3 Ways Your Website Can Make HOA Administration Easier

As a homeowners association administrator, you volunteered to help your HOA, and that’s a great testament to your community spirit. After all, it takes everyone’s commitment to ensure that the reality of your neighborhoods matches up to everyone’s expectations—and the specific terms of your formal covenants.

So you’re looking for anything you can do to lighten your workload and improve the administrative status of your community at the same time. If you make things easier without making them better, that’s taking a short-sighted view—and if you ease life for community residents at the expense of complicating your tasks, that’s not helpful, either.

While you’re searching for helpful shortcuts, consider how your HOA website can contribute to reaching your goals. When you choose the right homeowners association website software provider and optimize your site so it works as hard as possible for your community, you’re net ahead of many aspects of HOA administration—and your community residents will thank you for the ease you contribute to their lives as well.

Share the workload

Are you the only person in charge of HOA administration? Even in a small community, the amount of effort involved can overwhelm the most dedicated volunteer—and swamp your schedule with more work than you can handle without compromising other commitments.

Instead of plowing ahead and trying to make the best of the situation, share the workload with other community residents. Your homeowners association website software should offer you the ability to add other people with administrative credentials—and if you’ve chosen the right package, you’ll also find that you can establish sub-administrative roles to which you can delegate some portion of a full set of administrative responsibilities. That way, a sub-admin can take care of community events, serve as a monitor of the newsfeed on which you post neighborhood updates, assist with architectural reviews, or take on other tasks that can lighten your load.

With more hands on deck, you’ll have more time to reply to residents’ questions, assist prospective homeowners, and handle the business of your community with timely responsiveness. That’s an enhancement that benefits everyone in your HOA, and your residents will notice the difference.

Simplify payments—for everyone

Even people who love to manage fiscal affairs aren’t excited about the tasks and the drudgery involved in invoicing and collecting homeowners association dues and fees. This is one aspect of HOA administration for which your website can lighten your workload exponentially—that is, if your homeowners association website software provider enables you to invoice and collect payments securely online.

For those of you who haven’t yet made the switch to the convenient advantages of online billing and collection, think about all the complications and time-consuming effort you can save. First, you can skip the process of creating paper invoices. Second, you can avoid standing in line at the post office, as well as costs of paper, envelopes, and stamps—or the hassles of attaching each of a batch of invoices to individual e-mail messages. Third, you no longer have to deposit checks and other paper payments. Fourth, you don’t need to follow up with late payers because your homeowners association website software takes care of that for you.

Online payments offer considerable advantages from your residents’ perspective as well. No more checks to write and mail. Your members simply log in to your attractive, responsive HOA website, enter their financial details, and finalize their payments with complete confidence in the security of the process. If you’ve chosen the right homeowners association website software provider, your site includes built-in payment processing, so you don’t need to research processing companies or worry about whether their actual performance matches the claims they make when they try to convince you to sign up with them.

Eliminate paperwork and guesswork

How many residents paid this month’s invoice for dues? Does a prospective website member actually qualify to join, and did they provide copies of their documentation when they signed up? How many ARC requests did you receive this month, and which of them actually represent proper adherence to community covenants?

If your answer to these kinds of questions is “Let me check my e-mail,” or “I’m sure I have those papers in a file folder somewhere,” you’re making life difficult for yourself in ways that your website actually can simplify.

When you need to request paint chips, floor plans, and other supporting details to validate an ARC request, why not make this the simple matter of attaching digital documentation to an online request form? That way, your residents can bundle up everything you need for an ARC request review into one easy-to-locate online resource.

When your membership sign-up process requires proof of ownership or residence, why not make this just as simple as the ARC documentation process, with online attachment of materials to a customizable signup form that you can create to match your community needs?

All of these scenarios and many more become faster and easier to administer when you choose the right homeowners association website software provider for your community. You want a site that’s built on software designed with a full understanding of how HOAs operate and which types of functionality they really need to perform at their best. That’s why it’s so important to prequalify the features your provider offers before you sign up and start building your site.

Choose the right HOA software provider for your community

At HOA Start, we have years of experience working with homeowners associations of all kinds and sizes, from small communities to large HOAs with a mixture of single-family and multi-family development. We’re convinced that we offer you the best choice for your homeowners association—and we’re happy to prove it. Check out one of our demo sites—or sign up for a completely free 14-day trial and experience our full feature set for yourself. Once you see how our homeowners association website software platform can make life easier for you and for your residents, you’ll wonder how you lived without a full-featured, easy-to-use HOA website.