Why Your CAM Numbers Don't Match Yardi (And What to Do About It)

1. Miscoded AP Invoices Pass Through Unchallenged

Yardi runs accurate math on whatever lives in the GL. That's the problem.

Non-recoverable expenses (marketing spend, leasing commissions, capital expenditures) coded to recoverable accounts get included in the CAM pool and billed to tenants automatically. Yardi's calculation modules have no way to know a CapEx invoice shouldn't be there. As PredictAP notes, "Calculation modules will process miscoded AP data, making front-end GL accuracy paramount."

The discrepancy appears when you manually reconstruct the pool from source invoices and find items that have no basis in the lease's definition of operating expenses. Yardi shows a larger pool. Your manual total is smaller. Both are doing the math correctly; the inputs are different.

Fix: Run a GL scrub before executing reconciliation. Pull every invoice coded to a recoverable account and verify it against the lease's expense exclusion list. Anything that fails, including CapEx, leasing costs, and above-the-line management, must be recoded before the reconciliation runs.

2. Unapplied Cash Distorts the Pool

When tenant payments are received but not matched to a specific charge code or expense account, they sit in Yardi as unallocated balances. These unapplied cash amounts create floating variances in CAM pool totals that are difficult to trace without a dedicated reconciliation of the cash ledger.

The symptom is a CAM total that doesn't match the sum of recoverable expense invoices by an amount that looks like a partial payment. The root cause is that cash activity and expense activity are running on parallel tracks that haven't been reconciled against each other. NtrustInfotech's Yardi accounting guides flag unapplied cash as a recurring source of year-end variance for this exact reason.

Fix: Before year-end close, run a full unapplied cash report in Yardi and match every open balance to its corresponding charge. Any cash that can't be matched should be investigated before it contaminates the reconciliation.

3. Square Footage Is Frozen at Lease Execution

Yardi defaults to the square footage recorded when the lease was signed. If the building was re-measured due to a renovation, a space reconfiguration, or an update to measurement standards, the denominator Yardi uses for every pro-rata calculation is wrong until someone manually updates it.

This matters especially with BOMA 2024. The 2024 standard introduced changes to Non-Allocated Tenant Area definitions that affect how rentable area is calculated across multi-tenant floors. Buildings re-measured under BOMA 2024 may have different rentable SF values than what's recorded in Yardi for leases signed under prior standards. As Building Engines notes, the BOMA 2024 updates require landlords to revisit their measurement methodology and, where buildings have been re-measured, update the SF figures in their property management systems. See BOMA 2024 measurement changes for what changed and which lease structures are most affected.

Fix: Compare the SF in Yardi against the current BOMA-certified measurement for each tenant space. Any discrepancy requires a manual update to the lease record in Yardi before the pro-rata calculation is run.

4. Gross-Up Applied Globally Instead of to Variable Expenses Only

Yardi's out-of-box gross-up configuration may apply the multiplier to the full CAM expense pool. That's wrong.

Fixed expenses like property taxes, insurance premiums, contracted security, and other costs that don't change based on how many tenants occupy the building must be excluded from the gross-up base. As both Stross Law and Lowndes Law have documented in lease interpretation guidance, the gross-up adjustment is justified only for variable expenses, because only variable expenses would actually increase if the building were fully occupied.

The math is not complicated. A $50,000 property tax bill grossed up at 50% occupancy produces $100,000 in expense pool charges. That extra $50,000 is phantom: taxes don't double because the building fills up. Tenants who audit will identify this immediately. Professional CAM auditors check it first.

Fix: Separate your expense pool into fixed and variable categories before applying the gross-up. The multiplier applies only to the variable pool. Fixed expenses pass through at actual cost, regardless of occupancy.

5. Custom Cap Logic Requires Paid Configuration Work

Cumulative cap banks, compounding cap structures, and per-tenant cap schedules are not Yardi out-of-the-box functionality. G2 reviews of Yardi Commercial Management consistently note that "executing custom lease caveats requires extensive, costly support." This is a known limitation of the platform, not a bug.

The problem is that teams who don't know this assume Yardi is doing cap math it hasn't been configured to do. The system processes the expense pool and produces a number. That number doesn't reflect the cap. The discrepancy between what Yardi bills and what the lease allows can compound for years before an audit surfaces it.

This is the same category of issue that produces CAM reconciliation errors in portfolios where lease complexity outpaces system configuration: the billing engine doesn't fail, it just calculates something different from what the lease requires.

Fix: For every tenant with a cap clause, verify that the cap logic in Yardi matches what the lease requires. If the lease has cumulative banking, compounding, or per-tenant structures, confirm with your Yardi implementation team whether those features have been configured and tested. If they haven't, the cap is not being applied.

How CAMAudit Solves This

CAMAudit sits adjacent to Yardi. You export the GL data as a CSV, the same export you already produce for year-end close, and CAMAudit runs the reconciliation independently, outside Yardi's calculation engine.

The independent calculation catches the errors Yardi can't catch itself. For gross-up errors, CAMAudit applies the multiplier only to variable expenses and flags any fixed costs that appear in the gross-up base. For cap violations, cumulative banks, compounding structures, and per-tenant caps are calculated from lease terms, not from Yardi's configuration. For pro-rata discrepancies, the denominator is verified against current building SF, not the SF frozen at lease execution.

The output is a full calculation trace that shows exactly where CAMAudit's numbers diverge from Yardi's output, line by line, with the lease clause that governs each calculation.

For instructions on exporting your GL data from Yardi in the format CAMAudit expects, see the Yardi export guide. For a direct comparison of what CAMAudit does versus what Yardi's native reconciliation tools produce, see CAMAudit vs. Yardi.