Reader Question: Management Companies and Financial Reporting

Question from a reader about management companies and financial reports:

Since you seem to be fairly in the loop with regards to condos & management, I thought I’d ask you for advice.

As the treasurer of our HOA, I get to audit their monthly financial reports on the building. Asking for any changes to our Quickbooks report is like pulling teeth. I couldn’t get the management company to make some changes to the end-of-year financial report because the number of rows in the monthly Quickbooks-generated report had changed over the year, and so making a new report that compared the previous year’s finances involved manually merging spreadsheets row by row. I would’ve expected this to be a very simple update to a database query (I actually don’t know anything about quickbooks, but… it’s a database of some sort!).

What I’m wondering is if any condo management companies are actually competent with financial software. Or am I asking too much? Having only worked with this one company, I’m not sure what level of service to expect. I’m also considering hiring a Quickbooks tutor to coach our management team.

I suspect the reader is not asking too much and I wonder if they’ve considered switching management companies?

Any other readers sit on homeowner boards and have experience with this?