Revolutionize Your Community Finances with HOA Billing Software
Quick: What’s your least-favorite homeowners association administrative task? If you said “Billing,” you’re not alone. Of all the responsibilities you undertake—most likely as a volunteer—billing is among the most complex. For one thing, it involves money, and that’s an immediate source of potential confusion just because of the complicated relationships many people have with their finances. For another, it can require many forms of communication for many reasons: to send out invoices, remind residents of their obligations, nudge again if members fall behind on remittances, and so one.
But you can transform your dues collection efforts in many ways with one comprehensive set of tools. Provided that you find the right package for your community, HOA billing software can save you time, bring in payments faster than with other invoicing methods, and clarify the status of every invoice so you always know exactly where you stand with every resident.
How does self managed HOA software help you accomplish all these transformative changes in your invoicing process? Think about the benefits of this important set of tools in terms of its focal functions.
Define your terms
Every homeowners association follows its own unique billing sequence. True, the similarities among them may be greater than their differences, but every community is one of a kind in some ways, and each one needs HOA billing software that respects its specific requirements. The ideal package offers you the flexibility to define any type of invoicing scenario you need—and to adopt more than one approach so you can handle the full roster of your billing requirements.
That means you’ll need HOA billing software that can set up invoices with just about any billing frequency you can name, from monthly to yearly. On top of the ability to establish the right billing frequency, you also need to be able to customize your invoicing with the right terms.
When you bill out on a schedule defined by frequency and terms, you set a due date for each item. Your payment terms define how many days in advance of the due date your residents receive the invoice. This way, you can set up your billing schedules so you know when invoices go out as well as when they become due and payable.
Add essential fees and options
If your HOA billing software integrates with HOA payment software—and the best HOA billing software packages do exactly that–you’ll find that the payment processor built in to your package charges a small percentage of the face value of every invoice, plus a few cents, for each invoice it handles for you. That fee deducts from the amount you collect. To recapture the fee, HOA billing software should enable you to pass it through to your residents as part of the invoice.
Homeowners association administrators differ in their opinions of late fees. Some think they’re an essential part of a strong collections effort, applying precisely enough financial pressure to motivate residents’ compliance with due dates. Others prefer to avoid them altogether and find other ways to encourage timely payment. Regardless of where you and your community fit in to this continuum of opinion, your HOA billing software should accommodate your expectations with the necessary options.
Some HOA administrators like to offer their residents the option of covering a single dues invoice with more than one payment. If that approach increases compliance, it can be a valuable tool—and with the right HOA billing software, it’s no more complicated to implement than a single checkbox on an invoice setup form.
Special approaches for special charges
Perhaps the most difficult type of HOA fee to implement and collect comes in the form of the one-time charge. These items don’t bill out like regular recurring invoices because they’re not for the types of costs that those collection efforts cover. Instead, they enable residents to pay for replacement mailboxes, pool keys, gate fobs, and other items that wear out or disappear.
With the right HOA billing software, you can set up these one-time charges to cover periodic purchases—and even items for which the buyer sets the price, based on a “floor” that you define as the minimum amount. In this form, HOA billing software makes it easy to accept sponsor donations and other variable-amount fees.
How much convenience can HOA billing software add to your homeowners association’s administrative function? So much that you won’t want to work without it—and you’ll find the right HOA billing software capabilities built in to the homeowners association software packages from HOA Start.
