How HOA Financial Software Makes Billing and Payments Easier
You can’t operate a homeowners association like a book club. An HOA is a real business, typically of the non-profit variety, and likely staffed with volunteers, not paid employees. But the decisions it makes, the rules it enforces, and the dues it imposes all have very real consequences for the people who live in its neighborhoods. As a result, it’s important for HOAs and their administrators to remember that just about everything they do—especially if it involves money—should be designed to work harmoniously with residents, not to create problems.
And that’s the trouble with many “legacy” invoicing processes: They simply don’t work very well or even very efficiently. If you still send out invoices that you have to create one at a time, collect check payments and worry about whether they’ll bounce, you’re spending way more time on this process than it should require—and achieving results that slow down your collections efforts.
Modern HOA financial software can do more than save you administrative time. It’s an all-around improvement on every manual financial process because it automates aspects of your system that otherwise make community finances cumbersome.
Modernize your invoicing processes
Your first step into the “I can’t believe how easy this is” world of modern HOA financial software comes when you identify the tasks you want to improve and look for the right HOA financial software package to meet your needs. For many homeowners associations and their administrators, resident invoicing tops the list of time-intensive processes they want to enhance—and that’s one of the biggest improvements that HOA financial software can help you implement.
Rather than creating invoices through a mail-merged word processing document that draws its data from a spreadsheet, or some other digital but not-quite-automated process, HOA financial software uses your online member information in conjunction with the dues items you set up. On the date you specify, invoices go out to the people you identify to receive them.
Does your HOA development include neighborhoods with varying dues? Do you invoice on a rolling year-round schedule instead of billing everyone at once? Do you accept partial payments or charge fees for late payers? All these contingencies are easy for good HOA financial software to accommodate.
Review payment status
Of course, invoices form only one part of the financial picture of your homeowners association. The real details include how many residents have paid on time and how many are late. After all, an invoice is an expectation of payment, not an actual result. To give you a full view of the big picture, HOA financial software provides onscreen and downloadable reports so you can see exactly where you stand at any given moment.
At the same time, HOA financial software updates your residents with timely payment reminders, and lists their outstanding invoices on the member dashboard of your community association management software. This way, everyone has the information they need to know what to do and when to do it.
Remind and record
How do you handle residents who fail to pay on or before the due dates you specify for your invoices? Powerful HOA financial software sends out reminders before a dues item becomes late, and also provides a polite nudge to push late payers along. Because HOA financial software interacts directly with your homeowners association website software, these reminders include a direct link to log in and pay up.
Do you still receive paper payments from some of your residents? Despite the security and convenience of modern online payment options, some people continue to write you a check rather than log in to take care of their obligations. HOA financial software can’t stand in line for you at the bank, but this digital convenience can enable you to record payments manually for those few residents who continue to prefer paper payments.
Along with recording manual payments, HOA financial software also makes it easy to void an invoice when that becomes necessary. Expect HOA financial software to preserve your audit trail, however, and mark the voided item as such so you can see the full picture of your data when you download reports for review.
Make the right choice
At HOA Start, we’ve built our HOA financial software based on years of experience dealing with the fiscal needs of communities like yours. Take a tour of our HOA financial software, sign up for a demonstration or even a free trial. We’re confident that we’re the answer to your HOA financial software needs.
