How to Read a Yardi CAM Reconciliation Statement
When your landlord sends you a CAM reconciliation, there's a good chance it came out of Yardi Voyager. Yardi is one of the two dominant platforms for institutional commercial real estate, with particularly strong market share in complex retail and mixed-use portfolios. If your building is owned by a REIT, an institutional fund, or a large private owner, your reconciliation is probably a Yardi report.
Yardi-generated reconciliations use specific column headers, account numbering conventions, and organizational structures that aren't intuitive if you don't know what to look for. This guide explains the terminology and what to check for errors.
Why Yardi's structure matters for tenants
Yardi Voyager processes CAM charges through a hierarchical ledger system. Expenses flow from a chart of accounts into Recovery Groups, then into Expense Pools, and ultimately into tenant charge calculations. Each step involves judgment calls by the landlord's accounting team — and each step is a place where an error can enter.
The key point: a Yardi-generated CAM reconciliation is a filtered extract of the property's general ledger. The filters determine what ends up in your bill. If those filters are misconfigured — or if an accountant coded expenses to the wrong account — the output will be incorrect, and the statement will look mathematically clean even though it contains billing errors.
Tango Analytics found that 40% of CAM reconciliations contain material errors across U.S. retail centers (cited by PredictAP, February 2026). Yardi's flexibility in account coding is one reason that number is as high as it is.
Key Yardi terminology
Recovery Groups and Expense Pools
Yardi organizes recoverable expenses in a two-tier structure. Recovery Groups are the top-level category — for example, "General/Opex," "Statutory/Taxes," or "Usage/Utilities." Within each Recovery Group are Expense Pools, which tie to specific General Ledger accounts.
For tenants, this means:
- Each line item on your reconciliation belongs to an Expense Pool
- Each Expense Pool feeds from one or more GL account codes
- The Recovery Group determines how expenses in that pool are recovered
If your lease excludes certain expense categories — say, "above-property management fees" or "capital expenditures" — those categories should not appear in any Expense Pool that feeds your bill. Verifying this requires the property-level GL export, not just the reconciliation summary.
The 7000-series account codes
Yardi enforces a numeric chart of accounts structure. The relevant series for CAM audits:
- 6000 series: Income accounts (base rent, CAM collections, etc.)
- 7000 series: Operating expenses — this is the recoverable expense pool for CAM purposes
- 8000/9000 series: Capital expenditures, debt service, owner-level non-recoverable expenses
The 7000 series is where all CAM expenses are supposed to live. Common 7000-series codes include accounts for maintenance, landscaping, janitorial, management fees, and utilities.
Here's the critical audit check: if you see any 8000-series or 9000-series account codes appearing in your Expense Pool report, that's a direct signal of capital pass-through. A roof replacement, elevator overhaul, or parking lot reconstruction is typically coded to an 8000-series capital account. When it appears in a 7000-series Expense Pool, it shouldn't be there — and you're paying for it anyway.
This is one of the most common Yardi-specific errors that professional CAM auditors find. The Yardi Core Setup Guide explicitly identifies the 7000 series as operating expenses; anything outside that series should trigger a question.
The Percent column
In Yardi's Property Setup, each tenant's share of a Recovery Group is controlled by a column called Percent. This column dictates the proportion of total payable transactions allocated to your space.
The Yardi Core Setup Guide specifically notes: "Each number in this column is a proportion of the total... If the numbers add up to something other than 100, the entries are proportions rather than strict percentages."
This matters because:
- If your building added tenants or square footage and the landlord didn't update the Percent column, your allocation percentage may be stale
- If proportions don't sum to 100%, the math is allocating more or less than 100% of costs — meaning someone is over- or under-billed
- The Percent column must match the pro-rata share formula in your lease
Cross-reference the Percent column against your lease's definition of your pro-rata share. If the numbers don't match, you're starting from a miscalculated denominator.
