Housing-community software: advances, utilities, resolutions and a resident portal
A Polish housing community (wspólnota) is created by law, not by a spreadsheet. Software for a community ties together unit files, maintenance advances, utility billing, owner resolutions and a resident portal. Packaged SaaS is often enough. A custom system — when the process, brand or portfolio does not fit a template. Software does not replace a licensed property manager.
The chair of the board is not looking for a framework. They want a tool that at 22:00 on a Wednesday can tell an owner the balance, why water was billed differently from last year, and whether they have already voted on the roof. A program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej (housing-community system) is not a shop with a subscription and not company accounting for a single NIP. It is a file of shares, an annual plan, zaliczki na utrzymanie nieruchomości (advances for the upkeep of the common property), rozliczanie mediów wspólnota (community utility settlement), a register of uchwały właścicieli lokali (owner resolutions) and a portal dla mieszkańców (resident portal) that shows the same numbers the zarządca nieruchomości (property manager) sees in the office. If any of that lives in a notebook, a Messenger group or a sheet named “community2024”, the first lift failure or the first parking row ends with three versions of the truth.
GESOFT builds oprogramowanie dla wspólnoty to order, or a layer on a package: a portal, work orders, voting. We do not pretend an app replaces the statutory duties of a licensed manager, the owners meeting or the signature under the annual report. We also do not sell “a system for every community in Poland”. First one property or one manager, one truth about balances and one channel instead of five groups. The rest — once the first financial year closes without glueing PDFs at 23:40 on the Sunday before the meeting.
The community is created by law, not by registering in software
This is not a company you “file in the court register once seven neighbours agree”. The Act of 24 June 1994 on the ownership of premises (Journal of Laws 1994 No. 85 item 388; consolidated text among others Journal of Laws 2026 item 232) says in Article 6 that the entirety of owners whose premises form part of a given property constitutes a housing community. The community may acquire rights and incur obligations, sue and be sued. No resolution “we hereby found a community” is required. No registration in a mythical register of communities is required. Separation of the ownership of a unit is enough. Software that forces you to “create a community like a company account” confuses a legal structure with SaaS onboarding.
That has a consequence marketing copy likes to skip: there is no single official Statistics Poland (GUS) headcount of “all housing communities in the country” that can honestly be quoted as the size of the market. GUS counts dwellings, buildings, floor area and rooms. It does not publish one public census titled “how many wspólnoty exist”. Every building with separate ownership of premises forms a community by operation of Article 6. How many there are exactly is a land-and-mortgage-register and practitioners fact, not one statistical release. Anyone who writes “we serve X thousand communities because Poland has Y of them” without a source is selling a slide. We do not add that slide.
A community is not a housing cooperative. A cooperative has members, a statute, cooperative-law bodies and often hundreds of buildings under one tax id. A community has unit owners and shares in the common property. The vote is different, liability is different, the annual plan is different, the way you convene a meeting is different. That is why software for a housing cooperative and a program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej may share a utility and portal engine but should not pretend to be the same product with another sticker. A manager who runs both needs two regimes in one panel or two tools — not one “organisation type” checkbox.
Small and large communities: since 2020 the threshold is three units
Until the end of 2019 a small community was one with up to seven units. From 1 January 2020 Article 19 of the Act lowered the threshold: if the number of separated units and of unseparated units still held by the previous owner is not greater than three, the Civil Code and Code of Civil Procedure rules on co-ownership apply to the management of the common property. Above three units — four and more — the community is large and falls under the full statutory regime: election of a board or entrusting management, resolutions, a meeting, a report. That is the consolidated text on ISAP and the reading in practice notes such as LEX on Article 19 and this explainer of small versus large communities.
A mała wspólnota mieszkaniowa (small community, up to three units) often lives without a formal board, without a statutory meeting and without share-weighted resolutions. Decisions follow co-ownership rules. A spreadsheet, a shared folder and a bank account with two cards can be enough — until short-term lets, a commercial unit or a fight about the roof arrive. A duża wspólnota mieszkaniowa (large community, four units and more) must elect a board or entrust management to a natural or legal person. That is where “we will work it out on the staircase” ends. The duty to keep records, convene a meeting, pass resolutions and account to owners begins. Software that does not distinguish the two regimes will be too heavy for a three-unit tenement and too light for an estate with 120 shares.
