Settlement

Conveyancing matters (sale and purchase) have a Settlement tab in the matter workspace. This is where settlement figures come together: you enter the price and the amounts from the council, water and strata certificates, and Certum computes the adjustments and the balance due on settlement — live, as you type. No separate spreadsheet, no hand pro-rata.

The layout is two panes: the figures you enter on the left, and the live ledger on the right showing exactly where the money lands.

Transaction basics

The Transaction Basics card at the top of the left pane holds the figures everything else hangs off:

• Sale price / Purchase price and Deposit
• Settlement date and Exchange date (the exchange date fixes the foreign-resident withholding rate and threshold)
• A “Contract makes land tax adjustable (cl 14.4.2)” switch — turn it on and the land-tax fields appear

Only the fields relevant to the matter show. Strata fields appear on strata matters; land tax appears only when the contract makes it adjustable.

Entering the adjustments

Below the basics are the adjustment blocks — council rates, water charges, and strata levies (administrative fund, sinking fund, special levies) where applicable. The fields are written to match the certificates you’re reading from: the s603 council rates certificate, the Sydney Water statement or s66 certificate, and the strata records.

Each adjustment has three parts:

• The amount — type the figure from the certificate. For council rates, enter the gross annual levy (including waste and stormwater charges, before any pensioner rebate).
• The period — the start and end dates the amount covers.
• A “paid?” selector — Paid, Unpaid — to be paid at settlement, or Not adjusted (agreed). This drives the direction of the adjustment: an unpaid charge is allowed to the purchaser for the vendor’s share of the period; a mixed strata levy (admin paid, sinking fund unpaid) nets the two directions correctly.

Two one-click fills save typing:

• Use rating year (1 Jul – 30 Jun) fills the council rating period from the settlement date.
• Use $x.xx seeds the current Sydney Water usage price from the built-in price table.

Tip

You can always type over a filled value — the one-click fills are starting points, and what you type always wins.

The live ledger

The right pane is the ledger, and it recomputes with every keystroke. Each adjustment shows as a plain-English line — what it is, the period, and which side it’s allowed to — in Vendor and Purchaser columns, with vendor disbursements (like a mortgage discharge fee) shown as vendor allowances rather than purchaser deductions.

At the bottom sits the balance due on settlement, formatted with thousands separators ($661,418.90, not $661418.90). Below that, disbursements and withholding, and default interest where it applies, are itemised so the headline figure can always be traced back to its parts.

If a computed figure needs to be different from what the certificates produce — an agreed amount, a correction — click the figure in the ledger to override it with a reason. Overridden figures are marked, and if the underlying details change afterwards, a drift marker flags the figure for a re-check.

Note

Weekend and public-holiday settlement dates carry forward automatically: a settlement date that lands on a weekend or a NSW public holiday moves to the next business day. If the holiday table doesn’t reach the year you’re settling in, Certum says so rather than guessing.

Destination funds

The Destination Funds card is for the settlement letter’s distribution: add rows for the PEXA fee, mortgage discharge payout, creditor payouts and your costs, and the client residual (the balance less the rows) is computed automatically. If the rows ever exceed the balance, the card warns you rather than producing a negative residual.

Generating settlement documents

Two buttons generate the standard document sets straight from the workspace:

• Pre-settlement set — cover letter, final invoice and settlement figures
• Post-settlement set — final statement and final letter to client

They render from the same figures the ledger shows.

Caution

Watch for an amber “needs review” marker on the document-completion screen reading “Settlement figures may be out of date — automatic recalculation failed; verify the adjustment amounts.” It means the document rendered with figures that couldn’t be freshly recalculated, so they may be stale. The document still generates — the marker never blocks — but check the adjustment amounts by hand before anything goes out.

Exporting an adjustment statement

The Export adjustment statement menu produces a standalone NSW settlement statement in By/To adjustment format, written straight into the matter’s Working Documents folder and revealed in Finder like any generated document. Four outputs:

• Practitioner statement (PDF) — the working statement for the file and the other side
• Client letter (PDF) — the same figures explained for the client
• Detailed breakdown (PDF) — every line with its workings
• Line items (CSV) — the adjustment lines as a spreadsheet, for the accounting file

Related

• Generating Documents — the full document-generation flow
• Editing Matter Details — the matter workspace
• Reference Tools — the date calculator, useful for settlement date arithmetic