What Condo Association Software Can Do for Your Community
Condominium associations share many of the same challenges that single-family developments face, including collection of dues and fees, regulation of requests to remodel a residence, enforcement of community rules, and more. Their legal structures—and the terms of home ownership—may be different, but one thing condominium associations need every bit as much as any other types of HOAs is a solid basis for their administrative functions.
Condo association software provides that administrative platform. When you find the right software package for your community, you can put the power and convenience of digital technology to work for you. After all, if you’re like most homeowners association administrators, you donate your time as a volunteer, trying to make life easier and better for your neighbors and your neighborhood. As you balance that commitment with all the other demands on your time, technology can help you speed up your work and make tasks more efficient.
What should you expect to find in a self managed HOA software package? Start by making a list of the administrative functions you want to speed up or make less complicated—and look for these types of features from the provider you choose.
Member management
Every resident in your condominium development is an important part of your membership picture. Condo association software can help you manage every aspect of your dealings with individual members and your community as a whole. For starters, let condo association software simplify the process of signing up members to access your website itself and neighborhood services through it.
That process requires you to capture a fair amount of personally identifiable information. Exactly how much depends on the decisions your association makes about what it needs to know. Regardless of whether you record nothing more than name, address, e-mail address, and phone number, or you create a customized member input form so you can build a more detailed picture of each resident, you need two things from your condo association software.
First and foremost, you want data security. Your residents entrust you with essential details about their lives, and you owe it to them to protect that information. Along with those fundamental protections, you want your condo association software to give your residents the ability to specify how much of their information they share, either in an online members-only directory or in a much more public context.
Second, your condo association software needs to help you manage the data you acquire and use it appropriately to communicate with your residents. In fact, the best condo association software packages include built-in messaging services that enable you to text and e-mail your membership directly through the software.
Payments and processing
Your condo association relies on recurring dues and fees to pay for essential services. Few improvements can streamline condo administrative functions to a greater extent than online billing and payment processing.
Once you experience the speed and convenience of billing dues and fees directly through condo association software, you won’t miss manual processes one bit. When you can create invoices directly through your condo association software and schedule them to go out on time without any further intervention on your part, you gain peace of mind—and regain the time you formerly had to invest in a billing process as convoluted as it was tedious and time consuming.
Combine online invoicing with online payments, and you not only make it easy for residents to meet their obligations, but you also receive those dollars as soon as these transactions conclude. If you tried to incorporate this secure payment processing into a do-it-yourself online solution, you’d struggle to create the seamless, reliable process that condo association software can provide. With the right provider and software package, you can eliminate most of the delay between invoicing and income. For stragglers who pay late, condo association software includes built-in reminders.
Sure, you’ll still have residents who prefer to pay by check, and won’t use an online payment feature that offers ACH debit processing. Your condo association software also needs a manual entry feature you can use to record these payments. Eventually, the safe, secure payment experience you offer should go a long way toward convincing these paper-payment holdouts to move on.
Move forward with condo association software
How do you find the right condo association software option for your community? Look for a package with the expertise of HOA specialists behind it. At HOA Start, we’re dedicated to meeting the needs of communities like yours—and putting your needs first in every aspect of our condo association software.
