How Property Manager Software Helps CAMs and Growing PMCs

Key Takeaways: 

• The right software can take much of the headache out of expanding client bases of community and property management companies (PMCs).
• PayHOA’s features automate tasks that complicate the work of HOA boards and community management professionals, from account reconciliation to communication with homeowners.
• Digitized billing and online payment portals drastically reduce delays, losses, and volunteer time involved in collecting HOA dues.
• Real-time financial reports promote HOA and PMC transparency, fostering greater community trust.

Picture this fictional-but-likely-familiar scenario: It’s a busy Tuesday afternoon at Prominence Prime Properties, a growing property management company. Corinne, the admin, has spent most of the day helping onboard a new community, Turtleshell Terrace HOA. Things are piling up fast — the resident contact log is incomplete, the board treasurer just resigned, and vendor paperwork is nowhere to be found.

As Trent, the company’s owner, fields a call about a tree down in another neighborhood, Corinne drops her pen and sighs, “Whoever came up with Murphy’s Law really knew what they were talking about.” (Murphy’s Law, for the uninitiated: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.)

They both realize it’s not just a bad day — it’s the result of outdated processes. Paper records and piecemeal spreadsheets aren’t cutting it anymore. To keep their sanity while they grow, they need real tools built for the complexity of modern HOAs, like community association management software that manages multiple communities from one dashboard.

HOA Management Software Helps Growing Companies

Growth can be painful. And without the right processes and tools in place, growing pains can burn out your staff and create a cycle of increased stress, decreased staff capability, and worsened client relationships. 

When daily management tasks begin stacking up, each new onboarding becomes more exhausting than the last. 

Sooner or later, circumstances will force a change. With better systems, like better property manager software, the change can be for the better.

How PayHOA solves these challenges

Scenarios like the above are something our growing PMC clients face more and more. Adding communities defines growth for property management companies (PMCs), but without the right tools, each onboarding can be a not-quite-comedy of errors, missed communications, and information logjams. That’s where quality community association management software, such as PayHOA, saves the day.

One Dashboard for All HOAs

PayHOA starts solving headaches with a dashboard that allows authorized PMC personnel to navigate as needed between communities with just one login. The dashboard gives easy access to review homeowner accounts, HOA accounts, and communication options that range from event committees to streets to entire communities.

Tim Plunkett is a real-life PMC owner whose company manages some 60 community associations in several states from its headquarters outside Indianapolis. Your HOA Community Management Company Inc. became one of PayHOA’s early PMC users after Plunkett researched software to solve the process bottlenecks in his employees’ work. He ended up talking at length to PayHOA’s founder, Mike Bollinger, and realized the same task-designed platform that was easing workloads for self-managed HOAs could create new efficiencies for Plunkett’s employees.

“From the moment Mike started showing me the platform, I could see how easy it was going to be to make the transition, and I knew right away that I’d found the remedy to my headaches,” Plunkett said. “The remedy was PayHOA.”

Immediately after changing Your HOA Community Management Company Inc. to PayHOA’s system, Plunkett started offering insights into further features for continual improvements of the software. His feedback loop with Bollinger has consistently led to solutions that benefited both companies, as well as PayHOA’s other clients.

“In the beginning, we were both relatively small companies just trying to learn our respective markets and figure out how to grow within them,” Bollinger said. “The approach was very collaborative. We helped Tim by building the tools he needed to grow his business, and his guidance on what those pain points were for HOAs helped us grow ours.” 

Simplified Financial Management

PayHOA community and property manager software uses such feedback to solve problems, streamline processes, and save time for both management professionals and the homeowner volunteers who populate most HOA boards. Electronic invoicing and online payment options automate dues collection and late-fee processing on both ends of the transaction, making billing and payment faster and easier. 

In addition, PayHOA’s accounting features can generate real-time financial reporting and auto-sync bank reconciliation that boards love, both for their ease of review and for the transparency they promote between boards and their communities. And that same report-generating capability makes preparing for that IRS audit in the Prominence Prime Properties scenario much less nerve-wracking.

Resident & Board Communication Tools within Community and Property Manager Software

Multiple channels of communication among HOA boards, residents, and managers mean quicker responses and fewer misunderstandings. PayHOA’s communication features let community leaders enter announcements once and designate them to be received by app, text, email, or even by automated phone call. In addition to addressing individual households or whole communities, messages can also be targeted for affinity groups, such as clubs or committees, or by geographic location, such as specific streets.

PayHOA’s resident portals make communications just as convenient for homeowners. They quickly adapt to using PayHOA’s resident portals to pay dues, to review community documents, and to submit service requests. That kind of user convenience translates to both PMCs and HOA boards fielding fewer calls and emails for information and a growing trust between residents and the people who manage and lead their communities.

Vendor & Maintenance Tracking

Keeping up with vendors is no longer a headache with the PayHOA community association management software. Whether a particular vendor serves one client community or several, the same dashboard makes contact info, contracts, and work orders readily available by vendor and by community. With PayHOA, your PMC can track different project statuses across mulitple communities, ensure timely payments and accountability, and flag contracts for review if warranted by complaints, billing irregularities, or other issues with a vendor.

Scalable Without the Overhead

Tim Plunkett found that, even as Your HOA Community Management Company grew, PayHOA enabled his people to complete more work in less time than before. The company previously employed two full-time people to reconcile bank statements and issue account reports. With PayHOA’s electronic payments and integrated banking, two people now do the job in just nine days each month. And given PayHOA’s intuitive design, Plunkett has also reduced training time for new hires and new HOA board members.

“One of our primary goals was to streamline operations and improve efficiency,” he says. “PayHOA does just that.”

And those time savings aren’t out of reach for small and growing property and association management companies. If you’re still in start-up mode and need to watch expenses carefully, PayHOA’s management pricing begins at just $250 per month minimum, with additional units costing only $0.50 each. The same property manager software features also answer the needs of companies managing several hundred or several thousand units, with economies of scale built into the per-unit pricing.

Arrange a free, no-obligation, month-long trial of PayHOA for your HOA or PMC here.