Case study: the handover of chair that went wrong (and how to avoid it)

A textbook case that repeats every year in thousands of communities: chair for nine years, everything managed "in his head and his drawer", sells the flat and moves out in March. The new one inherits… nothing.

The hole

• A bank account with the previous chair's signature (two months before anything could be done).
• Not a single set of minutes from the last four years (meetings held "informally").
• Cleaning and lift contracts nowhere to be found (automatically renewed at old prices… or so everyone believed).
• Who owed dues? "The previous chair knew."

The six months of reconstruction

1. A formal appointment meeting plus minutes → the bank.
2. A letter to the known suppliers asking for copies of the contracts in force (up turns a lift tie-in renewed three months before the sale: two more years at a high price).
3. Reconstructing the dues from twelve months of bank movements: €1,900 of arrears surface that nobody was chasing.
4. A new stamped minute book; the insurance located (underinsured, corrected).

What would have changed the story

That the information belonged to the community and not to the chair: accounts, minutes, contracts, dues and history in a shared place, accessible to the committee, transferable in a ten-minute handover. The knowledge of the role cannot live in the memory of a person who legitimately leaves one day.

The rule of a good handover

If you moved out tomorrow, could your community keep functioning on Monday? If the answer is no, the problem is not the successor: it is the system (or the lack of one).