In our last post we went through the 70% of a managing agent’s job, which is maintenance coordination, and why a system can do most of it. The other 30% is admin: the books, the AGM, and the council meeting minutes. This is the part people assume they need an MA for, so let’s go through it.
Good news: none of it needs a full-time person. All three can be outsourced or largely automated, and the costs are lower than most councils expect.
1. Accounting: hand it to a firm that does this all day
This is the easiest one. Plenty of accounting firms in Singapore already specialise in MCST bookkeeping, for example WLP and STAC. You send them the paperwork, they keep the books and prepare the financial statements.
It’s also what smaller MA companies do. A small MA doesn’t have enough clients to justify a full-time accounting staff member, so they outsource it too. The logic is simple. An accounting firm with dozens of MCSTs as clients can charge each one less, because the work is repeatable and they spread their overhead across all of them. A single condo, or a single small MA, can’t get that economy of scale on its own. So when you outsource directly, you get the same deal the MA would have gotten, minus the MA’s markup.
As a rough guide, budget about $600 a month for the bookkeeping, plus about $1,000 a year for compiling the financial statements.
The accounts also need to be audited every year, so include that in the budget too. For a 128-unit estate, the audit costs about $1,000 a year.
2. MCST AGM: outsource the hosting, and budget for the paperwork around it
An AGM has a lot of moving parts. Someone has to prepare the agenda and resolutions, host and chair the meeting, and write the minutes afterwards. Most volunteer councils don’t want to do all of that, and a chair who isn’t experienced can make a long meeting even longer.
You can outsource it. For example, A4 International offers a service to conduct and chair the AGM or EOGM at around $1,000 per year.
Read the fine print, though. That fee doesn’t cover preparing the AGM documents, distributing the AGM booklet, technical support, or the presentation slides. Set aside another $500 to $800 for those. So a realistic AGM budget is about $1,500 to $1,800 a year, and that’s for a fully outsourced meeting.
3. Council meeting minutes: record, transcribe, let AI draft, secretary confirms
This is the one that’s changed the most recently. Here’s the workflow:
- Record the council meeting and run it through a transcription tool such as myminutes.ai.
- Feed the transcript into an AI tool like Claude and ask it to turn the transcript into a formal set of minutes.
- The council secretary reads it, corrects anything that’s wrong, and confirms it before it gets sent out.
Step 3 matters. The AI drafts, but a person still signs off on what goes on record. That’s the same check you’d want on minutes written by hand.
What used to take an MA staff member hours of note-taking and formatting now takes a fraction of the time. The output is also arguably more consistent, because the format doesn’t change depending on who was taking notes that month.
What it adds up to
Here’s what the admin side costs per year when you outsource it, using the figures above:
| Item | Cost per year |
|---|---|
| Bookkeeping ($600 x 12 months) | $7,200 |
| Financial compilation | $1,000 |
| Audit (128-unit estate) | $1,000 |
| AGM chairing and hosting | $1,000 |
| AGM documents, booklet distribution and slides | $500 to $800 |
| Total | $10,700 to $11,000 |
Council meeting minutes aren’t in the table because the cost is small. A transcription tool and an AI subscription cost far less than what an MA charges for the same job, and the secretary’s review time is free.
Compare that total with what you’re paying an MA today. If the MA’s management fee covers more than this list plus the maintenance side, you have a clear number to bring to your next council meeting.
Putting it together
Between the 70% from the last post and the 30% here, there isn’t a piece of a managing agent’s job that a self-managed council can’t cover. Maintenance runs on a system, accounting and AGMs go to specialists you pay directly, and minutes take minutes instead of hours.
Will it be the right call for every estate? No. Some councils really don’t have anyone with the time, and that’s what the MA option is for. But the choice should come from what your council needs, not from a belief that the law or the workload forces you to hire one.
If you want to see how the maintenance side works, book a demo or get started here.