Extract Australian Statement of Adjustments and PEXA FSS

An Australian property settlement runs on two settlement-day documents. The Statement of Adjustments (SoA) is prepared by the vendor's conveyancer to pro-rate the property's periodic outgoings — council rates, water availability charges, owners corporation fees, and land tax where it applies — between vendor and purchaser as of the settlement date. The PEXA Financial Settlement Schedule (FSS) lists every source-of-funds and destination row for the transaction and must balance to zero before both parties' conveyancers can lock the PEXA workspace. If you need to extract Australian Statement of Adjustments and PEXA FSS rows into the matter file, the trust ledger, or a post-settlement tax record, those two documents and their underlying source certificates are the inputs.

The most consequential rule in current AU practice sits in Victoria. The Sale of Land Act 1962, as amended by the State Taxation Acts and Other Acts Amendment Act 2023, prohibits the apportionment of land tax in residential contracts under an indexed threshold for any contract entered into on or after 1 January 2024. The threshold was $10 million in 2024 and is indexed annually, so confirm the current-year figure with the State Revenue Office of Victoria before relying on it on a live matter. Outside that prohibition, land tax adjustment rules differ materially state by state and are covered in detail further down.

Water charges carry the single most commonly mishandled distinction in an Australian SoA. The fixed availability, sewerage, and drainage component is adjusted, because both parties benefit from it for the period it covers. Consumption and usage charges are not adjusted, because they are user-pays for water actually drawn during the period the user lived in the property. Treating the whole water rates notice as one adjustable line is a recurring mistake on draft SoAs and a recurring point of correction from the purchaser's side.

The two-document framework sounds familiar to practitioners who handle settlements in adjacent jurisdictions, but the resemblance is shallow. The regulatory framework, the source documents, and the apportionment rules diverge enough that the workflow does not port across borders without rework. If you also handle UK or US conveyancing, the equivalent extraction patterns are covered separately for UK conveyancing completion statement extraction and US ALTA settlement statement and HUD-1 extraction; this article stays inside the Australian PEXA framework, the s32 vendor-statement provenance, the state-specific land tax rules, and the water-availability-versus-usage distinction that define how AU settlement adjustments actually work.

The Source Documents Behind Every Adjustment Line

The SoA is a derivative document. Every line on it traces back to a source certificate the firm collected as part of the contract, the s32 vendor statement in Victoria, or the pre-settlement search bundle. Those source certificates are themselves invoice-style line-item documents, with periods, charges, and apportionment-relevant detail that the SoA reads from. When the apportionment is challenged on the other side, the conversation lands back on whichever certificate supplied the number, so the chain matters as much as the calculation.

Council rates. The rates notice issued by each Local Government Area is the source. Most LGAs run a 1 July to 30 June rates year and bill quarterly, so a single property may have one or two notices in the file depending on settlement date. The notice carries the annual amount, the period covered, the instalment plan (and any instalment already paid), and the payment-due dates. The SoA pro-rates by days from the start of the rates year to the settlement date. Where the property sits across two LGAs (rare but does happen on rural and rural-residential boundaries) two notices feed two adjustment lines. The same notices flow into the matter file for the firm and into the rental schedule for the year, which is why the council rates notices that feed the rates adjustment line are worth extracting once into structured rows rather than re-keying for each downstream use.

Water and sewerage. The source is the water rates notice from the relevant retailer for the property's location. NSW is dominated by Sydney Water (with Hunter Water and a handful of regional utilities outside metropolitan Sydney). Victoria uses Yarra Valley Water, South East Water, and City West Water across metropolitan Melbourne, with Barwon Water, Goulburn Valley Water, and other regional retailers outside. Queensland is split between the south-east distributor-retailers (Unitywater, Urban Utilities) and the councils that retail water directly (Logan, Gold Coast, and most regional councils). SA Water covers South Australia and Water Corporation covers Western Australia. The notice separates the fixed availability, sewerage, and drainage charges from consumption charges. The availability component is adjusted on a daily pro-rata basis; the consumption component is not, because it is user-pays for water actually drawn. A clean SoA reads two lines from one water notice, not one.

