The AMC you pay for and cannot prove happened
Most societies approve quarterly maintenance invoices against the existence of a contract rather than against delivery of the work. Two small changes close the gap.
Most societies pay quarterly AMC invoices for lifts, fire systems, DG sets and pumps, and cannot demonstrate that the visits those invoices cover actually took place.
The contract is being paid for. Whether it is being delivered is genuinely unknown, and that is true across the majority of the maintenance spend in most properties.
How the gap opens
The vendor attends, or does not. A service report may be left with a guard, or may not. It goes into a file nobody opens. The invoice arrives at quarter end, somebody approves it because the contract exists, and the cycle repeats.
Nobody is behaving badly here. There is simply no mechanism that connects the invoice to the work, so the invoice is approved against the contract rather than against delivery.
The second failure: nobody owns the dates
The related problem is that contracts outlive the committees that signed them. The lift AMC was agreed two terms ago, the document is in a cupboard, and the renewal date exists only inside it.
So the standard discovery mechanism becomes a breakdown. A lift stops, the vendor attends, and mentions while quoting for the repair that the contract expired four months ago. The society is now negotiating from the weakest position available — under time pressure, with no alternative quotes, and with a repair charged outside contract.
Two changes, both small
Put every contract in one register with its period, scope, included visit frequency and renewal date, and alert sixty days out rather than on the day. Sixty days is enough to get comparative quotes; the morning a lift stops is not.
Then require completion evidence for each visit — a checklist completed at the asset with readings and a photograph. It takes the technician two minutes and it converts a quarterly invoice from an act of faith into something you can check before approving.
The return usually shows up at the first renewal after you start, either as a better rate or as a vendor change that was overdue and, until then, unarguable.