The Approval Process in Plan Heaven
Plan status
A plan in Plan Heaven can be either "approved" or a "draft". As you might expect an "approved" plan is one that has been approved by the body corporate. At any time before it is approved, it is a "draft".
There is only one plan
There is only ever one plan for each body corporate. There are no copies or saved versions. Of course we backup the whole site and databases - several times - but we don't back up each individual plan or body corporate account.
A draft can be edited many times
A draft can be edited many times and it remains the same draft. Think of it as being similar to Word file or a spreadsheet. You can change it as many times as you like by simply overwriting the current content. If you feel you must keep a copy of the last version before you start editing, you will have to make a copy and save it somewhere. But you can’t save it within Plan Heaven, you will have to print and save it as a hardcopy or digital print file on your local drive, or in the cloud somewhere.
Your plan must be approved by the owners
The legislation requires that your plan must be approved by owners at a properly convened general meeting.
Once you have completed editing your draft plan to the point where you are now ready to present it to the owners, you go to the print section and print a hardcopy, or pdf copy, to distribute to owners. See these help pages about printing and note that there are versions to view on a screen that are different to the version you would use to print.
Printing your plan for approval
In the print options you will see that there is a "short" version and a "full" version. The short version just has a heading page followed by the job cost and funding tables. The full version is a much bigger document and has everything including a full summary of items and jobs and the age, life and replacement cost table. However the long version is prepared with the short version, which includes the important tables, at the beginning, rather like an executive summary.
We recommend that the first time your Plan Heaven plan is to be approved, you present the full plan to owners. However, each subsequent year, if there have been no material changes to the items, you could use the short version.
Your owners could use a mobile device at the meeting
You can make it an option that owners can be invited to view the plan online and this will give them the option of bringing a mobile device to the meeting. However, they will first need to sign up to Plan Heaven as a user and the Administrator will have to join them to the body corporate account. See our help pages on joining and adding a user to a body corporate account.
After your plan is approved
Once a plan is approved by the body corporate, the Administrator will need to return to Plan Heaven and edit the plan settings. They simply login and go to the edit section, click on the "plan settings" panel, click the "edit" button. In the edit form they click the radio button marked "approved" and fill in the "approved date" field with the date of the meeting. They click save and it’s done.
The plan is now locked
The plan will now be marked as "approved" and the edit button will now read "unlock and edit". You will also find that all of the edit buttons throughout the edit page will be either removed or replaced with an unlock button so you don’t mistakenly forget and start editing the approved plan.
However, as administrator you are able to go ahead and edit if you choose. If you were to click on any of the unlock buttons, you will be taken to a warning page that you must acknowledge before you can continue with editing.
But it would be unwise to materially change a plan that has been approved by the body corporate, unless you intend to go back and get it approved again.
If you have any feedback or questions please use the feedback form.
The Plan Heaven team.
Disclaimer. Plan Heaven is not qualified in law and any comments made on this website are only the opinion of Plan Heaven and should not be regarded as legal advice. Our comments are merely providing some thoughts on how the legislation might be interpreted and how we go about attempting to meet its requirements. You should not rely on this information in isolation and do you own homework and at all times if you wish to be sure of your position relating to legal matters you should seek advice from a suitably qualified lawyer.