Florida Annual Financial Report: Which Level Your Board Owes

By Carlos Castellano · Current as of August 20, 2026

An association’s fiscal year produces two documents, and boards routinely treat them as one. The budget is the plan for the year ahead. The annual financial report is the account of the year behind. The report has its own deadline, its own delivery rules, and a level of detail that your association’s revenue decides, not the board. Getting that level wrong is the common failure, and it is an easy one to make: the summaries a director finds first disagree with each other about where the thresholds sit. Here is what the two Florida chapters actually require.

The budget is the plan. The report is the account.

These are separate statutory duties with separate deadlines, and they land on the board at opposite ends of the year. The budget is adopted before the fiscal year starts and sets what owners will pay. The financial report is prepared after the fiscal year ends and tells them what happened to the money. Two different documents, two different audiences reading for two different reasons, and no amount of care with one satisfies the other. If the budget side is what you came for, that is covered separately in adopting the annual budget.

The report is also the duty behind one of the four subjects Florida requires in HOA director education. Section 720.3033(1)(a) names “financial literacy and transparency” as required course content, and this is the transparency half of it: not how the numbers are produced, which is the accountant’s job, but what the board owes its members and when.

Two deadlines, not one

Both chapters open with the same sentence structure, and both hide a second clock inside it. Under Section 720.303(7) for an HOA and Section 718.111(13) for a condominium, within 90 days after the end of the fiscal year, or annually on the date provided in the bylaws, the association must prepare and complete the report, or contract with a third party for its preparation and completion.

That is the preparation deadline. Delivery is separate, and it runs on whichever of two limits arrives first. The association must get the report to owners “within 21 days after the final financial report is completed by the association or received from the third party, but not later than” an outside date measured from the fiscal year end. The outside date is where the chapters split:

• HOA: 120 days after the end of the fiscal year, or the other date provided in the bylaws.
• Condominium: 180 days after the end of the fiscal year, or the other date provided in the bylaws.

The 21-day clock is the one boards miss, and it bites the diligent ones hardest. Finishing the report early does not buy you the calendar. A condominium whose accountant delivers in March has 21 days from that delivery, not until day 180. Put the date the report is completed or received in the minutes, because it is the date the delivery obligation is measured from.

Which level you owe is decided by revenue, not by preference

This is the part secondary summaries get wrong, and they get it wrong in both directions. The bands are identical in the two chapters, and they are these:

• Total annual revenues under $150,000: a report of cash receipts and expenditures.
• $150,000 or more but less than $300,000: compiled financial statements.
• At least $300,000 but less than $500,000: reviewed financial statements.
• $500,000 or more: audited financial statements.

So reviewed statements start at $300,000 and audited statements start at $500,000, in both chapters. A summary that puts the audit trigger at $300,000 has confused the two rungs. Above the smallest band, the statements must be prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and on the HOA side the statute names the Board of Accountancy as the body that adopts them.

There is one trigger that has nothing to do with money, and it exists on the HOA side only. Section 720.303(7)(a)4. requires an association with at least 1,000 parcels to prepare audited financial statements “notwithstanding the association’s total annual revenues.” A large community with modest assessments is in the audit tier on size alone. Chapter 718 has no counterpart, so no unit-count threshold puts a condominium into an audit.

What the smallest report has to disclose

A report of cash receipts and expenditures is the lightest level, but it is not a one-page summary. Both chapters require it to disclose receipts by account and receipt classification, and expenses by account and expense classification, and both then list categories that must appear where they apply: security, professional and management fees and expenses, taxes, recreation facilities, refuse collection and utility services, lawn care, building maintenance and repair, insurance, administration and salary expenses, and reserves.

The reserve line is worded slightly differently in each. The HOA statute says “reserves if maintained by the association.” The condominium statute reaches further, naming “reserves accumulated and expended for capital expenditures, deferred maintenance, and any other category for which the association maintains reserves.” A condominium therefore has to show what came out of reserves, not only what sits in them.

Getting it to the members, and the affidavit only condos have

Neither chapter makes you mail a full report to every owner. Both let you deliver a notice instead. What differs is the method, the wording, and the proof.

An HOA must provide each member with a copy of the annual financial report, or a written notice that a copy is available upon request at no charge to the member. Section 720.303(7) sends the copy itself out on the records timetable in subsection (5), which is 10 business days after the board or its designee receives a written request.

A condominium must deliver by United States mail or personal delivery, at the mailing address, property address, e-mail address, or facsimile number the owner provided to fulfill the association’s notice requirements. What it delivers is either a copy of the most recent financial report or a notice that a copy will be, as the owner requests, mailed, hand delivered, or electronically delivered via the Internet, without charge, within 5 business days after the association receives a written request.

Then comes the sentence with no HOA counterpart: “Evidence of compliance with this delivery requirement must be made by an affidavit executed by an officer or director of the association.” A condominium board that delivered the report but never executed the affidavit has not finished the job, and the affidavit is the only proof the statute names. It is the same instinct behind the condominium budget-notice affidavit, and the same officer usually signs both. Which officer, and what else lands on that desk, is covered in the board secretary’s duties.

There is a third delivery route that catches larger associations, and it is automatic rather than on request. An HOA with 100 or more parcels must post the financial report on its website or app under Section 720.303(4)(b)1.g., and a condominium of 25 or more units that contains no timeshare units must do the same under Section 718.111(12)(g), within 30 days after the association receives or creates the record. Those posting duties sit inside the wider records rules, which are covered in what to do when a member asks to see the records.

Moving up a level

A condominium board can simply decide to. Section 718.111(13)(c) lets an association prepare a higher level of reporting than it owes “without a meeting of or approval by the unit owners,” one rung or several: compiled, reviewed or audited statements in place of a cash-receipts report, reviewed or audited in place of compiled, audited in place of reviewed.