Charge Date column
In standard Yardi charge reports, the Charge Date column shows when each expense was charged. Charges default to showing newest first. This matters for audit purposes: some landlords include expenses from the prior year or from periods outside the reconciliation window.
If you see Charge Dates falling outside the calendar year being reconciled, those are potentially improper charges. Expenses must be incurred during the reconciliation period to be billed in that period's reconciliation — carrying forward prior-year expenses or pulling in future-year charges is a common timing error.
Bank Reconciliation Exceptions Report
Yardi provides a Bank Reconciliation Exceptions Report that flags non-correlating dates between "post month" and "transaction month." Landlords use this internally to clean up the general ledger before finalizing CAM calculations.
Tenants can request this report as part of an audit to identify whether the landlord resolved all exceptions before finalizing your bill. An unresolved exception — a transaction posted in the wrong period — can inflate the CAM pool for the year you're being billed for.
How to review a Yardi reconciliation
Step 1: Get the GL export. The summary reconciliation is a subset of the full general ledger. Request the property-level GL export for all accounts in the 7000 series that were included in your CAM pool for the year being reconciled. Also request any 8000-series account activity to verify no capital accounts fed into your pool.
Step 2: Check account codes. Scan the GL export for any non-7000-series codes. If you find 8000-series accounts, identify what those expenses represent. If they're capital improvements (replacement, installation, renovation), they shouldn't be in your bill.
Step 3: Verify the Percent column matches your lease. Find the pro-rata share percentage shown in your reconciliation. Calculate your own: your square footage divided by total leasable area as defined in your lease. If the Yardi Percent column uses a different number, the allocation is wrong.
Step 4: Check Charge Dates. Verify that all Charge Dates fall within the calendar year being reconciled. Expenses dated outside the reconciliation period should be questioned.
Step 5: Cross-reference against lease exclusions. For each Expense Pool and its underlying accounts, verify that the category is permitted under your lease's CAM definition. Management fee accounts, administrative overhead accounts, and capital account codes are the highest-risk categories.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Yardi Voyager used for in commercial real estate?
Yardi Voyager is an enterprise property management platform used primarily by institutional owners of commercial, retail, and mixed-use properties to manage lease administration, accounting, and expense recovery. It processes CAM charges, generates tenant invoices, and produces the reconciliation reports that landlords send to tenants annually. It holds an estimated 8–10% of the enterprise commercial real estate software market.
What does the 7000 series mean in a Yardi reconciliation?
In Yardi's standard chart of accounts, the 7000 series represents operating expenses. These are the expenses that are supposed to feed into the CAM pool and be passed through to tenants under NNN leases. If you see account codes outside the 7000 series — particularly 8000-series capital accounts — appearing in your reconciliation's expense pool, that's a signal of improper capital pass-through.
How do I know if my pro-rata share is correct in a Yardi statement?
The Percent column in Yardi's Property Setup controls your allocation. Verify this column matches the pro-rata share calculation in your lease: your square footage divided by total leasable area as the lease defines it. If they differ, either the Yardi setup was never updated after a lease amendment, or the denominator used is different from what your lease specifies.
Can I request Yardi backup documentation for a CAM reconciliation?
Yes. You can request the underlying GL export that feeds your reconciliation, including the full chart of accounts report showing which accounts were included in each Expense Pool. Most audit rights clauses give tenants the right to inspect underlying accounting records. If the landlord uses Yardi, the GL export is the primary backup document.
What should I look for in a Yardi Charge Date column?
Verify that all transaction dates fall within the calendar year being reconciled. Expenses charged outside the reconciliation period — either from the prior year or carrying into the next year — should be questioned. Yardi's system records both a "post month" and a "transaction month," and the Bank Reconciliation Exceptions Report flags discrepancies between them.
For a general guide to reading any CAM reconciliation, see how to read a CAM reconciliation statement. For the MRI equivalent, see how to read an MRI CAM reconciliation. For context on how NNN leases work, read the NNN Lease Tenant Guide.
Think your Yardi reconciliation has errors? Run a free CAM scan to check.