Based on the presentation "It's CAM-plicated: Let's Talk Recoveries," delivered at ICSC PropTech in Las Vegas on May 19, 2026
CAM reconciliation has a reputation as a year-end headache, known for the seasonal scramble of spreadsheets, audits, and tenant disputes that descends along with each annual close. But David Stifter, CEO and co-founder of PredictAP, thinks that framing gets it backwards.
"The reconciliation happens at year-end," he told attendees at ICSC PropTech in Las Vegas this week. "The errors usually start months earlier."
In the Proptech Stage presentation on It's CAM-plicated: Let's Talk Recoveries, Stifter built a methodical case that CAM recovery is not primarily an accounting problem — it's a data-integrity problem that looks like an accounting issue. And the place to solve it is accounts payable, not the year-end rec spreadsheet.
Download the presentation here: It's CAM-plicated: Let's Talk Recoveries
Stifter opened with a structural observation that cuts to the core of why CAM is so hard to get right at scale. As a retail property manager, you are responsible for defending every line item across every recovery in your portfolio. Each tenant, by contrast, studies only their own. And their auditor only needs to find one possible mistake.
"You are dealing with hundreds of mini business cases," he said.
That asymmetry is what makes CAM so consequential and so costly when the process breaks down. The stakes are real: CAM expenses represent 15% to 35% of a tenant's total occupancy cost, according to BOMA, giving tenants every incentive to audit closely.
Data shows that one in four tenants experience CAM billing discrepancies, that a single regional shopping center developer lost $55,000 in one year to recovery errors, and that the five most common audit findings — lease misinterpretation, expense allocation errors, double billing, non-reimbursable expenses, and lack of transparency — are all errors that compound quietly over time before surfacing as disputes.
Compounding the challenge is the fundamental mismatch between how leases are written and how accounting systems are built. Stifter walked through the full taxonomy of CAM complexity that any practitioner will recognize: base years, expense stops, controllable vs. non-controllable caps, capital exclusions, gross-ups, fixed CAM clauses, management fee exclusions, co-tenancy provisions, and amendments that never made it into the system.
"Every lease is a small constitution," he said. "Most accounting systems want standard fields." There is no standard CAM at scale, and any process that pretends otherwise is built on a flawed assumption.
The most important reframe in the presentation is also the most practical: CAM errors don't originate in reconciliation. They originate in AP coding, often months before the rec spreadsheet ever opens. Landscaping coded to the wrong property. Security coded to a non-recoverable account. Capital work treated as operating expense. Tenant-specific work entered into the common area pool. A utility invoice missing the meter or allocation detail. Each of these is a small procedural mistake that looks unremarkable but can be an issue at year-end.
"A $12,000 mistake in February becomes a tenant dispute in March of the next year," Stifter said.
The problem is made worse, by one of the most common recovery corrections in the industry: the year-end reclass. A reclass can fix the general ledger entry, but it doesn't bring the invoice image, the approval trail, or the tenant backup along with it. The account code is clean; the documentation preceding it is not.
"If your CAM process depends on year-end reclasses," Stifter said, "you're not running a recovery process, you're running an archaeological dig."
Stifter organized the mechanics of CAM recovery into what he called a recovery stack — four layers that each depend on the integrity of the one below. At the top is the exception workflow, the negotiated complexity that requires human judgment. Below that is the calculation engine, handling pools, denominators, pro-rata shares, estimates, true-ups, and credits. Below that is lease data, like caps, exclusions, gross-ups, base years, amendments, audit windows. And at the foundation, supporting everything else, is AP coding: property, GL, pool, recoverability, allocation, vendor, and invoice image.
"AP coding is the foundation," Stifter said. "Everything above it inherits its quality."
This is also the lens through which Stifter framed what he called the biggest opportunity in CAM recoveries: closing the loop between AP and AR. When AP coding is clean at the source, AR can accrue recoveries more accurately, compare budget to actual sooner, build cleaner tenant backup, catch errors while invoices are still fresh, and eliminate year-end surprises entirely.
"Automation helps most when the source data is clean," Stifer said. "If AP is messy, AR becomes a cleanup department."
Annual reconciliation, Stifter argued, structurally guarantees annual surprises. Errors compound for twelve months before anyone looks. Backup becomes a scavenger hunt. Variances are found too late to fix. Tenants receive true-up shocks. The alternative isn't more heroic year-end effort — it's a monthly cadence that treats CAM as a closing discipline rather than a seasonal crisis. Earlier variance detection, faster correction of coding mistakes, cleaner accruals, and no year-end shocks are not aspirational outcomes; they are the natural result of reviewing exceptions monthly instead of annually.
Stifter closed with nine operational changes he argued every team should put in place before the next year-end: code recovery treatment at invoice entry; maintain lease abstracts as structured data; minimize lease variation where possible; track caps, exclusions, and gross-ups under change control; avoid unnecessary reclasses; keep invoice backup linked to recovery pools; review exceptions monthly; use automation without outsourcing judgment; and make the lease the final source of truth. The through-line connecting all nine is the same: "The goal is not to automate bad logic faster. It's to make the right logic visible, repeatable, and defensible."
CAM recovery shouldn't be an annual argument. When the foundation is clean AP, clean lease data, clean recovery rules, and clean backup, it becomes the natural output of a well-run process. That's how you win the asymmetry.
David Stifter presented "It's CAM-plicated: Let's Talk Recoveries" at ICSC PropTech in Las Vegas on May 19, 2026. Want to learn more about how PredictAP can improve your CAM process? Fill out this form to talk to the team.