News for: Board Tips

The Short Answer An HOA SMS broadcast is best for short, time-sensitive information that residents can act on immediately: a water shutoff, gate outage, meeting reminder, weather closure, or payment deadline. It should complement email, the homeowner portal, and any notice method required by state…

Meet Your Dollar Somewhere in your community, a homeowner just paid their monthly assessment. Call it $250. That dollar bill (well, the ninety-nine other dollars riding along with it) is about to go on a trip — through invoicing, into the ledger, past a bank feed, through a reconciliation, and…

A Small Bill With Remarkable Survival Skills Some HOA expenses arrive with dignity. Insurance protects the community. Landscaping keeps the entrance from developing the mood of an abandoned railway platform. Reserve contributions are the responsible vegetables of association finance. Then there is…

The Short Answer Every HOA board should regularly review six financial reports: the income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flows, accounts-receivable aging, delinquency report, and payment register. Together they explain whether the association is operating within its means, what it owns…

The Website Nobody Can Edit Almost every self-managed community has a website with the same origin story. A resident who "does computers" builds one. It's genuinely good. It has a photo of the entrance sign at golden hour. Then he sells his house. Nobody has the login. Nobody knows which registrar…

The Short Answer An HOA work order tracks the operational job: what needs repair, who is doing it, the estimate, and the completion status. A vendor bill tracks the accounting obligation after the work and invoice are reviewed. Posting the bill should debit the correct expense account and credit…

The 4% Open Rate A board secretary in Ohio sent a newsletter every month for two years. Twelve hundred words, carefully written, attached as a PDF. She checked the stats exactly once. Four percent had opened it. Her conclusion was that nobody cared about the community. The actual conclusion was…

The Short Answer An HOA should use an association-owned email address because official correspondence belongs to the community, not to the current president, secretary, or property manager. A good shared HOA mailbox preserves incoming messages, replies, attachments, assignments, and history across…

Forty-One Percent A 96-unit association needed 50% participation to amend its landscaping assessment. They held the meeting on a Tuesday in November. Eleven people came. Nine proxies arrived, two of them unsigned. Turnout: 41%. The amendment did not fail. It simply never got voted on. They…

The Short Answer An HOA AI assistant is most useful before a board meeting when it can answer questions from current association records, show the numbers behind its answer, and link the user to the source report or record. The best prompts are specific: ask about overdue balances, year-to-date…

Why the Letter Matters More Than the Rule A violation notice does three jobs at once. It tells someone what's wrong. It creates the record that proves you told them. And it sets the tone for everything that follows. Most boards focus on the first job and accidentally sabotage the other two. They…

The Deck That Was Already Built An owner emails the board in March asking to build a deck. She attaches a sketch. A director replies, "Looks fine to me, but let me check with the others." Nobody checks with the others. In June the deck is finished. In July a neighbour complains that it encroaches on…

Nobody Sets Out to Enforce Selectively Here is how it actually happens. A director drives past a house with a boat in the driveway. Boats in driveways are prohibited. But he knows the owner — decent guy, works nights, boat's only there while the trailer gets fixed. He mentions it in passing. The…

The Short Answer To choose HOA software in 2026, evaluate complete workflows rather than feature lists. Ask each vendor to demonstrate the same real tasks: issue assessments, trace an owner balance, reconcile a bank account, handle a resident request, turn maintenance work into a vendor bill, send…

The Quarterly Reconciliation Habit Is a Symptom, Not a Strategy Ask any volunteer HOA treasurer how often they reconcile the operating account, and you will hear one of three answers: monthly (rare), quarterly (common), or "before the audit" (more common than anyone admits). The reason is almost…

A Story Every Volunteer Treasurer Knows Linda is the volunteer treasurer at a 200-unit suburban HOA outside Phoenix. For the better part of three years, the first of every month looked the same. She would wake up early, brew a pot of coffee, open QuickBooks, and start the slow march through 20…

The Fence That Cost a Board Eleven Months A homeowner in a 140-unit community put up a six-foot privacy fence. The CC&Rs capped fences at four feet. The board sent a letter. Nothing happened. They sent another. Nothing happened. Nine months later the board voted to fine, and the homeowner's attorney…