Question: Can a QLD body corporate committee authorise the treasurer to approve minor expenses without a full committee vote?
We have been advised by the BCCM team that all committee decisions, including expenditure, must be voted on either at a committee meeting or by a vote outside a committee meeting. Including an item of expenditure in a budget does not give authority to spend the money, and the legislation does not provide a delegation process to permit an individual committee member to make body corporate decisions on their own.
The examples I used were common property electricity bills and the purchase of a light bulb. Holding a meeting or circulating a vote outside a committee meeting and waiting 21 days is not practical for expenses like these.
Can an amount be delegated to the secretary and/or treasurer by committee vote? If not, why not?
Answer: The legislation does not allow formal delegation of decision-making to an individual committee member, but in practice, committees routinely handle minor routine expenses informally and ratify them at the next meeting.
The BCCM Office is right (unsurprisingly) that the legislation requires committee decisions to be made either in a committee meeting or by a vote outside a committee meeting (VOC). However, as with many things in body corporate law, the legislation sets parameters for how schemes can operate but does not set out methods of operation within those parameters.
If committees had to hold a formal vote every time a light bulb needed replacing or an electricity bill needed paying, most schemes would grind to a halt. The practical balance is that committees routinely make decisions via email, phone, and informal conversations, and then ratify them after the fact at a committee meeting or a general meeting, if necessary. Provided committees are making decisions within their spending limits, the majority of sites find a comfortable balance that allows expenditure to be transparent while also facilitating the scheme to get on with day-to-day operations.
Regarding delegation, the legislation does not provide a mechanism for the committee to delegate decision-making authority to an individual member formally. So a resolution saying “the treasurer can approve expenditure up to $500” may not have strict legal effect under the BCCM framework. That said, in practice, many committees do operate this way informally, with one or two members handling routine matters and the full committee ratifying those decisions later. It is not a formal delegation so much as a practical arrangement that gets confirmed through the ratification process.
For genuinely routine and low-value expenses like electricity bills and light bulbs, the most practical approach is usually to let the relevant committee member or manager handle it, keep a clear record, and ratify at the next available opportunity. The right approach will vary depending on the size and culture of your scheme, so think through what is necessary at your site. Most commonly, you will see this in practice through the various invoice approval systems that are available. This is typically where the treasurer and possibly another committee member are approving invoices through an online system, and the body corporate manager handles the payment process.
If your committee wants a more structured framework, it is worth considering passing a resolution that authorises expenditure up to a set amount for defined categories of routine maintenance. That won’t constitute a formal legal delegation, but it puts the committee’s intentions on record and gives whoever is actioning the expense a clear mandate to work from.
This post appears in the July 2026 edition of The QLD Strata Magazine.
William Marquand
Tower Body Corporate
E: willmarquand@towerbodycorporate.com.au
P: 07 5609 4924
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