How to Audit CAM Charges Against Your Commercial Lease
A practical CAM reconciliation workflow: collect the lease and recap, extract caps and exclusions, compare billed lines, and dispute with page-level evidence.
2026-08-17 · 9 min read
Start with the controlling documents, not the recap total
Pay the statement first and you lose leverage. The workflow that holds is: identify the lease plus every amendment that touches CAM, then open the billed CAM / opex recap for the same period. If those two piles never meet, you are not auditing — you are paying.
A desk workflow that actually finishes
Use this sequence on every asset, every year:
- Collect the base lease and CAM-related amendments
- Collect the CAM / operating expense statement (and prior year if the cap is cumulative)
- Extract caps, exclusions, base year, gross-up, and pro-rata share
- Map billed buckets to allowed categories
- Flag mismatches with the clause, the arithmetic, and the page
- Controller reviews; humans send the dispute or pay
Where Excel dies
Re-typing cap language from a scan is how errors start. Pro-rata formulas drift from the lease. Finance asks “where does it say that?” and the workbook has no page cite. A specialized tool extracts facts and keeps findings deterministic so the same lease + same recap produce the same finding class.
What “done” looks like
Done is not a highlighted PDF. Done is a finding packet: billed line, rule that fired, math, clause text, page. That is what a landlord (or counsel) can answer. Abstraction software will not produce it. Neither will a generic CRE chatbot.
Run it in Jorora
Lease Audit AI takes the lease and the CAM statement, extracts contractual facts, and runs the audit engine. Same credits as Freight. See a Freight sample decision first, or open the Real Estate desk with two free credits.
Audit the next CAM recap before you pay
Caps, exclusions, and pro-rata against billed lines — not a chatbot paraphrase. Two free credits on signup — you can run tools before verifying email.
