CAM reconciliations, drafted tenant by tenant for your property accountant to check.

When the books close, someone in property accounting sorts the year's recoverable costs into pools: common area, real estate taxes, insurance, and in some centers a pool of their own for an enclosed mall or food court. For each tenant they open the lease and its amendments, find the share, base year or stop, gross-up, cap and exclusions, and weigh what the tenant owes against the estimates it paid. A statement then goes out, with backup ready for the tenant's auditor.

For the test, AI does that on copies of a year your team already reconciled. It drafts each tenant's reconciliation: pools, the lines that lease excludes, gross-up and cap arithmetic step by step, the share, estimates billed and the balance due or credit, each step tied to its lease section. We call it the sandbox. No tenant ledger is touched.

The denominator is a lease term, not a fact about the building. In a workshop at ICSC's 2025 U.S. law conference, two real estate lawyers walked through a power center with an anchor that owns its land, a third-party outlot and outlots the landlord leases to restaurants. The anchor and the third-party outlot come out of the denominator at a minimum, they said, and the restaurant outlots stay in only if the landlord maintains them. Some leases add a minimum floor area so a share can't jump when part of a center is sold or redeveloped. The draft uses each lease's own denominator and prints it.

Gross-ups touch only costs that move with occupancy. Holland & Hart's guide to gross-up clauses counts electricity, utilities, trash removal, management fees and janitorial service as costs that vary with occupancy, and taxes, insurance and building security as costs that don't. For a base-year office tenant, Parr Brown's leasing guide says the gross-up should reach the base year as well, or the tenant later pays for nothing but a fuller building. The draft grosses up only the lines a lease names, to the occupancy that lease sets, in both years.

Caps come in kinds. A cap usually covers only controllable costs; the workshop's typical uncontrollable list is snow and ice removal, utilities, security and costs from changes in law. A cumulative cap carries unused room into later years, a non-cumulative one starts fresh each year, and a compounding cap grows from the prior year's cap rather than from the base year. The cap is a percentage the lease sets; the draft applies it to that lease's base and shows each year's arithmetic.

Exclusions and the admin fee change the pool tenant by tenant. The same workshop lists common exclusions: ground rent, costs of selling or refinancing the center along with any tax increase that follows, environmental cleanup, repairs paid by insurance or a warranty, and vendor charges above market. The administration fee is a percentage the lease sets, charged in some leases on taxes and insurance too and in others on common area costs alone. Two tenants in one center can start from different pools, so each gets its own pool list.

The statement has to stand up to an audit. Retail audit clauses commonly make the landlord keep full records, let the tenant or its auditor review them, refund any overpayment and pay for the audit when the overstatement passes a threshold the lease sets. Fixed CAM leases skip all of it: a set amount per square foot, set increases, no reconciliation. MRI describes its recoveries tools posting each result to the tenant's ledger as a one-time charge or credit; the draft posts nothing and marks fixed-CAM leases as outside the job. Your reviewer, usually whoever signs the statements, will look hardest at the denominator, the cap base and the exclusions.

Once your reviewer says yes, the job runs for about 30 days of your next reconciliation season, in the buildings you choose.

Each draft waits for your property accountant to correct and approve it before any charge or credit is posted or a statement reaches a tenant. Tenant questions and audits stay with your team. No other job begins that month.