Everything HomeHerald Does for a Self-Managed HOA

You volunteered for the board because the pool needed fixing, the ARC inbox was a war zone, or the last treasurer left a spreadsheet that nobody could open. You did not volunteer to spend every Saturday morning chasing late dues, mediating violations, drafting meeting minutes, and copy-pasting payment notifications from Venmo into a ledger.

Most board members are part-time volunteers doing their best for their community while a day job, a family, and a real life happen in parallel. The reality is brutal: too much to do, not enough time, and a community counting on you to get it right. Burnout is the rule, not the exception. The treasurer is the first to quit. The secretary is second.

HomeHerald is built around that reality.

This is AI as the operating system, from the ground up. Not a chatbot grafted onto a portal. Not a “smart” feature added in the last release. Every workflow in the platform - dues collection, violation review, vendor dispatch, resident chat, email triage, expense entry, lost-pet matching - was designed around AI from the first commit. The 5 agents are almost-autonomous or fully autonomous, your call. They take every board member to the finish line. All the volunteer has to do is make a decision and step a toe over the line.

The point of building this way is to decouple self-managed HOAs from expensive management companies that over-bill and over-charge for the privilege of doing what software can do. HomeHerald is the full operating stack at the best price on the market - free up to 50 properties, then $49/mo - and it is backed by a founder furiously building it to be the best tool that exists, for his own neighborhood and his friends’ neighborhoods.

This post is the receipts. Everything HomeHerald does, in one place. Skim the bullets. Anchor-jump to the parts you care about. Send this link to whoever is on the fence.

Why “AI as the operating system” matters

The reason it feels different in practice:

• A board member opens an email; the AI has already classified it, drafted a reply grounded in the HOA’s own documents, and queued the one-click resolution.
• A resident asks Herald Chat about a vote that closed last Tuesday; the chatbot answers because it lives inside the same system that ran the vote.
• A treasurer uploads a receipt; by the time the file finishes uploading, the expense entry is drafted with the right category and vendor pre-filled.
• A complaint comes in with a photo; Herald Shield matches it against the covenants, finds the cited section, and queues a one-click “issue warning” or “open for review.”

That kind of integration is not achievable with a bolt-on AI assistant. It is only achievable when AI is the operating system from the first commit.

We also shipped the industry’s first resident-trained HOA chatbot. It still works better than the chatbots that came after, because it lives inside a system that knows everything that has ever happened in the community.

What residents get

When a resident joins:

• A native iOS app with biometric login, push notifications, and Apple Pay - read a full tour of what board members and residents can do on it. A native Android app, also available.
• A personal dashboard that shows their balance, open work orders, upcoming bookings, RSVPs, and any covenant violations against their property.
• An always-available chat button that answers questions about CC&Rs, amenity rules, balances, vote dates, and city services - personalized to their address, role, and household.
• A directory of neighbors (opt-in), the board, vendors the community actually uses, and amenity rules.
• One-tap dues payment with credit card, ACH, or Apple Pay through Stripe.
• Amenity bookings with conflict detection, deposit collection, and automatic refunds.
• Cast votes in any ballot the board opens. One vote per property, full audit trail.
• See events and RSVP. Block parties, board meetings, work days. One tap to mark “going,” automatic day-before reminder.
• Submit maintenance requests (if the HOA enables it). Photo evidence, AI-classified, routed to the board.
• Report covenant violations with photo evidence. AI runs the report against the community’s covenants and queues a board decision.
• Submit ARC requests. AI checks the request against the rules and either queues it for board review or asks the resident for missing information before it ever reaches the board.
• Submit general inquiries to the HOA board. AI categorizes the question, drafts a reply grounded in the HOA’s own documents, and the board approves with one click.
• Share vendor recommendations. A neighbor finds a great electrician; they post the contact; everyone in the community sees it. No more “who do you use for X?” threads on Nextdoor.
• Direct message any resident on the platform. Built-in messaging. List your phone number to neighbors if you want to, hide it if you do not. The resident picks.
• Choose how to be notified. Email, text message, or push notification - the resident picks the channel for every kind of alert in their settings. The board never overrides the resident’s preference.
• Pet registration with lost-pet broadcast and AI photo matching.
• Household invites by magic link so a spouse, adult child, or co-resident can join the same property.

Why this matters: the single biggest source of board burnout is residents emailing the board for things the CC&Rs already answer, or submitting violation reports that do not meet the policy threshold. HomeHerald lets residents self-serve nearly everything. The things they cannot self-serve are pre-screened, pre-categorized, and pre-drafted before the board ever sees them.

Feature pages referenced above: Resident Portal, Mobile App, Herald Chat, Payments, Amenity Booking, Voting, Events, Maintenance Requests, Smart Request Management, Herald Shield, Pet Protect, Communications.

