Writing a CAM Reconciliation Letter Tenants Do Not Dispute

The reconciliation letter is where a year of expense tracking meets the tenant. A good one gets paid. A vague one generates a backup request, a delay, and sometimes an audit.

The instinct to keep it brief is understandable and wrong.

Detail reduces disputes

A one-line statement — “2025 CAM reconciliation: $3,962 due” — looks clean and reliably produces a reply asking for support. Now you are two weeks into a conversation you could have pre-empted.

A tenant who can verify the number themselves usually just pays it. A tenant who cannot has to either trust you or ask, and asking is free for them.

What to include

Header

• Property and suite
• Tenant and lease reference
• Reconciliation period
• Date of the statement

Date it. Reconciliation delivery deadlines are real, and a dated statement is your evidence of timely delivery.

The pool

• Total recoverable expenses for the period
• Exclusions, itemized with amounts and reasons
• Net pool total

Itemized exclusions are the single highest-value addition. A lump sum invites the first audit question.

Gross-up

• Actual occupancy and how it was measured
• Target occupancy per the lease
• The variable cost base
• The uplift amount

State the occupancy basis explicitly. “Grossed up to 95%” without saying what it was grossed up from is not verifiable.

Administrative fee

• Rate and the base it was applied to

Tenant share

• Tenant rentable area
• Building rentable area
• Resulting percentage
• The tenant share amount

Show both areas. A percentage alone cannot be checked.

Deductions

• Base-year or expense-stop amount
• Cap test: the reference, the ceiling, and any reduction applied

If no cap applied because the increase fell below the ceiling, say so. Silence reads as omission.

Estimates and result

• Estimates billed, ideally by month
• Net balance due or credit
• Payment terms and due date
• The new monthly estimate going forward

Tone

Plain and factual. This is not a sales document, and warmth reads as softening bad news.

Do explain material changes. If the pool rose 14% because of a tax reassessment and an insurance renewal, one sentence saying so prevents a phone call. Tenants generally accept increases they understand.

Handling credits

If the tenant overpaid, say so clearly and state what happens next — whether the credit is applied against upcoming charges or refunded. A credit memo with its own reference number is cleaner than a negative line on an invoice, and easier for both sides to track.

Delivery

Send it in a way you can evidence. Where the lease specifies a notice method, follow it exactly — some leases require certified mail for anything affecting payment obligations, and a statement delivered by email in a lease requiring certified mail may not count as delivered at all.

Keep the delivery record with the reconciliation. If a dispute arises two years later about whether the statement was sent on time, that record is the whole argument.

Generating rather than writing

Assembling all of this by hand for forty leases is the reason reconciliation takes weeks. When the calculation already retains every intermediate, the statement is a rendering of data you have rather than a document you compose — which is most of the time saving in running reconciliation in software.