The (More-Than) Accounting Software for Homeowners Associations

If you’re thinking about adopting an accounting software solution for your HOA, products like QuickBooks or Xero may come to mind. 

While these general accounting tools can fulfill the basic functions of budgeting, sending invoices, and receiving online payments, they don’t offer any of the other services you need to run your HOA. 

What if your HOA accounting software could do more than help you manage finances?

The best HOA accounting software provides tools for a more holistic approach to management—from managing individual units and vendors to tracking violations and maintenance requests, storing and retrieving important documents, and communicating with homeowners.

This cloud-based software serves as a central hub for organizing your accounting, management and communications. Individual member portals let homeowners stay up to date with their accounts and neighborhood events, and this convenience and transparency greatly improves overall satisfaction.

Looking to manage your association online? Here’s what you should expect from the best HOA software, from accounting to everything else.

Table of Contents

1. HOA Accounting Software Puts Homeowners First
2. HOA Accounting Software Starts a Conversation
3. HOA Accounting Software Puts All Your Management Needs in One Place

HOA Accounting Software Puts Homeowners First

HOA accounting software is designed to give you tools for bulk invoicing all the units in your community, digital collection of dues and fees, syncing your bank ledgers, automated, streamlined budgeting and bookkeeping, customized financial reporting, and more.

But the fact is that HOAs aren’t just a mechanism for collecting dues. Maintaining the value of your neighborhood is about more than a mere transaction between business and customer. Your association’s ultimate goal is to meet the needs of your residents, to make living in your neighborhood a great experience.

Serving on your association board means having the unique perspective of being both a manager and stakeholder of your property and its amenities.

The right HOA software should help enhance a neighborhood’s value for its homeowners. 

A Homeowner’s Portal with Digital Payments

Your HOA accounting software platform serves as a repository for documents and payment history, so homeowners always know where they stand.

A unique, secure portal for each resident can allow them to make scheduled digital payments without having to deal with paper checks. They can also check their payment history, make maintenance requests, view shared documents and unit information, and send communications.

By making it easier for homeowners to fulfill their own duties, HOA software helps everyone in the community stay on the same page and makes HOA management more intuitive and efficient.

HOA Accounting Software Starts a Conversation

HOA accounting software gives homeowners centralized access to community resources like calendars, surveys, and establishing documents and brings them into a collaborative conversation.

Transparency and communication are crucial to effective HOA management. Your software should streamline and optimize the way you communicate and share information with residents.

Here are some key features for maintaining a dialogue in your community.

Multiple Channels to Connect with Residents

A large part of the day-to-day operations of HOA management is spent returning phone calls and emails from residents, vendors, and other stakeholders. Without a centralized way of managing communication, you may end up playing phone tag, missing messages, and failing to address the community’s needs with consistency.

HOA software can provide a digital hub that keeps your communications records in one, easy-to-search repository. You can also provide updates to individuals or groups of residents through multiple channels, including text, email, and automated phone messaging.

An HOA can also use software to:

·        Create surveys with digital voting.

·        Build a calendar of community events.

·        Send invoices, late notices, and violation notices.

·        Share important documents, financial reports, etc.

·        Print and direct mail physical invoices and neighborhood newsletters.

HOA Accounting Software Puts All Your Management Needs in One Place

One of the biggest challenges HOAs create for themselves is the disorganization that comes from using different systems to track different management needs. With management software you can keep all your data in a cloud-based central repository and easily search to find the information you need.

Managing Units and Owners

HOA-specific software allows you to invoice and segment information by units and by individuals. Maintenance history and other details stay with the unit, even when someone else moves in.

HOA accounting software gives you access important documents, maintenance history, communications, and payment history, and the ability to share documents with homeowners. This system also makes it easy to update key information about units, including resident information, and sync to accounting tools.

Managing Vendors

You may need to juggle multiple vendor contracts as part of your key management duties. HOA accounting software lets you create vendor profiles with payment information, contractual documents, invoices and important contact information. You can also pay your vendors electronically and view your history of communications and payments.

Managing Requests and Violations

HOAs must have a system to manage maintenance, architectural, and other types of requests. They must also track and enforce rules violations. Ideally, all these systems are synchronized to keep the community running smoothly.

Software helps you achieve this. Individual request tickets can help you direct requests to the right people with attached images, text, and documents. You can also close completed tickets and access the thread of communications to easily organize and manage every request.

Through the same digital hub, HOAs can create and send customized violations, send email and physical mail copies, view communications, and close violations when they’re completed.

Go Beyond Invoicing

HOA accounting software should meet the financial management needs of your association and help you grow the value of your community. Yet HOA management consists of so much more than what traditional accounting tools can do on their own.

PayHOA believes your software should meet all your management needs in one place. Our all-in-one management software solution is easy to use and free to try. Over 6,000 HOAs are using PayHOA to self-manage their communities. Our support team knows the ins and outs of HOA management—they’d love to hear about your HOA and help you create a better neighborhood.

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PayHOA offers an HOA management software solution for HOAs of any size or managerial priorities. To find out if PayHOA fits all your HOA management needs, try our software free for 30 days.