Land tax. Where the vendor is liable, the source is the land tax assessment or clearance certificate from the state revenue office for the relevant taxing year. The certificate confirms the vendor's liability, identifies the property by its lot and plan reference, and (in NSW) protects the purchaser from inheriting historical liability. The detailed state-by-state apportionment rules — including the Victorian residential prohibition introduced in 2024 — sit in the next section, along with the multi-state extraction approach.

Owners corporation, body corporate, and strata. Two source documents feed the OC line. The first is the levy or fee notice that supplies the period and amount actually paid; the second is the disclosure certificate at contract date. In NSW that is the Section 184 strata information certificate; in Victoria the Section 151 OC certificate; in Queensland the Form 33 / BCCM disclosure statement. The disclosure certificate confirms that there are no special levies, capital-works contributions, or arrears that would shift the adjustment outside the standard quarterly or half-yearly fee. The owners corporation fee adjustment at settlement is straightforward where the disclosure is clean, and considerably less so where a special levy has been struck close to settlement. The Victorian owners corporation fee notices for the OC adjustment and the NSW strata levy notices that drive the strata adjustment are both extractable into structured rows that match the SoA's expected fields.

The contract of sale schedule. The standard contract for each state carries the adjustment clause that governs which items are adjusted, from which date, and on what basis. NSW uses the standard contract for the sale and purchase of land. Victoria uses the contract of sale paired with the s32 vendor statement, which doubles as the source-document baseline for the property's outgoings. Queensland uses the REIQ contract, with the standard adjustment clause sitting in the schedule. Western Australia and South Australia each have their own equivalents. The clause is what makes the pro-rata council rates calculation in a settlement spreadsheet consistent across matters in the same state — and what makes it diverge across state lines.

The substantive point is that the SoA is only ever as reliable as the source-certificate chain underneath it. A clean line on the SoA points back to a specific certificate, a specific period, and a specific charge breakdown. A line that does not point back cleanly is the line that ends up in dispute on settlement day.

State-by-State Apportionment: NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA

There is no single national rule for any of the major adjustment categories. The contract framework, the revenue authority's published position, and recent legislative changes all vary by state, and at least one of them — Victoria's 2024 land tax prohibition — has shifted recent practice materially. A multi-state firm working settlement adjustments needs to read the land tax apportionment rules for NSW, VIC, and QLD side by side rather than from five separate single-state notes.

The five states below cover the bulk of AU settlement volume. The Northern Territory and the ACT carry their own variations and are best handled by reference to the relevant territorial revenue authority and contract framework.

New South Wales

NSW follows the standard Australian pattern on water rates: availability adjusted, usage not adjusted. Council rates are adjusted on a daily pro-rata basis from the start of the rates year. OC and strata fees are adjusted to the end of the period the vendor has paid for. Land tax is adjusted on a daily pro-rata basis where the vendor is liable, governed by the standard contract for the sale and purchase of land and the clearance-certificate framework under the Land Tax Management Act 1956.

The clearance certificate is the key document on the purchaser side. According to Revenue NSW guidance on the Section 47 land tax clearance certificate, in NSW a clearance certificate issued under section 47 of the Land Tax Management Act 1956 protects a buyer from becoming responsible for the unpaid land tax of the seller, and the seller must provide the buyer with a current certificate at least 14 days before settlement. The certificate is what the SoA reads from when the vendor's land tax liability is set, and what the FSS relies on when the cleared figure flows into a destination row.

Victoria

Water and council rates follow the standard availability-adjusted, usage-not-adjusted pattern. OC fees are adjusted from the s32 / Section 151 baseline — the s32 vendor statement is the source-document anchor for Victorian adjustment items, with the s151 OC certificate confirming the position at contract date.

