Community Association Management Software

Key Takeaways:

Community association management software is a game-changer that won’t just improve the lives of HOA leaders; it transforms the way the community connects.
Software provides a single hub for communication, storage, accounting, management, and payments.
When communication is clear and consistent, tempers stay down and trust grows strong. And volunteers stay happy in their roles instead of burning out.
HOAs must uphold high standards of integrity and transparency in how they run the community’s finances. Robust software helps them accomplish that mission by facilitating excellent accounting and bookkeeping.
Software can significantly reduce HOA leaders’ to-do lists, automating and simplifying many of the tedious tasks that lead to overwhelm. This frees them up to do the jobs that require a human touch.

Community associations have big jobs. And by “big” we mean “ginormous.” HOAs are responsible for receiving and tracking owner dues, issuing violations and levying fees, managing neighbors’ money responsibly and ethically, upholding community covenants, overseeing property maintenance and upkeep, building community connections, protecting property values… plus a thousand other things we don’t have room to list. Like we said, a ginormous job.

Many HOA leaders and board members are volunteers, willing to serve because they have generous hearts and care about their neighbors, not because they are experts in accounting, organization, or property management. They’re glad to serve, but the extensive responsibilities can become overwhelming. In the past, HOA leaders were forced to rely on cumbersome, inefficient methods to accomplish all their work, but now they can turn to a powerful solution that reduces their workload and automates many tasks: community association management software. Management software frees volunteers and leaders to do more of the meaningful work they love: spending time with their neighbors and improving their community. Community association management software is a game-changer that won’t just improve the lives of HOA leaders; it also transforms the way your community connects.

Community Association Management Software Facilitates Excellent Self-Management

Managing an HOA is a multifaceted, complex job, and it’s all too easy to get lost in a never-ending to-do list. And when everything feels like a four-alarm fire, you may think, “I’m running out of fire extinguishers. Maybe I should quit fighting my own fires and call in the fire department.” In the case of an HOA, you may think, “Maybe we should quit self-managing and hire a property management company.” But property management companies can cost your residents tens of thousands of dollars a year, and they still may not put out all the fires, so self-management probably remains your best option.

Here are a few ways community association management software can facilitate excellent self-management:

Software streamlines and simplifies your communication.

Instead of fielding emails, texts, phone calls, and those dreaded unexpected doorbell rings, you can send and receive all your HOA communication from one organized hub. This helps HOA leaders to remain accessible and responsive to resident concerns without losing track of messages. And when neighbors have a convenient outlet for their questions and concerns within the portal, they are less likely to come knocking on your door.

Software provides organized channels for different types of conversations.

Some conversations need to happen between all residents; others only pertain to a small group. PayHOA offers communication tools to keep your community conversations organized:

Public bulletin boards where you can post announcements for the entire community to see
Restricted message boards where smaller community groups can communicate privately
Clear pathways for residents to request maintenance
Automated mass messages that allow leadership to keep the entire community informed simultaneously
A range of options in how you deliver community messages: text, email, prerecorded voice messages, and snail mail
Community calendars to keep residents informed in real time about events and meetings

When communication is clear and consistent, tempers stay down, and trust grows strong. And volunteers stay happy in their roles instead of burning out.

Management Software Was Designed to Meet Your Community Association’s Accounting Needs

If community communication feels intimidating for HOA volunteers, money management can feel downright impossible. Stewarding neighborhood finances is one of the HOA’s most difficult but important tasks. For years, community association leaders were forced to rely on tools that weren’t designed to meet HOA needs, but they did their best: resourceful people duct-taped together a system to (sort of) finish the job. Maybe you’re working with an inherited system like that now, using QuickBooks for some tasks (even though it requires numerous awkward workarounds), Excel for others (even though it doesn’t connect to your bank accounts), and–speaking of duct tape–let’s not forget the dusty, hanging-together-by-threads paper ledger passed down from previous treasurers.

