Your Board Is Running on a Group Text. Introducing Board Chat.

Look at how your board actually talks to each other right now.

There is a group text with five people in it, and one board member’s phone drops out of it every few months because somebody replied from a different number. There is an email chain about the landscaping bid where three people replied-all and two people replied to just the sender. There is a screenshot of a resident’s dues balance that the treasurer took, cropped, and texted to the president. There is a photo of a leaning fence post somebody took in March that is now buried 900 messages up.

None of it is searchable. None of it is connected to a single number in your HOA’s actual books. And when the secretary steps down in November and a new one steps up, that person inherits exactly nothing. Not the thread, not the context, not the reason the board picked the more expensive roofer last year.

We just shipped Board Chat to fix that. This post covers what was broken, what we built, and the part that makes it different from every other group chat: Herald is in the room.

The group text is not a system

Boards do not choose the group text. They fall into it, because it is the only tool where everyone already has an account.

What it costs you shows up later:

• Nothing is searchable. “What did we agree the pool vendor’s number was?” means scrolling. Nobody scrolls. Somebody re-asks.
• Nothing is connected to your data. The conversation is about dues, vendors, and work orders, but the actual dues, vendors, and work orders live in another app entirely. So somebody stops the conversation, opens the software, screenshots a row, and pastes it back in. That screenshot is now the record.
• Membership drifts. New board member gets added in July. Nobody thinks to remove the treasurer who resigned in April. A private board conversation is running on a distribution list nobody audits.
• New members inherit nothing. Handing over a board seat should include handing over the context. In a group text, the context is on someone else’s phone, mixed in with their family’s messages.

And the fallback is worse. Boards that avoid the group text end up discussing board business in email, which means board business is sitting in six personal Gmail accounts, or on the public community channels, which is how a sensitive delinquency conversation ends up somewhere a resident can read it.

What we shipped

Board Chat is a private, realtime group chat that only your community’s board members and admins can see. It is not a separate app or a separate login. It lives inside the Herald chat window you already use.

On your phone: tap the Herald button in the bottom bar, then choose Board Chat from the Admin section of the menu. Or open Herald and flip to the Board tab at the top.

On desktop: click the floating Herald bubble in the bottom-right corner and switch to the Board tab.

If there are unread board messages, the Herald button pulses with a count, and opening it drops you straight into the Board tab. Every message shows who wrote it and their board title, so a new member reading back through knows that “Dana” is the treasurer without having to ask.

Residents never see the Board tab. It is not hidden behind a setting they might flip. The messages do not exist for them anywhere in the app.

The part that is actually new: Herald is in the chat

Every other board chat tool is a room where people type at each other. This one has your community’s AI sitting in it.

Type @ and a picker appears with your fellow board members and Herald. Mention @herald with a question and it answers right there in the conversation, where the whole board can see the answer. Because every reader in that room is a verified board member, Herald can talk about balances, delinquency, vendors, and work orders openly - things it would never say to a resident.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Budget night, and nobody opens a spreadsheet

The board is arguing about next year’s dues number. Somebody needs to know how collections are actually going. Instead of hanging up, opening the admin panel, and screenshotting a table:

Dana (Treasurer): Before we land on a number, how bad is collections right now?

Dana (Treasurer): @herald who’s behind on dues?

Herald: Nine properties are carrying a balance, $4,180 in total receivables. The three largest are 214 Abundance Crossing ($1,240), 1107 Pine Hollow ($860), and 38 Ridgeview Court ($610). The other six are all under $200 and look like a single missed cycle.

Herald: [ Open the ledger ]

That last line is a real button. Herald’s answers in Board Chat can carry a single action chip that jumps whoever taps it to the right admin screen. It never navigates on its own, because the reply is sitting in front of the whole board and nobody’s phone should jump somewhere they did not ask to go.

A vendor quote lands mid-conversation

Marcus (President): Pool guy came back at $1,850 a quarter. That feels high to me.

Marcus (President): @herald what did we spend on pool maintenance this year?

Herald: Pool Maintenance is a $6,000 line in the 2026 published budget, filed under the Maintenance category. Four quarters at $1,850 would be $7,400, so that quote puts you about 23% over the line as budgeted. Spend to date against it is on the Budget vs Actual report.

Herald: [ Open Budget vs Actual ]

Herald answers from your community’s published budget, with the real line item and the category it rolls up to, and then hands you the one-tap route to the report. The board did not leave the conversation. Nobody had to remember which screen that number lives on.