Land tax is the consequential change. Sections 10G and 10I of the Sale of Land Act 1962, introduced by the State Taxation Acts and Other Acts Amendment Act 2023, prohibit the apportionment of land tax in residential contracts of sale under an indexed threshold for any contract entered into on or after 1 January 2024. The threshold was set at $10 million in 2024 and is indexed annually. Verify the current-year figure with the State Revenue Office of Victoria before relying on the prohibition or the threshold on a live matter; the indexation moves and the published rule is what governs practice. Above the threshold, and for non-residential contracts, the prior apportionment position continues. The effect on a Victorian residential SoA prepared today is that the land tax line that would once have appeared on the draft drops out entirely for the bulk of contracts — vendor liability remains the vendor's, and the purchaser does not contribute through the SoA.

Queensland

Council rates and water charges are adjusted on the standard pattern. Body corporate fees are adjusted to the end of the period the vendor has paid for. Land tax under the standard REIQ contract has historically been adjusted to the vendor where the vendor was liable for the year, but the position has shifted following recent Queensland Revenue Office guidance — confirm the treatment against the current REIQ contract clause and the published QRO ruling for the contract date before relying on prior practice.

Western Australia

WA conveyancing differs in one structural respect: settlement is conducted by licensed settlement agents under the Settlement Agents Act 1981, a separately licensed profession distinct from solicitors. Solicitors can also handle settlements, but the volume runs through settlement agents. The adjustment categories are familiar — water and council rates adjusted, OC and strata fees adjusted, land tax adjusted where applicable — but the practitioner authority sitting on the file is set by the WA framework, with Landgate as the registry authority and the settlement-agent practice rules governing day-to-day workflow.

South Australia

Water and council rates adjusted on the standard pattern. OC and community corporation fees adjusted to the end of the paid period. Land tax adjusted where applicable, governed by RevenueSA. The standard SA contract carries the adjustment clause and the relevant disclosure obligations.

A multi-state firm working an SoA in any of the five states reads from the same row schema (covered in the next section) and the same source-certificate chain (covered in the previous one); the apportionment quirks are what change. Pulling the relevant land tax assessment or clearance certificate into the workflow is the same shape across states, and the Australian land tax assessments and clearance certificates extractor handles the multi-state set as one job rather than five.

The PEXA Financial Settlement Schedule as a Row Schema

PEXA's own help content treats the FSS as a print-and-sign artefact: prepare it, approve it, lock the workspace, settle. The document is more useful read as data. The FSS is two sets of rows that must net to zero, populated jointly by the vendor's and purchaser's conveyancers, and it is what the post-settlement bookkeeping pipeline reads from once the workspace closes. Reframing the PEXA FSS source-of-funds and destination rows as a structured row set rather than a printed statement is what makes the downstream mapping tractable.

Source-of-funds rows. These are the inflows. The purchaser's deposit already paid to the vendor's agent appears as one row. The purchaser's further funds paid into PEXA appear as another. The purchaser's loan drawdown from the incoming lender — the financed portion of the purchase price, sourced directly into PEXA from the lender's nominated account — is the third common row. A cash settlement collapses the financed row into additional further funds; an off-the-plan or developer settlement may add additional rows for adjustments funded outside the standard pattern.

Destination rows. These are the outflows. The vendor's mortgage payout to the discharging lender is typically the largest. The vendor's net proceeds is the closing residual after all other destinations are paid. Agent commission goes to the selling agency. Conveyancer fees go to the firm. Transfer duty (or stamp duty, depending on the state's terminology) is a destination row to the relevant revenue office. Registration fees go to the land registry. The settlement adjustments balance — the closing number from the SoA — flows as a destination row to whichever side is owed; a vendor-favourable adjustment flows to the vendor's net proceeds, a purchaser-favourable adjustment reduces the further funds the purchaser provides.

Balance to zero. The load-bearing rule is mechanical: total source-of-funds equals total destinations to the cent, and until that holds the workspace cannot lock. A miscalculated SoA shows up here, not earlier — the SoA's closing adjustment number flows into the FSS as one row, and if that number is wrong the whole schedule fails its balance check. Catching the error on settlement day, with both parties watching, is materially worse than catching it during preparation, which is part of why a clean source-certificate chain in the SoA matters.