- Article 19 counts separated units and unseparated units remaining with the previous owner — not “how many flats have keys” and not “how many families live here”.
- Four units already mean a large community: a board, resolutions, a meeting, a report. There is no third category called “medium, we will wait”.
- A small community may want a portal and a water settlement without pretending to run a full quorum engine.
- A large community without a resolution register and an attendance list lives on challenge risk, not on “Excel convenience”.
- The switch from small to large happens by law when the fourth unit is separated — the system should detect it, not wait for a manual “community type” toggle.
The 2019 amendment that took effect on 1 January 2020 gave former 4–7 unit communities time to appoint a board (in practice discussed as a two-year transitional period). That stage is closed. In 2026 nobody can pretend “we have always been under seven so we stay on the Civil Code”. If the building has four units within the meaning of Article 19, the regime is statutory. Oprogramowanie dla wspólnoty should reflect that in the file and in permissions, not in a footnote of terms nobody reads.
The housing stock is counted. Communities are not a single GUS total
What GUS publishes is dwellings, not communities. According to Housing economy in 2024 (16 September 2025), at the end of 2024 Poland had almost 16.0 million dwellings (up 1.2% on the end of 2023). Usable floor area: 1,206.8 million m² (+1.4%), rooms: 61.2 million (+1.1%). Year-on-year increase: 186.5 thousand dwellings. 10.8 million dwellings were in cities (704.2 million m², 37.9 million rooms); 5.1 million in rural areas. Average dwelling size: 75.6 m². That is a hard picture of the stock. It does not say how many of those dwellings sit in communities, cooperatives, TBS, municipal stock or single-family houses without separation of units.
For a software vendor the release means something simpler than “a huge market to capture”. It means that every year new buildings arrive with new notarial deeds, new shares and new communities that in year one receive a stack of PDFs and an account number from the developer. A developer CRM finishes work at the moment the community starts: handover, first advances, first utilities, first meeting, first reserve fund. A bridge between those two worlds (unit list, areas, owners, parking spaces) is needed more often than another pretty dashboard. If the developer hands over a sheet with 140 rows and three spellings of the same surname, community software must ingest it with a conflict report, not “we will type it in over the weekend”.
What a manager week actually looks like
Monday: weekend payments, three calls “I did not get the water bill”, one waste complaint and a request for a bank certificate. Tuesday: meter readings that arrived by email, SMS and a slip in the mailbox. Wednesday: the heat supplier sent a February correction and the annual plan was calculated on the old rate. Thursday: the commercial-unit owner wants a different split of common costs because “nobody is here after 18:00”. Friday: the roof resolution collected 47% of shares at the meeting and must go to a circulation vote. Saturday: a pump failure, the on-call crew, a photo in a Facebook group, and nobody knows whether that is a ticket or already a job with a quote. Sunday: the chair asks for a PDF for “tomorrow morning, but a version for people who were not there”.
That week a zarządca nieruchomości does not need artificial intelligence that “predicts a parking conflict”. They need one unit card, one balance, one ticket channel and one resolution register. The rest (a native app, a chatbot, a contractor marketplace) is an add-on that will not close the financial year. Software for a property manager who runs 40 communities hurts in a different place from the panel of a single 18-unit tenement: bulk postings, bulk mail, staff permissions, allocation of the manager own costs. Those are two products with a shared core, not one “number of buildings” slider.
- An owner balance that in the office differs from the printout they received in January.
- Utilities billed as a lump sum for some, by meter for others, and for a third group “per registered person” whom nobody updates.
- A resolution passed at a meeting, then edited in Word, then challenged because the annex was not the one laid out.
- A defect reported in three channels — the duty phone, the office inbox, a Messenger group — with three descriptions of the same pump.
- An owner who sold in May while advances still hit their account because the deed never reached the file.
- A commercial unit, a parking space, a cellar and a share in an internal road calculated “by eye” in the first plan and never touched again.
- Debt collection that starts as “send reminders” and ends as a case nobody can reconstruct from email.
What housing-community software must actually do
A good program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej ties together records, money, decisions and communication. It does not need to be an ERP with twelve tabs “because a corporation has them”. It must carry a financial year, a meeting and a utility settlement without manual glue. The list below is a list of process duties, not a feature slide. A mature SaaS will carry part of it. A custom layer is needed when you have an unusual regulation, several communities under one brand, or a portal that must look like your site rather than the vendor white label.
