due.
In Victoria, Tier 1 and Tier 2 owners corporations must prepare and approve a maintenance plan, covering major capital items requiring repair or replacement over the next ten years, their present condition, expected timing, estimated cost and expected life after works. And the plan's implementation must be reported on at each AGM. Notably, Victoria's December 2025 statutory review recommended going further: Recommendation 11 was that owners corporations be required to actually implement approved maintenance plans, not merely have one, and Recommendation 12 was to extend the maintenance plan requirement to Tier 3 and Tier 4 schemes, which currently have none.
Why this gets missed, and it isn't negligence
Look at the shape of these obligations and the pattern is obvious.
They're annual or five-yearly, so they fall outside the rhythm of a committee that meets when there's something to discuss. They're owed by the building, not by a person, so no individual's inbox reminds them. Several of them are discharged by a contractor, the fire company attends, does the work, and the committee's only evidence is an invoice. And the whole set turns over with the committee, roughly annually, with no handover.
Nothing in that list is anybody failing to try. It's a set of duties designed for an institution, being carried by volunteers on a one-year rotation.
The failure mode isn't dramatic either. It's rarely a disaster. It's a surveyor asking for ten years of reports and the building producing four; a fire safety statement lodged six weeks late for a $3,000 penalty notice; a capital works plan last reviewed in 2019 that everyone assumed was current.
What NaloHub does about it
I built NaloHub as a private resident portal for apartment buildings, it's not a strata management platform and it doesn't replace your body corporate manager. But this is one of the areas where having a single place for the building to keep its own state does real work.
The Compliance Calendar generates the statutory deadlines your state's law actually imposes for your scheme, with traffic lights, so the committee can see what's coming instead of finding out late. Whatever else it does, it means the year exists somewhere other than in somebody's memory of last year.
Documents holds the artefacts, the fire safety statement, the evacuation plan, the maintenance schedule, the capital works plan, where the next committee can find them without asking anyone for the file.
Maintenance runs through named stages with every change stamped with who moved it and when, so a request for a maintenance history is answered by pulling a report rather than reconstructing one. You can enter historical items with their real original dates, so your record is honest from day one rather than pretending the building started the week you signed up.
And the Maintenance Report, pick a date range, get a Word document with every issue, its updates, quotes, approved works, the committee decision and the full trail. That's the thing you hand a surveyor, or a broker, or an incoming committee, instead of a shrug.
To be clear about what this is and isn't: it doesn't perform your fire safety assessment, and it doesn't lodge anything with a council. Your accredited practitioner attends, your surveyor signs, your secretary lodges. What it removes is the part where nobody knew the date was coming.
Build the year, even if you never use us
If you do nothing else after reading this, do this at your next meeting. Take an hour and build your building's compliance year on one page:
- What has a date on it? Fire safety statement or ESM report or occupier's statement, insurance renewal, AGM, audit if you have one.
- When was each last done, and by whom? Include the contractor's name and contact, not just the date.
- What's on a multi-year cycle, and when is it next due? Capital works plan review is the one that gets lost.
- Where does the evidence live? For each item, an actual answer. "In the fire panel room" is an answer. "Somewhere" is the problem.
- Who is watching each one? A name. Not "the committee."
Then leave it somewhere the next committee will find it, which is the whole point, and the part that almost never happens.
If you'd like to see what it looks like when a building keeps that as a matter of course, there's a full demo building at demo.nalohub.com, no signup, nothing to install.