What is the dedicated condominium account

The duty under article 1129 of the Civil Code

Article 1129, paragraph 7, of the Italian Civil Code requires the property manager to route every sum received, for any reason, from owners or third parties, as well as every sum paid on behalf of the condominium, through a specific bank or postal account held in the condominium name. The rule was introduced by the 2012 condominium reform precisely to stop the once common practice of managing building funds through the manager personal account, which risked mixing assets and made it hard to reconstruct transactions in a dispute or when a manager changed.

Failing to comply with this duty is a serious irregularity that can lead to the judicial removal of the property manager on the request of any single owner, under the same article 1129. It is therefore not a formality: it is one of the most concrete protections the law grants owners against poor management.

What must flow through the account and what fund separation means

All income (condominium instalments, reserve funds, any contributions or reimbursements) and all expenses (payments to suppliers, professionals, shared utilities, condominium taxes) must pass through the condominium account. The core principle is asset separation: condominium money must never be mixed with the manager personal funds or with the funds of another building, and each managed condominium should have its own account, distinct from those of other buildings the same manager administers.

This makes it possible, at any time, to verify transaction by transaction that outflows match expenses actually resolved or due, and that inflows match instalments paid by individual owners according to their ownership shares.

Managing this with dedicated software reduces the risk of error precisely on this point: linking bank transactions to statement line items and to individual owners turns the reconciliation between the account and the accounts into something that can be checked systematically rather than relying on occasional manual review.

The owners right to direct inspection

Every owner has the right to obtain from the property manager, at their own expense, a copy of the accounting documentation related to the management, and this includes the statements of the condominium bank account. The right to inspect and to obtain copies of documentation, set out in article 1129 and confirmed in applied practice, exists precisely to make oversight of the financial management effective, without having to wait for the assembly that approves the annual statement.

In practice, an owner who has doubts about an expense or a payment received can ask to review the account transactions to check their consistency with the annual statement. A platform like AmministraPro makes this right easier to exercise, because it lets the owner consult online the status of the payments and expenses that concern them directly, reducing ad hoc requests to the property manager.

One account or separate accounts for multiple managed buildings

A property manager who administers several condominiums must keep a distinct account for each one, precisely to avoid funds from one building covering, even temporarily, expenses of another. This separation is consistent with the duty to produce a separate statement for each condominium and with the principle, increasingly emphasized in case law, that the accounting of each building must be autonomous and verifiable independently of the others.

In day to day practice this means tracking, building by building, cash balance, individual owners outstanding amounts and actual liquid funds available, work that management software built for condominium administration simplifies considerably compared to a spreadsheet or a single account managed through manual compartments.

Frequently asked questions