- Property file: building, units, appurtenances, parking spaces, cellars, shares in the common property, land register, floor area from the deed — not from “more or less”.
- Owner and holder file: natural person, spouses, company, municipality, developer with unseparated units, attorney, correspondence address, email, phone, contact consents.
- Annual plan and zaliczki na utrzymanie nieruchomości: operations, reserve fund, utilities, waste, insurance, manager fee — rates per share, per m² or per unit, as resolved, not as the office is used to.
- Postings, payments, set-offs, interest, reminders, balances on a date. Bank export and statement import. Not “accounts will retype the PDF”.
- Rozliczanie mediów wspólnota: water, heat, heat cost allocators, common-area electricity, gas, waste. Readings, estimates, corrections, meter legalisation, rate history.
- Register of uchwały właścicieli lokali: draft, annexes, mode (meeting, circulation, mixed), voters, shares for / against / abstain, date passed, publication, any challenge.
- Portal dla mieszkańców: balance, documents, meters, vote, defect report, notice. The same truth the office sees, in the owner role.
- Work orders and defects: from report to protocol, cost, contractor, board consent above a threshold, before / after photos.
- Documents: contracts, policies, inspection protocols, chimney protocols, decisions, correspondence. Versions, not a folder named “scans 2019–2024”.
- Permissions: board member, zarządca nieruchomości, accountant, office staff, chair, owner, attorney. Not one password “community” on a card in the duty room.
Then come the things a demo hides: rate-change history, an audit of who edited a share after a deed, a block on settlement when a reading is missing, resolution numbering that matches your custom, a demand-letter template your lawyer accepted. The MVP does not need all of it. It needs a data model so that in a year you are not rewriting the file because “share was a number and now it is a fraction from the deed and from the cellar annex”.
The unit and share file is the source of truth
A unit in the Act is not “flat 12”. It is a self-contained premise with an area, a use, a share in the common property and often appurtenances. The share is not decoration on a notice. It is the key for most resolutions, for part of the advances and for liability. If the software rounds the share to two decimals while the land register has 1273/98420, the first resolution on a roof loan will drift from reality by votes you will not recover at the meeting. Oprogramowanie dla wspólnoty stores the share as in the document and counts a majority from that number, not from a “more convenient percentage”.
A change of owner is not an edit of the “surname” cell. It is the date of the deed, the date the community learned of it, a split of advances and utilities by days, a new correspondence address, the previous owner losing portal access and the new one gaining it — without waiting until someone “remembers after the meeting”. Joint marital ownership, an inheritance division, an auction, a municipal acquisition, a unit still with the developer: each state has a different voting right and different mail. Software that only knows “one owner — one login” will break on the first probate file in a 1912 tenement.
Maintenance advances: a plan, not “rent like a cooperative”
Owners casually say “rent”. In the Act the point is covering the costs of managing the common property, in practice zaliczki na utrzymanie nieruchomości resolved at the meeting as part of the annual plan. That is not the price of the flat and not a tenancy rent. It is an advance for operations, the fund, insurance, the manager fee, sometimes utilities. The amount follows a resolution and a key (share, m², unit, persons). Software that issues a “rent invoice” like a shop confuses a community with a service vendor. A note, a settlement document, a balance statement — yes. Pretending VAT sales to residents for the mere upkeep of common parts — only where there really is a supply (a commercial unit, an extra service, a lease of a common part). The rest belongs to the accountant and the tax adviser, not to a shop engine.
The annual plan is a budget, not a wish. On the income side: advances, interest, mast rent, facade lease, top-ups. On the cost side: standing items (common-area energy, lift maintenance, security, insurance, fees) and variable items (water, heat, waste). The reserve fund is a separate pool: you must not “borrow it for waste” because April ran short and then have a hole for the roof in October. A program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej watches the pools, not only the sum in the bank. When the chair says “there are 80 thousand in the account”, the system must be able to say: 22 operations, 51 fund, 7 deposits and overpayments you will not spend on the facade without a resolution.
- Rates with an effective date. A rise from 1 July must not overwrite January history.
- A settlement key per line: lift by share, waste by persons or by unit, antenna by users — as resolved, not as Excel prefers.