The agenda writes itself

The Sunday before the monthly meeting, somebody asks the question that usually takes an hour of prep:

Marcus (President): Meeting Tuesday. What’s still hanging?

Marcus (President): @herald which work orders are still open?

Herald: Four are still open. Pool pump reseal (In Progress, Delta Aquatics). Front gate sensor (Scheduled, Gulf Coast Access). Mulch refresh at the entrance (Open, no vendor assigned yet). Playground swing bolt (Open, no vendor assigned yet). The two unassigned ones have been sitting the longest.

That is the maintenance section of your agenda, produced in one message, in the same thread where the board is going to discuss it.

And sometimes you just need one person

Not everything needs the AI. Most of what happens in Board Chat is board members talking:

Marcus (President): @Dana can you sign off on the mulch quote before Thursday? The crew wants to schedule.

Four seconds later, Dana’s phone lights up:

Abundance Crossing Board Chat Marcus mentioned you: @Dana can you sign off on the mulch quote before Thursday? The crew wants to schedule.

Not “you have a new message.” Not a badge she will notice Friday. Her name, the person who said it, and the actual ask, on the lock screen. Tapping it opens the app directly to the conversation, even from cold.

Everyone else on the board gets the ordinary version of that push, so the whole board sees the thread move without being told they specifically owe an answer.

Everyone stays in the loop, on whatever they are holding

Board members are not sitting at desks. The push goes to phones, tablets, and now desktop browsers too, so the treasurer working on the laptop and the president out at the mailbox both see it.

Notification preferences are respected. A board member who has turned messages off does not get pinged, and Herald’s reply to the person who asked the question does not push back at that person - they are already looking at it.

There is one more channel, and it is the one boards do not expect. If you call your community’s Herald phone line from the number on your HomeHerald profile and you are a board member, Herald knows it. It answers you in board mode: per-property balances, open work orders, and the recent board chat, including how many messages you have not read yet. Driving home from work, you can ask what you missed and get told. Board Chat is not a room you have to be sitting in.

Where the line is, and why boards can trust it

Board-level data stays in board-level surfaces. That boundary is enforced in the code, not by convention:

• Herald verifies your role on the server before it answers a single board question. A resident cannot reach board-scoped answers by any route, including calling the underlying function directly.
• Residents only ever see their own information. The same Herald that will read the whole delinquency list to a board member will not tell a resident anything about a neighbor’s balance.
• Herald never reads private direct messages between members. Not the board’s, not residents’, not even the message history of the person asking the question. Before Herald answers anything in Board Chat, member-to-member messages are stripped out of what it can see. Only community-wide broadcasts survive. If you ask Herald what somebody privately messaged somebody else, the honest answer is that it does not know, and it will say so.

That last rule matters more than it sounds. A board chat with an AI in it is only useful if everyone in the community understands exactly what the AI can and cannot see. One firm, easy-to-explain boundary beats a settings page full of toggles.

What Board Chat is not

Board Chat is a working conversation, not a system of record. That is a deliberate choice.

Decisions that need a paper trail should still land where the paper trail lives: Community Voting for anything the board formally decides, the financial ledger for money, an announcement for anything residents need to know. The habit we recommend is simple. Hash it out in Board Chat, then make it official in the right place.

We also did not ship Herald posting into the chat on its own. It speaks when a board member mentions it, and not otherwise. A group chat where the AI volunteers opinions is a group chat people mute.

You can delete your own messages, see who has read your latest one, and page back through the full history with “Load earlier messages.” Nothing expires.

Pricing and availability

Board Chat is included on every HomeHerald plan, starting at $49/month for up to 105 properties. There is no per-message charge, no per-board-member seat, and no communications add-on. Every community starts with 14 days free and no credit card, and adding a card whenever you are ready starts a full 30-day free trial on top of that. No contracts, cancel anytime.

It arrives with the rest of it: Herald Chat, Community Voting, Work Orders, the Community Budget, dues, documents, and everything else on the Automate plan. Herald Voice rides along on Automate+. Prices are set by your community’s size, not per unit.

The bigger picture

Boards do not need another place to talk. They have five of those already, and that is the problem. What a board needs is one place to talk that knows what the community’s books say, tells the right person when they are the one being asked, and is still there in two years when a new secretary wants to know why the board picked the roofer it picked.

Turn on your Board tab and put the group text down.

See plans and pricing

Related Reading

• Herald Voice: What AI Actually Does on Your HOA’s Phone Call
• HOA Communication Best Practices
• HOA Board Member Duties and Responsibilities
• HOA Board Member Burnout
• HOA Voting Software with Audit Trail