Sooner or later every association meets a fee that will not be paid, or one that was issued wrongly. These are different situations, and flatnumber treats them differently on purpose.
Mark a fee as uncollectable
Use this when the debt was legitimate but you have given up recovering it: an owner who sold and left, a dispute the association decided not to pursue.
Open the fee from Funds and choose to mark it as uncollectable; you are asked to confirm.
- The fee stays in the records, labelled as uncollectable, with the date you marked it.
- Its pending balance is not set to zero: the label says "we stopped expecting this", not "this was paid".
- It no longer accepts payments, and the mark cannot be removed. That is deliberate: once a fee has been reported as uncollectable, it stays that way. If the money turns up later, it goes in as extraordinary income.
- The association's balance does not change, because no money moved.
- When the year's accounts are closed, an uncollectable fee still counts as billed to its unit, and the closing screen warns you about it.
You will also be offered this option when you cancel an owner who still has pending fees.
Delete a fee, or undo an issue
Use this only for fees that should not exist: wrong unit, wrong amount, issued twice.
- Fees issued from the budget cannot be deleted one by one, so that the split between units stays consistent. Open Issue fees, find the issue under Previous issues and press Undo. It is available while none of the issue's fees has been paid; it removes all of them, and you can issue again.
- A fee you typed yourself (older fees, or a consumption fee) is deleted from its own sheet: open it, choose delete and confirm. Every payment recorded against it is deleted too. If money had really been collected, it leaves the accounts and the association's balance drops.
If a fee has real payments and you only need to change it, do not delete it. Delete the wrong payment instead (see Record a fee payment), or issue the difference.
Good to know
A plain "pending" fee tells you nothing about why it is unpaid. "Not paid yet" and "will never be paid" look the same until you mark the second kind as uncollectable. Doing so keeps your list of genuinely outstanding fees honest.
Unpaid fees do not expire with the financial year. They keep appearing as money owed until they are paid, written off or deleted.
Credits cannot be marked uncollectable. When the year's accounts are settled per unit, a unit that paid too much gets a credit instead of a fee. A credit is money the association owes; you apply it to another fee of the unit or refund it.
Common questions
The owner paid after I marked the fee uncollectable. Record it as extraordinary income (from Funds), and name the fee in the description: "Late payment of 2025 annual fee, flat 3B". Do not try to reopen the fee: it was reported to owners as uncollectable, and those reports should keep saying what they said. The money still reaches the balance, and the description explains where it came from.
I undid an issue by accident. Press Issue fees again. The sum is the same as before, so the new fees match the ones removed; only their dates change.
I deleted a fee by accident. Issue it again and record its payments again.