- Overpayment and underpayment after the year-end settlement: automatic set-off or refund, not “leave it in the fund, nobody is asking”.
- Statutory or contractual interest on arrears — calculated, not brandished at a meeting without a basis in a resolution.
- A no-arrears certificate with a date and a balance, for a bank and a notary, with a document number, not from the chair Word file.
Utility billing: reading, rate, correction, dispute
Rozliczanie mediów wspólnota is where Excel dies most loudly. Water: a main meter, unit meters, the difference (loss, watering of common parts, a leak, a bad reading), legalisation, replacement, an estimate when someone will not let the reader in. Heat: a building meter, allocators, location coefficients, energy for heating and hot water, heating seasons, supplier corrections after the season. Waste: the municipal rate, a declaration of occupants, a change in occupants, a commercial unit. Common-area electricity: an administration meter, a split by shares. Each path has a different unit, a different calendar and a different reason to complain. One “utilities module” without rules is only a prettier table.
An owner does not fight physics. They fight opacity. If the portal shows the 31 December reading, the 30 June reading, consumption, the rate, their share of the main-meter difference and the source document from the supplier, a complaint becomes a concrete reading error or a concrete meter, not a general “you are robbing us again”. If they get one line “utilities 427.18 PLN” with no breakdown, the meeting will be about utilities, not about the roof. A portal dla mieszkańców is a tool for a calm year, not a gadget.
Honesty about law in motion belongs here. A government draft amendment to the Act (UD312) — described among others by Infor.pl (August 2026) and filed in the RCL legislation list — would treat metering devices (water meters, heat meters, allocators) as part of the common property and would make utility advances payable by the 10th of the month. That is a draft / amendment in progress, not binding law. As of 18 August 2026 Infor reported the draft at the Standing Committee of the Council of Ministers, with possible entry into force in Q4 2026 or only in 2027. Software may have a “meter ownership” field and a payable-by parameter so you can flip them by resolution or by statute if (when) the amendment passes. We do not build settlements “as after the amendment” while pretending Parliament has finished.
Owner resolutions: a register, not a folder of PDFs
uchwały właścicieli lokali are how a large community decides about the common property. The annual plan, election of the board, the management contract, a loan, the roof, house rules, suing a debtor, a change of use of a common part — those are not “emails asking for a plus”. They are resolutions with a date, a text, an annex, a mode and a share tally. Challenging a resolution within the statutory time is cheaper for an unhappy owner when the file is full of holes. It is more expensive when the register is complete: who voted, with what share, which text hung on the board and in the portal, and when. Software will not replace a lawyer. Software will not let you pretend the 23:11 version and the 08:02 version are the same document.
In practice there are three modes: a meeting, individual collection of votes (circulation), and a mixed mode. At a meeting you count attendance, powers of attorney, the agenda, the minutes. In circulation — a start date, an end date, who received the draft, who voted, whether the vote is valid. In mixed mode — the sum of both without counting the same share twice. A duża wspólnota mieszkaniowa without that arithmetic in the system votes “by feel” and then patches the minutes. That is the dearest kind of patch: it does not cost an hour of bookkeeping, it costs a dispute.
Electronic voting is not spelled out in the current Act the way SaaS vendors would like. Binding rules rest on the meeting and on collection of votes. The UD312 draft announces electronic circulation of information, treating electronic form as equal to writing, and — in circulation voting — an ordinary majority of those who voted after the deadline. Again: a draft, not a provision. You can build voting in the portal as a tool for collecting votes and documenting will, with minutes the board signs. You cannot write in the system terms “from today resolutions pass by a click because the 2026 amendment says so” until the amendment is in force. An honest vendor distinguishes those two things. We do.
The resident portal: one truth, not a second hotline
A portal dla mieszkańców is not a “social app for the estate”. It is an owner account (or a tenant account, if you resolve that) for four things: balance and payment history, documents and resolutions, a meter reading, a defect report. Neighbour chat, a noticeboard about a bicycle and “likes” under a facade photo are options that eat attention and do not close the year. If you have budget and rules for that — we add them. We do not sell them as the core. The core is: at 22:00 the owner sees the same balance the accountant sees at 08:00.
