How to Audit Your CAM Reconciliation, Step by Step
Each year your landlord sends a CAM reconciliation — a statement reconciling estimated charges with actual costs. Most tenants file it and pay. But a careful read against your lease is where overcharges turn up. Here's a practical process you can follow.
Before you start: mind the clock
Most leases give tenants a limited audit-rights window — often 60 to 180 days after the reconciliation is issued — to question charges and request the landlord's books. Miss it and you may waive your right to dispute that year. Check your lease for the deadline and calendar it the day the statement arrives.
Step 1 — Gather three documents
You need your lease and all amendments, the current-year CAM reconciliation statement, and the prior-year reconciliation. The prior year lets you spot line items that jumped unexpectedly.
Step 2 — Pull the rules out of your lease
Find the CAM / operating-expense section and note exactly what it says about:
- Which costs are included and which are excluded
- Any cap on controllable expenses and how it's calculated
- Limits on the management or administrative fee (often a % of CAM or gross revenues)
- How capital expenses are treated (excluded, or amortized over useful life)
- Your pro-rata share formula and the building's total square footage
- Any base year or expense stop
- The audit-rights window and process
Step 3 — Compare every line against the lease
Go down the reconciliation line by line and ask of each charge: does the lease actually allow this, and at this amount? Flag anything that looks like an excluded category, a fee above its cap, a one-time capital project billed in full, marketing or leasing costs, or expenses that should be reimbursed by insurance or another tenant.
Step 4 — Re-do the math
Recalculate your pro-rata share (your square footage ÷ total leasable square footage) and confirm the landlord used the right figures. Re-run any cap calculation on controllable expenses. Add up the categories and confirm the total matches. Simple arithmetic and stale square-footage numbers cause more overcharges than people expect.
Step 5 — Request backup, then dispute in writing
For anything questionable, send a written request for the supporting invoices and general ledger within your audit window. If the backup confirms an overcharge, dispute it in writing and cite the specific lease clause that the charge violates, along with the dollar amount. A specific, clause-cited letter gets a far better response than a vague complaint.
What makes this hard to do by hand
An honest audit means cross-referencing a dense, often-vague lease against a multi-page spreadsheet, knowing which clauses cap or exclude which costs, and doing the math — every year, for every location. That's exactly the work CAMcheck automates.
Let CAMcheck do the cross-referencing
Upload your lease and reconciliation. CAMcheck reads both, checks every charge against your lease terms, flags likely overcharges cited to the exact clause and line item, and drafts a dispute letter you can send today.
Start a free CAM check →