Imagine if you could do all your accounting work from one integrated application: sending automatic invoices and reminders, accepting digital payments, tracking income and expenses, direct depositing to your bank (do you hear angels singing yet?), creating up-to-date budgets and profit and loss reports, even (prepare to drool on your screen) prepping to file your HOA taxes with confidence and ease. Thanks to community association management software like PayHOA, you can do all that and more.

Let’s look into the “more.”

Management Software Simplifies Your Daily Tasks

We’ve touched on what software like PayHOA can do for your communication and accounting, but if you serve an HOA in any capacity, you know your to-do list is extensive and daunting. Here are a few ways community association management software can simplify your management tasks. With software, your residents can do these things for themselves:

Report maintenance concerns any time of the day, triggering an automatic workflow.
Check dues and fees from their owner portal, and pay online.
Set up autopay so they never miss a payment.
Connect with HOA leadership privately when they have questions.
Connect with neighbors through community bulletin boards and private message boards.
Look up policies, covenants, and other information from their member portal.

With the help of robust community association management software, HOA leaders can:

Respond promptly to resident concerns.
Communicate privately with HOA leaders and board members as needed.
Share news, meetings, and updates with the entire community on one-way bulletin boards.
Invite resident feedback and engagement through polls and surveys.
Initiate and track workflows for maintenance requests.
Oversee multiple properties from a single account.
Automatically send mass communication through email, text, voice mail, and even physical mail.
Automatically track income and expenses.
Balance your accounts and maintain accurate budgets.
Pay vendors and employees.
Prepare regular reports on community association finances and distribute them to your residents.

All of these convenient features simplify your daily workload and help your community run smoothly.

Management Software Preserves Trust by Providing Transparency

HOAs manage their neighbors’ hard-earned money. (Gulp.) Not only do you answer to Suzie and Bob next door, but you also answer to the government. HOAs must uphold high standards of integrity and transparency in how they run the community’s finances. And because few volunteers come in with degrees in financial management, the pressure is high and the learning curve is steep.

If you’ve been relying on QuickBooks and Excel, chances are, you’re working hard. Way too hard. You’re jumping through weird hoops and doing a lot of manual entry and calculations, trying to make those platforms accomplish what you need… and they’re still falling short. (And you worry that all the manual entry is leaving you vulnerable to accidental errors and miscalculations.) When you rely on community association management software–software specifically designed to support HOAs–your workload is simplified and lightened.

PayHOA’s standalone software allows you to ditch the external software and do all your bookkeeping in one place. With our accounting features, you can:

Automate invoices for fees, dues, and fines, and automatically update those invoices with late fees as needed.
Make it easy for residents to pay dues and fees from their resident portal.
Enable autopay, making it a no-brainer for owners to pay on time.
Track income and expenses in real time.
Sync your ledgers and bank accounts.
Choose between options for cash or accrual-based accounting.
Add in liabilities, then track them using reporting and journal entries.
Produce regular financial reports for your leadership team and residents so everyone stays informed.
Budget accurately so you can plan wisely.
Prepare your tax forms (including 1120-H and 1099 forms) responsibly and with minimal stress.
Protect your community’s sensitive financial information with military-grade 256-bit encryption.
Spend less time crunching numbers and processing neighbors’ paperwork, and more time out with your neighbors.

All these features make it easy to track your money and stay on track with your budget. And if you still need more support, you can hire a PayHOA Bookkeeper to manage your books all year. All this means you’ll spend less time worrying over late payments and lost checks, and more time planning for your community’s future. And you’ll spend less time answering redundant questions, because thanks to the regular reports you send, everyone already has the answers. That kind of outstanding management and consistent communication maintains transparency and protects trust.