Login: email and password, optionally a trusted profile or bank login if volume and budget will carry it. Not one password for the staircase. Not a national id number as a login. Two-factor for board members and for the manager — yes. For a pensioner who checks a balance once a quarter — we do not block the door with a circus they cannot operate. Attorney and co-owner access: separate accounts, not forwarding a spouse password. A tenant: only what the owner or a resolution allows (meter, a fault report), not the annual plan and not a list of debtors. A list of debtors is not portal content at all. One own balance — yes. The neighbour balance — no.
Defects and work orders: from a photo on the landing to a protocol
A failure does not know office hours. Software that only accepts reports by email to the secretariat moves the duty onto the chair phone. A path that works: the owner or security reports in the portal, the system issues a number, a category (lift, water, roof, electrics, cleaning, other), a priority, a location. The zarządca nieruchomości or a board member decides: on-call, a job with a money threshold, or park it in the plan. The contractor gets a job card, not “the group description”. After the work: cost, invoice, photo, protocol, close. The owner sees a status, not the crew internal number.
The line of “ordinary management” is a dispute in practice, not a slider. Replacing a landing bulb does not wait for a resolution. Replacing a roof does. Replacing a pump for 9 thousand on a Friday night depends on the management contract, the plan and whether it is a failure that threatens damage. Software will not settle competence fights. Software can force: above amount X — two board members, above Y — a draft resolution, a failure — an on-call path with a cap and a report to the next meeting. The UD312 draft wants to define ordinary management in the statute. Until it does, you follow the contract, resolutions and common sense, and the system keeps a trail of the decision. A trail is cheaper than testimony that “we thought we could”.
Small and large communities need a different weight of system
A mała wspólnota mieszkaniowa with three units does not need a quorum engine, bulk reminders and roles for a five-person office. It needs an account, a split of invoices, water readings and a place for contract scans. A good SaaS or even a careful sheet plus a folder is often enough if all three get along. A custom app at that scale is usually out of proportion — we will say so on a call instead of selling a portal “for later, when you separate a fourth unit”. When the fourth unit appears, we talk about the large-community regime, not about a new icon.
A duża wspólnota mieszkaniowa with 40, 80 or 200 units dies without postings, without a portal and without a resolution register. Here the cost of no system is monthly: a salary for retyping, utility errors, a meeting that runs two hours long because nobody has the list of powers of attorney. A manager with 30 such communities dies a second time: they must switch property in one tool, not open 30 files. Software for a property manager at that scale is staff permissions, a ticket queue, bulk posting and bulk mail with an individual balance. That is not “the same community × 30”. That is an office operation.
What is on the market: Weles3, e-Majordom, eMieszkaniec, Mieszczanin
The Polish market is not empty. Before anyone writes their own advances engine, a mature SaaS should be priced and someone should say honestly where it is enough. The names below show up in manager practice and in communities; this is not a ranking and not a GESOFT certificate. It is the map we start from when we say “keep / integrate / replace with a layer”.
- Weles3 — a cloud system for property postings and accounts, with an owner portal ToMójDom. A frequent choice for offices that want ready community bookkeeping and online payments.
- e-Majordom — an app aimed at communities: online resolutions, utilities, payments, communication. Light onboarding, subscription model.
- eMieszkaniec — a community operations system, including an option of bookkeeping on the vendor side; a resident panel (balance, vote, meters, documents) in the subscription.
- Mieszczanin — a heavier suite for cooperatives, communities and social-housing companies; cloud, e-Mieszczanin / e-kartoteka, voting, tickets, invoices.
There are other licences (local accounting packages, “Lokale” systems, overlays on Symfonia or Insert). The common point: SaaS and a boxed suite will carry a standard plan, standard utilities and a standard portal. They break when you want your own brand and domain without the vendor logo, you have a settlement regulation that cannot be clicked in a wizard, you join communities to a developer process, you need an API for your own technician app, or the data and code must stay with you because the owners or the municipality say so. Then we do not “force-migrate you onto our ERP”. We leave accounts in Weles3 or Mieszczanin and add a portal, voting, work orders. Or — more rarely — we write the engine when the office has 50 properties and a process no wizard will carry. The trade-off: package or custom software.
