Summary

Your HOA Community Management, Inc. is based near Indianapolis and manages 60+ HOAs nationwide using PayHOA’s homeowners association software. In its early years, Your HOA Community Management struggled with routine tasks—like invoicing, payment processing, and handling requests—that consumed excessive time and bogged down staff efficiency.

PayHOA’s user-friendly interface and targeted, time-saving features—such as online invoicing and homeowner communications, integrated banking, and reporting available to HOA board members—are a selling point for management services with Plunkett’s clients, most of whom are volunteer HOA board members.

Some clients initially resisted when Your HOA Community Management adopted PayHOA’s/Alliance Bank’s integrated banking services. Its ease of use for PMCs and their communities—not to mention often higher interest rates—has made it attractive to new clients.

Introduction

After growing up around his family’s tax businesses, Timothy Plunkett spent years owning and managing several tax and bookkeeping companies. When an HOA bookkeeping client approached him with a request to expand his services beyond tax management, Plunkett’s foray into community management began. 

Expanding from tax and bookkeeping to property management was a leap. It involved learning and juggling new tasks, such as handling violations, architectural requests, and other communications between homeowners and the board. That conversation marked the beginning of Plunkett’s journey into the world of HOAs. 

As one client became many, “It snowballed from there,” he recalls.

In the early days, spreadsheets and Google web apps helped streamline some property management tasks, but their functionality was limited and often unavailable in the field. QuickBooks, a staple for Plunkett’s tax franchises, seemed sufficient at first for billing and collections but fell short for all HOA-specific management needs. Streamlining processes became his focus.

As his portfolio grew, Plunkett knew exactly what he needed: scalable HOA management software.

Enter PayHOA’s HOA management software

After researching homeowners association software online, Plunkett contacted PayHOA and spoke directly with founder and CEO Mike Bollinger. What Bollinger shared with him sold Plunkett on PayHOA software’s capabilities and its ability to scale with a growing property management company (PMC). 

“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.”

Improving efficiency

PayHOA was the solution Plunkett was looking for—software that enabled him to grow and expand his PMC quickly without adding costly staffing hours or unwieldy manual tasks. He now manages over 60 HOA communities across the country, using PayHOA’s platform to automate and digitize billing, payments, communications, and accounting. This reduces time and costs for both Plunkett’s company and the HOA communities it serves.

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

The homeowners association software has automated payment processing, provides useful reports for board members, and provides an accessible online portal for residents to manage their accounts, review documents, and submit requests.

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 do the job in nine days each month. 

Easy to use and improves communication

Plunkett said PayHOA’s intuitive design is crucial for both HOA volunteer board members and new hires he brings on at Your HOA Community Management. 

“We’ve made training videos to onboard our new HOA boards, and they hardly ever have questions. PayHOA is super intuitive,” he says. “I’ve never had an issue with an employee learning to use it or navigating it.” 

“Communication has also improved: Homeowners appreciate the clarity and accessibility of the online tools, and the key with boards is the transparency of communications and transactions—they can see everything in real time.”

 Simplifying website builds for HOAs

PayHOA’s software has also made an easy job of creating websites for new HOA clients—so much so that Your HOA Community Management is converting existing clients’ websites to the same platform.

“We love the website builder,” Plunkett says. “I was the only one who could update the previous WordPress sites we were building for clients. My team now knows how to do it through PayHOA–and it’s extremely simple. They don’t have to send me a list of a thousand tasks anymore.”

Consistent improvement and innovation

Continual upgrades in interface and capabilities solidified Plunkett’s loyalty to the software. 

PayHOA’s Mike Bollinger expands on the relationship between the two companies, saying, “In the beginning, we were both relatively small companies just trying to learn our respective markets and figure out how to grow within them. 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.” 

PayHOA’s violations module, for instance, instantly digitized a task that once required hours upon hours of handling mail. 

“One reason we chose to discontinue accounting in QuickBooks is because of tracking violations,” Plunkett said. “We wanted to be able to keep everything together, which is kind of what started that search for an alternative solution to begin with.”

“A part of every proposal call now is discussing all the benefits we offer as a PMC by using PayHOA software,” Plunkett says. “It’s the main reason we’re growing over the years.”

Integrated, safe, and secure

PayHOA’s integrated partnership with Alliance Association Bank affords HOAs and management companies higher interest rates on escrow and other accounts. It also enables board members to review account reports at a useful level of detail and automates much of the work in managing payments, deposits, and account reconciliation (all via 256 encryption).

Plunkett says, “The ‘Alliance alliance’ became a huge advantage and selling point for Your HOA Community Management. As we grew, it was easy and safe for homeowners and for us.”

Growing together as partners

Today, Your HOA Community Management’s reliance on the PayHOA platform is indicative of the growing trend toward HOA governance by property management firms. Plunkett said he and his company “wouldn’t be where we are today without PayHOA.”

They are also continuing to grow and evolve. Plunkett still talks with Bollinger frequently, often to share ideas or comment on how a new feature works, while staff members frequently collaborate with other members of the PayHOA team.

“My team loves PayHOA’s tech support,” Plunkett said. “The service side has been perfect.”

What’s next?

Plunkett is especially excited about the launch of PayHOA’s new PMC dashboard on the platform.

“We’re always trying to make things faster and easier and to mitigate mistakes—not that we’re making mistakes all day long, but when there’s the same sort of mistake happening from multiple people, we go, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’” 

One of the dashboard features that Plunkett looks forward to most eagerly is the ability to navigate seamlessly between client communities. The dashboard is just another reflection of PayHOA’s collaborative culture with Your HOA Community Management and its other clients and users.

“A lot of the enhancements along the way have been where there’s something we have a need for, and then we mention it, and sometime down the road, it becomes a thing,” he adds. 

“If any little idea that we come up with gets implemented and helps somebody else, that’s gratifying. We like that.”