Management Software Can Minimize Your Risks

When you signed up to help your HOA, maybe you were excited about fun parts of the job like hosting ice cream socials, planning playground improvements, and fostering community connections. You probably weren’t thinking, “And best of all, I get to minimize everyone’s risks and protect the HOA from litigation!” But the HOA is responsible for key aspects of neighborhood safety. Community associations may have to navigate risk factors like these:

Resolving maintenance concerns in public areas that could pose health or safety risks
Purchasing and maintaining lighting, fencing, and surveillance cameras, which promote a safe environment
Ensuring the community has the insurance coverage it needs
Upholding the highest standards of financial integrity as you manage the community’s money

Community association management software can keep your leadership team organized and on track with these tasks. Specifically, it can help with:

Providing accounting support to make sure you budget properly for safety assessments, property upkeep, and insurance
Facilitating easy collection of dues and fees, which keeps your budget balanced
Initiating workflows so maintenance concerns are resolved quickly
Helping you pay employees, repairmen, consultants, and vendors so property upkeep stays on track
Adhering to legal requirements about how and where you post information (meeting minutes, proposed covenant changes or property improvements, financial disclosures, etc.)
Protecting residents’ private information by storing sensitive documents and financial data responsibly
Communicating clearly with owners about closing any gaps in their insurance coverage

Why take risks with risk management? Software helps you stay on top of small issues before they snowball into big problems.

Management Software Keeps Homeowners Happy

Nobody wants to spend their free time fielding complaint calls from unhappy neighbors. Sure, community living is bound to have some measure of conflict, but clear and consistent communication, excellent management, and transparent leadership go a long way toward preventing unnecessary conflict.

As younger generations are stepping into home ownership, they expect responsive management and leadership, and they assume they’ll be able to do almost everything online. They want digital ways to find information, pay bills, and communicate with their leaders and neighbors. Community association management software will help your HOA leadership fulfill both expectations. And software doesn’t just benefit younger owners–it also meets the needs of your legacy owners, who are deeply invested in the neighborhood goings-on. Legacy owners value clear communication about proposed changes, neighborhood finances, and future plans.

Community association management software can offer features like these to make your residents happy:

Message boards provide meaningful, convenient ways for neighbors to connect with each other.
Bulletin boards keep everyone informed about meetings, gatherings, and community concerns.
Opinionated residents can offer ideas and feedback through polls and surveys, confident their voices are heard.
Residents can submit maintenance requests or questions after hours, sure they will receive a timely response.
Resident portals allow each owner to track their bills and dues online.
Autopay makes billing pain-free for residents (and saves leaders from the burden of chasing people down and levying late fees).
Up-to-date information about covenants, policies, or upcoming meetings is always available for residents to access in the app.

When neighbors are happy, HOA leadership is happy. Software can help you spend less time fighting fires, and more time sitting around fire pits enjoying time with your neighbors. (Just be sure to follow community guidelines for fire pits…)

Management Software Helps You Work Smarter

You probably know the adage, “Work smarter, not harder.” If you’ve been working hard for your neighborhood, but the burden has become too much, the solution may not be quitting your position: It may be working smarter by transitioning to an all-in-one software. PayHOA’s software reduces your workload and makes your community a happier place by:

Providing a single software platform to meet all your communication, accounting, document storage, and management needs
Simplifying your tasks—instead of learning five different systems and softwares, you only have to learn one
Making it easy to communicate with residents and your leadership team through appropriate channels, some private and some public
Training your leadership on the software so you all feel confident using it and passing it on to new volunteers

Software can significantly reduce your to-do list, automating and simplifying many of the tedious tasks that lead to overwhelm. This frees you up to do the meaningful jobs that require a human touch: listening to neighbors’ concerns, cultivating an atmosphere of respect and trust, and forging true community connection.

PayHOA is a highly-rated, comprehensive software that provides everything your community association leadership team has been looking for. It was designed by people who understand the difficult aspects of your job and know exactly what you need. It provides a single hub for communication, storage, accounting, management, and payments.

Don’t spend one more day feeling overwhelmed. Contact us to try a free 30-day trial, and find out how we can make your life easier today.