KSeF 2026: the community and the manager invoice differently
The National e-Invoice System is not “a topic for accounts in the background” if the community or the management company issues invoices (a facade lease, a commercial unit, a recharge, a management service). The official timetable on ksef.podatki.gov.pl: 1 February 2026 for taxpayers whose 2024 sales including tax exceeded PLN 200 million; 1 April 2026 for the rest. Receiving invoices in KSeF — from 1 February 2026. There are time-limited exceptions (including sales documented by invoices up to PLN 10,000 gross a month until the end of 2026, B2C optional). Detail for an in-house panel is in KSeF in a company app. The distinction that matters here: a debit note / advance information for a residential owner is not always a VAT invoice. An invoice for a roof tenant, a telecom operator, a management company — usually is. Software must not push every document through one “issue FV” button.
e-Deliveries: a duty of a management company, not of every staircase chair
If the zarządca nieruchomości operates as a company or another entity entered in the KRS register of entrepreneurs, an e-Deliveries address is not optional. Entities in KRS registered before 1 January 2025 must have an address from 1 April 2025; newly registered entities — on filing. That is set out among others on biznes.gov.pl and gov.pl/e-doreczenia. The community as such is not a KRS company. A chair who is a natural person does not automatically become “a firm with e-Deliveries”. A management company does. Software can store the ADE, log official correspondence and not lose a notice in a staff private inbox. It will not replace activation of the box in the state system. That is done on gov.pl, not in our onboarding.
Amendment UD312: balconies, meters, advances — a draft, not an act
We repeat this because in 2026 some sites describe the changes as if they already bound. Infor.pl (updated 18 August 2026) and draft UD312 describe intentions of the Ministry of Finance and Economy: a definition of the community as an organisational unit without legal personality with assets tied to management, balcony structure (slab, girders, balustrade, insulation — common; inner space — the unit), meters as common property, utility advances by the 10th, a power to raise an advance when the use of a unit generates extra cost, access to a unit for inspections and failures, a reserve fund in the Act, e-circulation, changes to counting circulation votes, warranty claims brought by the community. On the publication date of this text that is a draft / amendment in progress, not a promulgated consolidated new act. Entry into force was planned 30 days after promulgation; Infor writes expressly that adoption by the Council of Ministers in Q2 2026 did not happen and that a realistic date is Q4 2026 or 2027.
What that means for software now, without pretending new law: it is worth having in the data model a balcony / loggia object split into “structure / space”, a meter with an owner attribute (unit / community), a utility due-date parameter, a note on extra cost of use (short-term let, a food unit), a calendar of unit access for inspection. When the amendment passes — you flip flags and resolution templates. If it does not pass, or passes in another wording — you do not have hard code that “the 2026 act requires”. Hard code on an unenacted rule is dearer than a field that can wait.
GDPR, roles and what must not hang on the staircase
A community file is names, addresses, account numbers, balances, sometimes a national id on a power of attorney, photos from inside a flat after a leak, phone numbers, attorney data. The controller is the community (or — in the scope of the contract — the manager; that is for the contract and a lawyer, not a software house). GESOFT is a processor when we host. Roles: the accountant sees balances, the technician sees an address and the ticket text, the owner sees their own, a board member sees more, a list of debtors does not hang as a PDF on the noticeboard. Consent to an SMS about a heating failure is not consent to the management firm newsletter. EU hosting, access logs, retention after a sale of the unit (historical balance versus contact data), an erasure path. More: GDPR in web applications. A shared password “Community1!” on a card in the duty room closes that model before we start.
An MVP that will survive the first meeting and the first reading
- The file: units, shares, owners, accounts, addresses. Migration from Excel / from the previous package with a conflict report (two shares, dead units, duplicate names).
- A plan and advances for one year. Posting, payment, balance, certificate. Statement import.
- One utility (usually water or waste) end to end: reading, settlement, publication in the portal.
- A resolution register and one meeting: attendance, powers of attorney, result, PDF.
- The portal: balance, documents, a ticket. An electronic vote — once the community lawyer confirms how you fold it into collection of votes.
- Work orders for the crew. KSeF and e-Deliveries — when you really issue invoices or you are a KRS company, not “in the innovation pack”.
Migration is a stage, not “we will pull it in at the end”. Duplicate tax ids, units without a share, payments without a reference, resolutions without a file, readings in units nobody remembers — that is a report, not a Friday surprise. The old program can run in parallel for one settlement period. We do not switch it off on the day the March posting runs. Test data is anonymised. Production does not boot from a backup “on the accountant laptop”.
