In a corporate setting, spending approval is simple. Above a certain threshold, a director signs off. One signature, one accountable person, and the process moves fast.
MCSTs don’t work like this. Council members are volunteers, not executives with signing authority baked into their job description. Even when a spending threshold is set, crossing it doesn’t trigger one signature. It triggers a vote, and the vote needs a majority.
So in practice, here’s what happens. The building manager, employed by the managing agent, spots a repair, posts it in the WhatsApp group, and asks the council for permission to fix it. Some building managers actually like this — it’s a chance to stay visible, keep the council in the loop, and hear their opinions before spending their money.
Call it relationship management or call it politics, it doesn’t change the underlying problem. Every council member carries equal vote weightage, decisions happen informally over WhatsApp, and there’s no clean record of who approved what and when. The result is a slow, inconsistent approval process that delays repairs and leaves residents unhappy.
The Real Challenge: Managing Volunteers, Not Employees
Here’s the question every building manager eventually has to answer: how do you run a maintenance approval process when your “bosses” are volunteers with different education levels, different work backgrounds, and wildly different comfort levels around spending money?
Managing one boss is hard enough. A council can have up to 14 members. Getting alignment from all of them, every time, is close to impossible if the only tool you have is a group chat.
What This Indecision Actually Costs
It’s easy to write this off as a minor inconvenience, but the cost shows up in places that matter. A leaking pipe or a faulty lift doesn’t wait for 14 people to reach consensus on WhatsApp. While the group chat scrolls past unanswered questions and half-formed opinions, the fault sits there, sometimes getting worse and more expensive to fix.
Residents don’t see any of the back-and-forth happening behind the scenes. All they see is a maintenance request that’s been open for two weeks with no update. That’s when the complaints start, and building managers end up absorbing frustration for a delay they didn’t cause. The approval process, not the building manager, is usually the real bottleneck.
There’s also a quieter cost: accountability. When approval happens through scattered WhatsApp messages, thumbs-up emojis, and the occasional “ok go ahead” buried in a long thread, there’s no clean way to reconstruct who agreed to what months later. If a council member disputes an invoice at the AGM, or a new MA takes over and has no idea why a job was approved, the trail is gone. That’s a governance risk MCSTs can’t really afford, especially with rising scrutiny around how sinking funds and maintenance budgets are spent. It’s part of a bigger pattern we’ve written about in Fixing Strata Management in Singapore: most of these problems trace back to a lack of structured process, not a lack of effort from the people running the estate.
How the Approval System on Basementgrid Fixes This
The workflow is simple. A building manager creates a work order for every repair. The work order link gets shared in the same council chat group they’re already using, so nothing about the relationship or the conversation changes. The repair is now on record, and the informal discussion can continue exactly as before, right there in the chat.
The difference shows up once an amount is entered. If it crosses the threshold, the system automatically notifies council members and collects approvals. Once the required minimum is reached, the work order is issued to the vendor. No manual chasing, no ambiguity about who said yes.
This solves two problems at once.
First, it closes the legality gap. Any spend above the threshold now has documented majority approval before the vendor is engaged, which is exactly what BMSMA compliance requires.
Second, it protects the informal working relationship building managers rely on. The conversation still happens in the chat group, the amount can still be discussed and adjusted freely, and none of that flexibility disappears. It’s only locked in once the work order is actually issued.
Every action is timestamped, so at any point, it’s clear who approved what and who’s sitting on a decision. For council members, especially the bank signatories who ultimately sign the cheques, this means no more surprise invoices at month end. If an amount was approved, they know, because they were part of the majority that approved it. The only way a large invoice catches anyone off guard is if the building manager skipped creating the work order in the first place.
The Bottom Line
None of this requires council members to change how they behave, and it doesn’t ask building managers to give up the relationship-building that comes with running things through the group chat. It just puts a paper trail underneath conversations that used to disappear into a scroll of unread messages. When approval is timestamped, threshold-triggered, and tied to a specific work order, nobody has to guess who’s holding things up, and nobody gets blindsided by an invoice they don’t remember approving.
That’s the difference between managing 14 bosses by chasing them, and managing them with a system that does the chasing for you.
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