Software for volunteer condominium managers: service-charge calls, meetings, maintenance

Three condominium platforms, three requests for quotes: nobody displays prices in a profession legally requiring price competition. Work between assemblies fits in a binder. What your own tool can take over, and what stays with the bank.

Volunteer condominium management software cannot be bought from a catalogue: Matera, Cotoit, and Vilogi all require quotes without displaying amounts (pages consulted September 2, 2026). National registration is mandatory for every residential building and every manager, volunteers included (service-public.fr).

A category locked behind quotes

Matera announces 'tailored, transparent prices, no commitment' and presents three unpriced offers, one for volunteers. Its only sitewide price concerns rental management, a different product, from 6% of rent including charges: do not confuse it with condominium management. Cotoit's Colib and Cocoon likewise omit amounts, targeting 15–300 apartments. Vilogi has no pricing page, only a form. The paradox is visible: the law requires the owners' council to consult multiple managers for proposed contracts and price-and-service information, yet no market publisher publishes theirs.

Nobody publishes how many condominiums this concerns. Anah's national register is authoritative, but its statistics page offers only a report generator, the data interface errors, and its full file is 453 MB without stating row count. We prefer saying so to rounding: the figure is not publishable as it stands.

You can view, but cannot act

Public condominium-app reviews repeat one complaint. A Matera French App Store user writes April 1, 2026: 'There is no consistency between mobile and web. The dashboard isn't there, for example!' A condominium administrator wrote July 16, 2021 that nothing could be done beyond viewing balances and transfers were impossible (the original review contains spelling errors). On February 16, 2026: 'Despite several password-reset requests, I receive no email.' On Trustpilot, where Matera scores 3.8, a co-owner describes months of incorrect calls for funds, then amounts demanded two years later, on July 20, 2026, concluding that a volunteer with basic management knowledge would be 'as effective and cheaper' (misspelled in the original). The constant pattern: viewing accounts instead of doing work.

What the law places on volunteers

A nonprofessional manager is an individual co-owner acting without profit and needing no professional card. If ownership ends, the mandate continues three months to convene an assembly appointing a successor. They open a bank account in the owners' association name within three months plus a dedicated works-fund account. They prepare the annually voted budget, keep books, close annual accounts, calculate individual charges, issue funding calls, and recover arrears. They register and update the condominium nationally. Each year they produce a dated, signed summary sheet, updated within two months of minutes notification, covering operating and works charges, supplier debts, arrears, and works fund. They convene and attend the assembly, draft minutes, and send them to everyone. Confirm your situation with an adviser: voting majorities and deadlines vary by decision.

Five objects replacing the binder

Your tool would handle five things. Funding calls allocate the voted budget by ownership shares, generate quarterly calls and dated reminders, maintain each owner's position, and provide the arrears total ready to copy. A prefilled summary sheet draws mandatory sections from annual accounts with a two-month reminder. The assembly cycle covers agenda, notice and attachments, attendance, proxies, minutes drafting, and timestamped distribution. The maintenance book and works register link every intervention to competing quotes, selected contractor, authorising vote, invoices, and allocation to works or operating funds. A shared vault keeps regulations, maintenance contracts, insurance, surveys, and recent minutes accessible to every owner and transferable together to the next manager.

What stays with banks and the state

Four things are outside scope. Registration is entered on Anah using the legal representative's personal account: the tool prepares data, not the form. The association bank account belongs to a bank; Matera uses an electronic-money institution and is registered with ACPR as a payment-services agent. Software tracks transactions, not executes them. Electronic minutes signatures and invoicing through an approved platform are purchased services. Finally, the red line: remunerating the role moves it into professional regulation, requiring a card, financial guarantee, and insurance. A tool must not turn a volunteer into a disguised professional.

The binder and what it becomes

Put the funding-call binder on the table: quarterly dividers, photocopied ownership shares, pen-annotated statements, a loose arrears page recopied because balances live in three places. Describe the dividers to AI agents and the binder becomes the French specification's contents, reviewed before code. Each divider becomes a screen, and the loose page the first business rule: arrears are calculated, never recopied. The first document will be imperfect; that is its role: start messy and approve clean. The AI budget depends on the assistant, its plan and the work requested. Our measured AI spending covers specific tests and does not set this tool's price. Also budget for your approval time, any hosting, external services and maintenance. Condominium accounts stay locally.

Where to start

Take your last summary sheet and time producing one today: how many sections can you fill without reopening three files? Then check whether arrears totals match first time. These evening checks say everything about the missing tool. An association treasurer made the same inventory before building theirs.