What the software will not replace — and does not promise
The software is not the board. It does not pass a resolution for absentees. It is not a professional licence of a zarządca nieruchomości. It is not a legal opinion on whether an act is ordinary management. It is not a balcony surveyor or an energy auditor. It will not excuse the community from a meeting, from building-law inspections, from an insurance contract and from a bank account whose signatory is a human, not an API token. GESOFT does not take a side in an owners dispute. We build a tool in which that dispute has documents instead of three versions of an email.
Software will not repair a community that has no plan, no resolutions and nobody who can sign a transfer. In that situation the constitution and a human come first, then a login. Software will not lower the advance. It can show where the advance came from. That is usually enough for a meeting to stop being a rally and become a decision. Anyone who sells “an app that will raise collection by 40% without recovery and without resolutions” is selling a spell. Collection rises when the balance is clear, payment is simple and a reminder goes out on time. That is dull. That dullness works.
When we say stay on SaaS, and how we price custom
One tenement, 12 units, a standard plan, no ambition for a private brand — we first price Weles3, e-Majordom, eMieszkaniec or Mieszczanin. If the subscription and the limits are acceptable, you stay. We are not ashamed of that recommendation. A custom program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej has a cost of analysis, migration and upkeep. It pays when the office has many properties and a process the licence will not glue; you need a white label and SEO on “resident portal [estate name]”; you have a bridge to a developer, a heat company, your own service desk; or the data must not leave for someone else cloud. Then the quote follows a process map, not a tab count. Budget context: what an app costs.
A frequent variant that works: bookkeeping stays in a trade SaaS because postings and statement import are mature there. We add a portal dla mieszkańców, voting and work orders on your domain, via API or a nightly import of balances. The owner does not need to know that the balance is calculated in another engine. They need one number and one pay button. The office does not need to move in the middle of a year. That is a bridge, not a revolution. Revolutions in communities end at a meeting, not in a repository.
The developer hands over the building. The community only starts
The worst first year of a community is a cardboard dump: 80 deeds, three annexes about cellars, parking spaces in another land register, house rules written for the developer, a two-year management contract, warranties, handover protocols for common parts that nobody scanned. A developer property CRM should hand over by machine: unit, area, share, buyer, deed date, cellar, parking, the email from the reservation. If it hands over a PDF, someone will type it and mistype a share. A mistyped share in year zero stays for a decade because nobody returns to the deed until there is a roof loan. A developer-to-community bridge is cheaper at handover than after three years of a hand-built file.
Commercial units, short-term lets, parking — three exceptions that break a lump sum
An estate of owner-occupied flats can be settled on a share key and one waste rate. An estate with a service ground floor, Airbnb in three units and a hall in which half the spaces belong to another community cannot. A food unit generates different waste, a different cleaning frequency of the passage and different noise. Short-term letting raises the use of common parts and the number of strangers in the lift. Parking has its own land register or its own rules. A program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej that only knows “flat × rate” will wrong some owners and over-subsidise others until someone brings an expert opinion to the meeting. The system must allow a separate key, a separate plan line and — if you resolve it — a separate advance. The draft amendment wants a statutory basis for raising an advance when the use generates cost. Today you can still resolve that if you can show the cost. The software needs a place for that calculation, not “we will add it by hand for Mr Kowalski”.
Community bookkeeping is not limited-company bookkeeping
A community keeps the off-book record of common-property management costs that the Act and accounting practice put on it — not full commercial books “because they look nicer in Power BI”. Some communities and most offices still keep a fuller record because the bank, a loan and the meeting require it. Software must distinguish: advance income is not company revenue in the sense of a unit owner; the fund is not profit; a refund of an overpayment is not a marketing cost. Integration with the accountancy office: an export of documents, not “the accountant will retype 200 notes”. If the office already sits in Weles3 or Mieszczanin, we do not rip out that engine to have “our GL module”. We add what the office will not give the owner at 22:00.
Communication: a Facebook group is not a notice system
An estate group is a neighbour channel. It is not service. It is not proof that an owner received a draft resolution. It is not a numbered fault report. Software sends a notice by email / SMS / (when there is a basis and an address) e-Deliveries, and keeps the text and the time. The board in the lobby stays — not everyone wants an account. The portal does not cancel the duty to notify in the form the Act and your rules require. It adds a channel people actually read. A communication regulation (what goes by SMS, what by email, what by letter) is a resolution or a contract, not a default from a vendor in California.