The roles are split, and the split is enforced by the workspace. The vendor's conveyancer drafts the SoA and reads its adjustments into the FSS. The purchaser's conveyancer reviews the SoA and signs off on it. Both sides populate their own line items in the workspace — the vendor side enters the discharging mortgage payout and the net-proceeds destinations; the purchaser side enters the loan drawdown source-of-funds and the duty and registration-fee destinations. Both sides must approve the FSS before PEXA will lock the workspace. Neither side can lock unilaterally, and neither side sees a balanced schedule until the other has populated its rows.

The schema sits on top of a national framework rather than a platform-specific design choice. The Australian Registrars' National Electronic Conveyancing Council Model Operating Requirements and Model Participation Rules are what require the joint-approval, balance-to-zero, source-and-destination shape; PEXA implements that requirement, as do other ELNOs. The structure of the FSS is therefore stable across platform updates, and durable enough to design a structured-row schema against.

From Settlement-Day PDFs to Structured Rows

The SoA and the FSS exist as PDFs in the matter file. The downstream uses — the firm's matter ledger, the trust-account reconciliation, the year's rental schedule, the rolling CGT register — all want rows. Most firms bridge the gap by re-keying, sometimes twice or three times into different systems, which is where vendor-and-purchaser settlement adjustment extraction tends to lose its source-certificate chain. The shape below is the structured row set that holds together across those uses.

SoA row schema. One row per adjustment line on the SoA, with the following fields:

Adjustment category — council rates, water availability, OC fees, land tax, strata levy, rental adjustment.
Apportionment basis — daily pro-rata, monthly pro-rata, or straight allocation.
Period start.
Period end.
Total annual or periodic charge from the source certificate.
Daily rate.
Days vendor.
Days purchaser.
Vendor share.
Purchaser share.
Net adjustment direction — plus or minus to vendor.
Source certificate reference — file name and page in the matter file.
Notes — free-text for clause-specific treatment, special-levy carve-outs, or apportionment exceptions.

That schema lets a reviewer step from any adjustment number on the SoA back to the certificate it came from, see the days that drove the calculation, and verify the resulting share against the contract clause that governs the adjustment. It also extracts cleanly into Excel for the firm's settlement file, into CSV for import into a matter-management system, or into JSON for a downstream API consumer.

FSS row schema. One row per FSS line item, with the following fields:

Row type — source or destination.
Payer.
Payee.
Amount.
Reference — loan account number, discharging mortgage account, ATO duty receipt, registry payment reference.
Approving party — vendor side or purchaser side.
Balance check — computed field that confirms total source-of-funds equals total destinations across all rows.

The balance-check field is what makes the FSS extract self-validating. A correctly extracted FSS has the field equal to zero on the closing row; a non-zero value flags either a missing line item or an incorrectly captured amount.

The workflow. The PDFs go in — the SoA, the FSS, and the underlying source certificates the firm already gathered for the SoA preparation (council rates notices, water rates notices, land tax assessments or clearance certificates, OC fee notices, strata disclosure certificates, the s32 vendor statement in Victoria). Structured rows come out, with the source-certificate reference preserved on every SoA row so a reviewer can step back from any row to the original PDF and page. This is where the practical commercial answer lives: rather than re-keying or maintaining parallel spreadsheets, you can extract settlement adjustment lines straight from the source PDFs into the row schema above and feed the same row set into every downstream consumer.

In practice that means uploading the settlement pack — typically a dozen or so PDFs across the SoA, the FSS, and the source certificates — and writing one prompt that describes the row schema you want returned. Invoice Data Extraction handles batches of up to 6,000 documents and individual PDFs up to 5,000 pages, so a portfolio's worth of settlements runs as a single job. The output is Excel, CSV, or JSON, with line items preserved one-to-one with the source documents and a per-row reference back to the file and page each value was read from. The same prompt produces the same shape every time, which is what makes the row set durable across matters and across the matter ledger, the rental schedule, and the CGT register that read from it.

