Assessment Calculator

Instant calculators

No paste required — just type numbers below.

What an assessment actually is

A mutual ditch company doesn't have customers or usage meters — it has shareholders who each own a fractional right to the water the ditch carries, and it pays for the ditch's upkeep by billing those shareholders in proportion to their shares. That bill is called an assessment. Own 5% of a company's shares and, generally, you owe 5% of whatever the board levies that year — headgate repairs, bank stabilization, keeping a ditch rider on through the irrigation season, insurance, whatever the company needs to keep running.

Colorado's ditch-company statute, C.R.S. Title 7, Article 42, requires that assessments be levied pro rata on shares — proportional to shareholding, not a flat per-member fee. The statute also sets who has the authority to levy one: ordinarily it takes a majority vote of the stock represented at an annual or special shareholder meeting. If shareholders don't hold that meeting, or don't act within 90 days after the company's fiscal year ends, the statute shifts that authority to the board, which can then levy an assessment on its own. Everything else about how a board arrives at the actual number — the total budget, the timing, how many assessments a year — is left to each company's own bylaws.

Rate per share vs. a target total

Boards generally work from one of two starting points, and this tool lets you go either direction. Sometimes a board decides on a rate first — "we're charging $45 a share this year" — and the total raised is whatever that works out to across all outstanding shares. Other times a board starts from a budget — "we need to raise a specific amount to get through the season" — and needs to divide that target by total shares to find the rate that raises exactly that much. Fill in either field in the "Total shares & rate per share" card above and it solves for the other, so you're never stuck doing the division by hand.

More than one class of shares

Not every company has just one kind of share. Some maintain more than one class — different canals, different water sources, or historically separate ditches that later merged into one company — and a board may need to charge each class a different rate, or apply the same rate to a different number of shares per class. The "Total shares & rate per share" table handles that: add one row per class, set each class's own shares and rate, and the tool totals them together. "Apply this rate to all classes" is a shortcut for the common case where every class gets the same per-share rate — it fills that number into every row, and you can still hand-edit any class afterward if one needs to be different.

The billing roll has to reconcile to the penny

A billing roll is the full list of what every shareholder owes for a given assessment — the working document a treasurer reconciles against payments as they come in, and the record a board can check against the total it actually levied. Because it's a financial record, it has to add up exactly: the sum of every shareholder's line has to equal the total assessment to the penny, not "close enough." This tool computes every shareholder's amount the same way — shares times that class's rate, rounded consistently — so the roll it generates always reconciles against its own total automatically. If a hand-kept roll doesn't reconcile, that's usually a sign a share count or a rate got entered inconsistently somewhere, worth tracking down before notices go out.

Using the paste-roster flow

The instant calculators above don't need a shareholder list — they just do the arithmetic for one number or one class. The roster flow is for turning that arithmetic into an actual mailing. Copy your shareholder list straight out of a spreadsheet — name, shares, and optionally a class — and paste it into the box. A tab-separated copy, the default when you copy cells from a spreadsheet, works best, though plain comma-separated text works too, and a header row is fine; the tool detects and skips it automatically. Click "Parse list" and it reports how many shareholders and classes it found. From there, set a rate for each class (or a target total the tool will divide into a uniform rate), fill in the notice details — your company's name, the assessment year, a due date, and how shareholders should pay — and click "Generate billing roll & notices" to produce both: one combined roll for your own records, and one individual notice per shareholder, ready to mail.

Printing invoices

Everything here is built to be printed. The billing roll has its own print button that produces a clean table with your company name, the year, and every line item — nothing else on the page. The notices print the same way, either all together for a full mailing run, or one at a time from a notice's own print button if you need to reprint a single shareholder's copy after a correction. Print styling strips out buttons and navigation automatically, so what comes out of the printer is the document, not the webpage around it.

What this tool doesn't do

It computes the arithmetic; it doesn't file anything, doesn't hold your shareholder list anywhere after you close the tab, and doesn't know your company's specific bylaws — whether your board or your shareholders currently hold assessment authority, what your fiscal year end is, or how your bylaws want a multi-class assessment split. Those are decisions for your board to make and record in its own minutes; this tool just turns the numbers you've already decided on into a roll and a set of notices.