Security: passwords, 2FA, backup, not “we have SSL”
A manager panel sees every community the office runs. A leak of that panel is a leak of hundreds of files. 2FA for office roles is mandatory in our deployments. Password rules without a circus of symbols, a block on leaked passwords, sessions that die, a log of who exported the owner list. Backup with retention and a restore test, not “the cloud takes pictures by itself”. A test environment with anonymised data. An incident path, not “we will post on the company Facebook”. The same Git repository we hand over is the one the server boots from. Not FTP on a Friday after the meeting.
What to take from this text
A community is created by Article 6 of the 1994 Act, not by a signup form. Small and large split from 1 January 2020 at three units (Article 19). GUS at the end of 2024 counts almost 16.0 million dwellings, including 10.8 million in cities — and does not publish one official total of “all communities”. A program dla wspólnoty mieszkaniowej must carry a share file, zaliczki na utrzymanie nieruchomości, rozliczanie mediów wspólnota, a register of uchwały właścicieli lokali and a portal dla mieszkańców. Mature SaaS exists: Weles3, e-Majordom, eMieszkaniec, Mieszczanin. A custom layer pays when process, brand or integrations do not fit a template. KSeF and e-Deliveries concern invoices and KRS companies, not every staircase chair. The 2026 amendment on balconies, meters and advances is a draft in progress. GESOFT will build the tool. It will not replace a zarządca nieruchomości or the meeting. Write how many units you have and what you use today to count balances.
Frequently asked questions
- Does housing-community software replace a property manager?
- No. An app is not a professional licence, is not the board and does not sign the report. GESOFT builds a portal, work orders, a resolution register and integrations. The community constitution and the duties of the board or the manager stay with people and the 1994 Act.
- How does a small community differ from a large one in the software?
- From 1 January 2020 Article 19: up to three units — Civil Code co-ownership; from four — the full Act, a board, resolutions, a meeting. A small community often needs an account, utilities and scans. A large one needs a plan, a resolution register and usually a portal.
- How many housing communities are there in Poland?
- We do not quote one nationwide figure because GUS does not publish a single census of “all communities”. GUS publishes the dwelling stock (end-2024: almost 16.0 million, 10.8 million in cities). A community arises by Article 6 when unit ownership is separated.
- Must I leave Weles3, e-Majordom, eMieszkaniec or Mieszczanin?
- No. Often we leave postings in the trade SaaS and add a portal, voting or work orders. A custom engine pays when the regulation, the brand, many properties, or a requirement that code and data stay with you, do not fit the licence.
- Is the 2026 amendment on balconies and meters already in force?
- Not as generally binding law on the date of this text. It is draft UD312 (balconies, meters, utility advances, e-circulation), described among others by Infor.pl, still in government work. Software can have fields ready. We do not hard-code an unenacted rule.
- Must a community issue invoices in KSeF?
- KSeF applies to structured invoices on the ministry timetable (1 February 2026 for large taxpayers, 1 April 2026 for the rest). An advance note to an owner is not always a VAT invoice. An invoice for a lease of a common part or a management service — usually yes. The document and the accountant decide, not a portal button.
- Must a community have e-Deliveries?
- The ADE duty covers among others entities in the KRS register of entrepreneurs (management companies: from 1 April 2025 if entered before 2025). The community itself is not a KRS company. A chair who is a natural person is not automatically a firm with e-Deliveries. A management company is.
- Can the resident portal be the only notice of a meeting?
- You must not assume that. The Act and your rules set the form of notice. The portal is a channel people read and a place for documents. It does not cancel a letter / personal service / another form that binding law requires until a provision or an effective resolution says otherwise.
- How long does implementation take?
- One community with a clean file and one utility: weeks. An office with many properties and three old databases: months. Migration and the first parallel posting are a stage, not “we will pull it in at the end”. A meeting date is not promised against the quality of shares in Excel.
- Does GESOFT sell a ready subscription for every community in Poland?
- No. We do not build a marketplace of all communities. We build a system for your property or a manager office: portal, work orders, voting, a bridge to bookkeeping. If a packaged SaaS is enough, we will say so on a call instead of selling custom for sport.
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