This sits at the document-extraction layer rather than at the platform-integration layer. There is no direct integration with PEXA, LEAP, GlobalX, InfoTrack, or ActionStep — the input is the PDFs that come out of those systems, and the output is structured rows that can be imported into whichever downstream system holds the firm's matter ledger or the client's tax record.

Mapping FSS Rows into the Year-1 Rental Schedule and the CGT Cost Base

Once settlement is locked, the SoA and FSS rows split into two downstream destinations. The apportioned outgoings on the SoA feed the Year-1 rental schedule for the days the purchaser owned the property in the relevant tax year. The acquisition-side rows on the FSS feed the CGT cost-base register, which sits in the file until the property is eventually disposed of — sometimes years, sometimes decades later. Getting the per-property settlement-day adjustments into the CGT cost base correctly at the time of settlement is materially cheaper than reconstructing the chain on disposal.

Mapping the SoA into the Year-1 rental schedule

Every adjustment line on the SoA points at a specific line on the Year-1 rental schedule for an investment property, with the days already calculated on the SoA itself.

Council rates. The portion the purchaser was reimbursed for (or paid the vendor for) maps onto the rental schedule's council rates line, for the days the purchaser owned the property in the rates year. The SoA's days-purchaser figure is what drives the rental-schedule entry.
OC and strata fees. The OC adjustment maps to the body corporate / strata fees line on the rental schedule, with the same days-purchaser allocation.
Water charges. The availability adjustment maps to the rates and charges line. Water usage — already not adjusted at settlement — is recorded against the purchaser's own period of ownership, read directly from any water bills issued after settlement rather than from the SoA.
Land tax. Where the adjustment survives state law (recall the Victorian residential prohibition under the indexed threshold from the previous section), the land tax adjustment maps to the land tax line on the rental schedule. Where the prohibition applies, there is no adjustment to map; the vendor's liability remains the vendor's, and the purchaser's land tax for the year reads from the purchaser's own assessment when it issues.
Rental adjustment. Where the property was sold subject to an existing tenancy, rent already received by the vendor for the period after settlement is transferred to the purchaser through the SoA. That transfer maps to rent received on the purchaser's rental schedule for the relevant days.

Mapping the FSS into the CGT cost-base register

The CGT cost-base additions come from the purchaser's side of the FSS. The first-element cost (acquisition cost) and the second-element costs (incidental costs of acquisition) are visible directly in the destination rows.

Purchase price. The contract price destination row.
Transfer duty. The duty destination row to the relevant state revenue office. The FSS line is the source of truth — it carries the actual amount paid, including any concession or surcharge that adjusted the headline rate.
Capital costs of acquisition. Legal fees, conveyancer fees, and search and certificate fees each appear as separate destination rows on the FSS. They are second-element costs of acquisition for CGT purposes and roll into the cost base on the day of settlement.

Lender's mortgage insurance also appears on the FSS as a destination row but is treated differently. Under current ATO practice it is a borrowing cost, deductible over the shorter of five years or the loan term under section 25-25 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, rather than a cost-base addition — so it sits in the rental schedule's borrowing-costs deduction, not in the CGT register.

Ongoing holding costs — rates, interest, repairs, OC fees for the period of ownership — generally belong in the rental schedule rather than the cost base, though the ATO's position on third-element costs for non-income-producing periods has its own treatment that a registered tax agent should confirm against the property's classification and use.

A worked example

Take a Sydney investment apartment settling on 14 March 2025, mid-rates-year. The vendor has paid the full annual council rates of $2,920 to the relevant Sydney council for the rates year 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025. The SoA pro-rates by days: vendor days from 1 July 2024 to 13 March 2025 (256 days), purchaser days from 14 March 2025 to 30 June 2025 (109 days). Daily rate $8.00. Vendor share $2,048; purchaser share $872. The SoA shows an $872 adjustment in the vendor's favour — the purchaser reimburses the vendor for the period the purchaser will own the property under the already-paid rates.