Chapter 720 contains no equivalent sentence. Its express route upward is owner-driven, and it comes with teeth for the board. Under Section 720.303(7)(c), if 20 percent of the parcel owners petition the board for a higher level of reporting, the association must duly notice and hold a meeting of members within 30 days of receiving the petition to vote on raising the level for that fiscal year. On approval of a majority of the total voting interests, three things follow at once: the association prepares the higher-level report, it must amend the budget or adopt a special assessment to pay for it, regardless of any provision to the contrary in the governing documents, and it must deliver within 90 days of the meeting or the end of the fiscal year, whichever occurs later.

Read that funding sentence twice. It is the answer to the most common board response to a successful petition, which is that there is no line in the budget for an audit. The statute anticipates that answer and removes it, and it overrides governing-document language that would say otherwise.

Moving down a level, and the rule that stops you doing it twice

Both chapters let members vote to accept less than the statutory level, and the thresholds are not close to each other.

• Condominium: a majority vote of all the voting interests of the association. The meeting and approval must occur before the end of the fiscal year, and the vote is effective only for the fiscal year in which it is taken.
• HOA: a majority of the voting interests present at a properly called meeting. Chapter 720 sets no before-year-end timing for that vote and does not say it lapses after one year.

The gap between those two standards is enormous. A 400-unit condominium needs 201 voting interests to approve a downgrade, which is a real turnout problem. In a 400-parcel HOA the same decision is a majority of whoever is properly assembled, so if 120 voting interests are present, 61 of them carry it. If your board is working from an article that describes one chapter, check which one before you count the vote.

One sentence appears in both, and it is the sentence boards forget: an association may not prepare a financial statement under the lower-of-level paragraph for consecutive fiscal years. The downgrade is a one-year measure. Take it two years running and the second year is out of compliance no matter how the vote went.

The reserve statement your budget decides

On the HOA side, a choice the board made in the budget shows up as required text on the report. Under Section 720.303(6)(c)1., if the budget does not provide for statutory reserve accounts and the association is responsible for capital improvements that may result in a special assessment, then each financial report for the preceding fiscal year must carry a statement in conspicuous type saying so and telling owners they may elect to fully fund reserves. Under Section 720.303(6)(c)2., a budget that funds deferred-expenditure accounts outside the statutory framework triggers a different conspicuous-type statement on the report, explaining that those funds are not subject to the statute’s restrictions and are not calculated under it. Both statements are quoted in full in the statute, and the wording is not optional.

On the condominium side the reserve disclosure sits in the report by a different mechanism. Section 718.111(13) directs the division to adopt uniform accounting rules that must include standards for presenting a summary of association reserves, with a good faith estimate of the annual amount that would be needed to fully fund each reserve item on the straight-line method. That disclosure does not apply to reserves funded by the pooling method. Which reserve regime you are in is a budget question, covered in adopting the annual budget, and the structural side of condominium reserves is in milestone inspections and SIRS.

What happens if the report does not go out

The condominium chapter writes out an escalation, and the penalty at the end of it is unusual. Under Section 718.111(13)(e), an owner who asked in writing and did not get the report within 5 business days may notify the division in writing. If the division determines the association failed, it notifies the association, which then has 5 business days to deliver the report to both the owner and the division. An association that fails to comply with the division’s request may not waive the financial reporting requirement for the fiscal year in which the request was made and the following fiscal year. In other words, ignoring one owner’s request costs the association two years of its ability to vote the level down.

Chapter 720 has no division escalation for this duty. What it has instead is the records track: the financial report is an official record under Section 720.303(4)(a)10.c., so a member’s written request runs on the 10-business-day deadline, and the ordinary records remedies apply, including the rebuttable presumption that attaches to a request sent by certified mail and minimum damages of $50 per day for up to 10 days. That route and its limits are covered in the records article.

What the statutes leave open

Three questions come up and the text answers none of them. The following is our reading of what is open, not legal advice, and capable lawyers land in different places. If one of these decides what your board files this year, get the association’s counsel to put a position in writing first.

• What counts as total annual revenues? Both chapters set the level on the association’s “total annual revenues” and neither defines the term or says which year is measured. An association near a band edge, or one that took in a large one-time special assessment, can reasonably ask whether that year’s receipts push it up a rung.
• May an HOA board raise its own level? The condominium statute expressly allows it without an owner vote. Chapter 720 simply does not address it, and its only stated route upward is the owner petition. Silence is not a prohibition, but it is also not permission, and the answer may turn on the governing documents.
• How long does an HOA downgrade vote last? The condominium provision says the vote must happen before the fiscal year ends and works for that year only. Chapter 720 says neither. All it says is that the lower level may not be used in consecutive fiscal years, which constrains the outcome without settling the timing.

Where this lands in the board’s year

A workable sequence, in the order the deadlines actually arrive. Confirm the fiscal year end and whether your bylaws set a different reporting date, because the statute defers to them. Measure total annual revenues for the year that closed, and on the HOA side count parcels, since 1,000 of them puts you in an audit regardless. Read off the level. Decide whether the board wants a different one, and if the answer is yes, hold the right vote at the right threshold, before year-end if you are a condominium. Engage the preparer in time to complete within 90 days. When the report is finished or arrives, write down that date and start the 21-day clock. Deliver by the method your chapter names, execute the affidavit if you are a condominium, post the report if you are over the posting threshold, and file it in the official records where it belongs.

None of that requires the board to understand the accounting. It requires the board to know which report it owes, when both clocks run out, and what proof it keeps. That is the compliance duty, and it stays with the directors even when the numbers are prepared by someone else.