Bypassing board voting on a VARIABLE contract
Back to index This is an escape hatch. It removes a guardrail. Read the whole article before you use it. The problem it solves Your board escalation floor is $2,500. Any expense at or above that goes...
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This is an escape hatch. It removes a guardrail. Read the whole article before you use it.
The problem it solves
Your board escalation floor is $2,500. Any expense at or above that goes to the board for a vote.
Your building's hydro bill runs $2,200 most months. In January and February it runs $3,100.
So twice a year, the board gets asked to vote on the electricity bill. They cannot say no to it. Nobody can say no to it. It is the electricity bill. The vote is theatre, it delays a payment that has to be made, and after a couple of rounds of it, people start ignoring board notifications, which is a real cost.
The board-voting bypass exists for exactly this situation.
What it does
When a VARIABLE contract has Bypass board voting turned on, its occurrences post without a board vote, even above the board threshold.
They still run the staff approval chain when the chain applies. What is removed is the board escalation step.
What it does NOT do
- It does not apply to FIXED contracts. At all. The toggle does not appear on a FIXED contract, and if a FIXED contract somehow carried the setting, the system would still route it to the board. A committed price above the board floor gets a board vote, full stop. There is no way around that.
- It does not apply retroactively.
- It is not silent. Every enable and every use is recorded.
- It does not skip the staff approval chain. It skips the board step only.
Turning it on
- Open the contract editor (the Scheduled tab, then Edit on the row).
- Set the Contract type to VARIABLE. The toggle only exists on VARIABLE contracts.
- Turn on Bypass board voting.
The toggle's description tells you the deal:
Post occurrences without a board vote even above the board threshold. Every use is written to the audit log.
The moment you turn it on, a warning panel appears:
No board guardrail while bypass is on
Every future instance of this VARIABLE contract will skip the board vote and go straight to staff approval. This is an intentional escape hatch, not a default. The toggle itself, and every instance it affects, is written to the audit log.
The footer caption reads: "Bypass board voting is off by default; every enable is audited."
And the save button changes to Save Amendment, because turning the bypass on is a consequential change to how this contract is governed, and it re-arms approval.
- Press Save Amendment. The contract goes back through the approval chain, so somebody signs off on the loosening itself.
When it is appropriate
Use it when all of these are true:
- The expense is genuinely variable (the amount is not something you control or agreed to in advance).
- The expense is genuinely non-discretionary (utilities, statutory charges, metered consumption). The board could not decline it even if they wanted to.
- The board has been told, and preferably has approved the arrangement itself. The board deciding "we do not need to vote on the hydro bill" is a legitimate board decision. You quietly deciding it on their behalf is not.
When it is not appropriate
Do not use it because:
- The board is slow.
- You want to get a payment out the door.
- The vendor is chasing you.
- "It is basically always approved anyway."
Those are all real pressures, and they are all exactly how a governance control gets quietly disabled and then forgotten about for three years. If the board is a bottleneck, the answer is a conversation with the board about the threshold, not an escape hatch on one contract.
Alternatives to consider first
| Situation | Better tool |
|---|---|
| The board already approved this specific thing once | Tag the expense to that board decision. This skips only the escalation for this expense, and names the decision that authorized it. |
| The board threshold is set too low for this property | Change the threshold. That is a property-level decision the board can make once, transparently. |
| It is a one-time large expense | Just let it go to the board. That is what the board is for. |
The bypass is for the recurring, non-discretionary, genuinely-variable bill. Nothing else.
Every use is audited. Genuinely.
This is not a comforting figure of speech.
Turning the bypass on writes a record. Who turned it on, on which contract, and when. Exactly one record, every time.
Every occurrence that actually used the bypass to skip a board vote writes a record. Not one record for the whole contract. One for each occurrence that skipped a vote it would otherwise have had.
That means you can ask the system, at any point: "how many board votes has this contract skipped, and for how much?" and get a real answer. That is the price of having the escape hatch at all.
Note the precision here. The record is written only when the bypass actually did something. An occurrence below the board floor would not have gone to the board anyway, so no bypass record is written for it. The count is honest: it reflects votes genuinely skipped, not just occurrences that happened to exist on a bypassed contract.
Turning it off
Turn the toggle off and save. That is it. The board guardrail is back on and the next at-or-above-floor occurrence routes to the board normally.
Flipping the contract type from VARIABLE to FIXED also clears the bypass automatically, in the same save, because a FIXED contract can never carry one. The editor shows you the toggle greyed out with the note:
Cleared on save: a FIXED contract can never bypass the board.
You do not have to remember to turn it off. The system will not let a FIXED contract keep it.
What the system records
Exactly one record when the bypass is enabled, naming you and the contract. Exactly one record every time an occurrence used the bypass to skip a board vote it would otherwise have had. Never zero, never duplicated. Turning the bypass on also re-arms the contract's approval, which is itself recorded with the reason.