On the Year-1 rental schedule for the purchaser's 2024-25 income year, $872 appears on the council rates line — the purchaser's deductible council rates for the days owned. The water availability adjustment, OC fees adjustment, and any rental adjustment under an in-place tenancy each follow the same pattern, with their respective days-purchaser figures driving the rental-schedule entries.

On the same purchaser's CGT cost-base register, the contract price flows from the contract-price destination row on the FSS. NSW transfer duty paid at settlement flows from the duty destination row. The conveyancer's fee and the search and certificate fees each flow from their respective destination rows. Those values stay in the cost base until the apartment is eventually sold; any lender's mortgage insurance shown on the FSS is captured separately as a borrowing cost, not a cost-base addition.

The flows are workflow descriptions, not tax advice. The actual tax outcome depends on the property's classification, the investor's overall position, and current ATO practice; a registered tax agent should review the position before lodgement, particularly where the property changes use during the year of settlement or where the investor is foreign, a trust, or a self-managed super fund. The same is true for the underlying settlement work itself — the article describes the workflow a licensed conveyancer or property lawyer follows, not a substitute for engaging one.

Multi-Property Consolidation for Portfolio Settlements

The per-settlement workflow holds together for a single property. It does not scale cleanly to a portfolio settling a dozen properties in a year, a developer settling a lot release across several months, or a deceased estate distributing several titles. For any of those, the firm or the accountant ends up wanting one master row set rather than a dozen. The shape below is the consolidation row schema for multi-property settlement work across an Australian conveyancer's portfolio — one that ties out to both the year's rental schedules and the rolling CGT register without forcing a separate spreadsheet for each property.

Consolidation row shape. One row per property × settlement, with at minimum:

Settlement date.
Property address.
Matter reference.
Vendor.
Purchaser.
Total contract price.
Transfer duty paid.
Net adjustment to vendor.
Net adjustment to purchaser.
Council rates adjustment.
Water availability adjustment.
OC / strata adjustment.
Land tax adjustment.
Rental adjustment.
Total CGT cost-base addition (purchase price plus duty plus capital costs of acquisition).
Pointer back to the underlying SoA, FSS, and source-certificate set.

The pointer-back field is what holds the schema honest at scale. Without it, the master row set drifts away from the matter file the moment a query comes back from the auditor, the tax agent, or the ATO; with it, every consolidated row points at a specific PDF in the matter file at a specific page.

Two distinct downstream consumers, one row set. The year-end tax preparation pass needs the apportioned outgoings allocated to the right property and the right tax year, with days-purchaser already calculated on the per-settlement SoA. The rolling CGT register needs the cost-base addition recorded once and held against the property until disposal. The same row supports both — the apportioned-outgoings columns feed the rental schedules, and the cost-base column feeds the CGT register. No re-keying, no second spreadsheet maintained in parallel.

Cluster realities. Portfolio settlements rarely arrive as a clean monthly cadence. A developer's lot release settles in waves over six to twelve weeks. An investor restructuring a holding might settle three properties in a fortnight while a fourth sits on a delayed contract. A deceased estate distributing several titles may settle four or five over a quarter as conveyancing on each completes. The consolidated extract holds together across those clusters because each row is self-contained with its own source-certificate pointer; new rows are added as new settlements complete, and the year-end tax prep reads whatever rows fall in the current income year.

The conveyancing firm's own benefit. The same consolidated schema doubles as a matter-ledger reconciliation. The firm's settlement records, the trust-account flows, and the client's tax record all read from the same row set, rather than from three parallel spreadsheets that drift over time. For a firm acting for a portfolio investor across many years, that single row-set is what the auditor expects to see and what the client's accountant works from at year end.

The shape is portable across portfolio scales. A small SMSF holding three properties uses the same columns as a developer settling a forty-unit release; the difference is row count, not row schema. The settlement work itself remains a matter for a licensed conveyancer or property lawyer, and the post-settlement tax treatment for a registered tax agent — the consolidation is the operational layer that lets both professions read from the same primary source rather than rebuilding it every year.