Related reading: Introducing Community Voting - Introducing Community Events - HOA Communication Best Practices - Understanding Your CC&Rs - What Are CC&Rs - Work Orders Without Vendor Portals - Your HOA Data Belongs to Your HOA.

The admin tab

The admin tab is the volunteer board’s daily driver. Four areas where the most powerful work happens:

Resident Communication

One screen, three channels. The board writes a single announcement and sends it across push notifications, email, and physical mail in the same flow. Pick the channels. Pick the audience (all residents, late-dues only, no-payments-only, custom list). Hit send. The system handles delivery, tracking, and retry on every channel independently. The board never copy-pastes the same message into three different tools.

For follow-up: open and read rates tracked per broadcast. Three urgency tiers (INFO, WARNING, URGENT) with optional dismiss-able banners on the resident dashboard.

Create Events

Block parties, board meetings, work days, holiday gatherings. Calendar-based. RSVP tracking with attendance audit. Recurring events for things that happen monthly or quarterly. Day-before reminder automatic. Banner on the resident dashboard so nobody misses it. Closes automatically when the RSVP window passes.

Hold Votes

One vote per property (or per board seat), full audit trail, results that can be printed for the records. Open a vote, set the deadline, the system handles the rest. Closes automatically. Tally is computed. Results broadcast.

The audit trail is privacy-aware: the board can see exactly who voted what (for record-keeping and edge-case dispute resolution), but residents only see the totals. Voter privacy is structural, not a setting.

Herald Chat knows about every vote ever held, opened, or closed. A resident can ask “did the board ever vote on the pool hours change?” and get a real answer with the date and the result.

Books & Banking

Everything financial happens here. One place, one source of truth.

• Cash position - operating, reserve, and trust account balances on the dashboard, refreshed in real time.
• Dues generation - monthly, quarterly, or annual. Auto-charged on a configurable day-of-month. Per-property apply-standard-dues toggle. Split-payment installments.
• Flexible dues and assessments - charge different amounts to different units. Build a Community Assessment once (base dues, yard care, pool access) and apply it to every property or just the units that opt in, add a Property Assessment to a single home, and post a special assessment across the community in one action. Every charge lands itemized on the resident’s ledger.
• Late fees - configurable grace period, configurable amount, applied automatically when the grace window closes.
• Per-property balance - rolling running balance per property, used everywhere (cash dashboard, overdue detection, ledger, AR aging).
• Stripe Connect - per-community Stripe sub-merchant. Credit card, ACH, Apple Pay.
• Off-platform payment tracking - PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, check, bank transfer. Tracked manually or via Email Inbox payment matching.
• Expenses - 13 categories, vendor lookup, receipt upload with AI extraction (vendor, amount, date, line items).
• Recurring expenses - monthly, quarterly, annual.
• Bank reconciliation - per-account, per-month, statement PDF attachment, soft-lock with audit trail. Re-open on demand.
• Profit and Loss - cash basis by default, accrual available. Six period presets. PDF and CSV export.
• AR aging - five buckets, color-coded, by property.
• AP aging - vendor bills with open and overdue tracking.
• Quarterly earnings - Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 summaries with comparative period analysis.
• Reports - cash flow, owner occupancy, accounts receivable aging, expense category breakdowns, comparative periods. PDF with letterhead, CSV for spreadsheets.
• Audit trail - every edit on every record, attributed to a user, timestamped.

Cash basis is the default because that is how an HOA actually operates - what came in, what went out. Accrual lumps annual dues into a single month and produces a P&L the treasurer cannot explain to the board. The system supports both, but the default fits the volunteer treasurer’s mental model.

The other admin areas

The admin tab also handles:

• Getting Started - the onboarding checklist, AI-assisted import (drag CSV, drag covenant PDF, go live in an afternoon).
• Residents - the roster, with bulk invites, role assignment, status transitions, and approval gates for new residents.
• Requests - every covenant complaint, ARC submission, maintenance issue, and general inquiry, with AI classification and Herald Shield verdicts inline.
• Work Orders - vendor dispatch, COI tracking, the lifecycle from DRAFT to PAID.
• Settings - community profile, branding, payment methods, dues config, integrations, plan and usage.
• Automation - the AI agents (Dues Chaser, Herald Shield, Email Inbox, Pet Protect) and their autonomy modes.

Internal links: Board Dashboard, Financial Management, Replace QuickBooks.

The 6 AI agents

The agents are almost-autonomous or fully autonomous. The board picks the autonomy level for each one. The default is “AI recommends, board clicks to approve.” Crank it to “fully autonomous” and the agent runs without supervision. Either way, every action is logged.

1. Herald Chat - the industry’s first resident-trained HOA chatbot

HomeHerald shipped Herald Chat before any other HOA platform had a working AI. It does four things at once:

• It knows the community’s documents. CC&Rs, bylaws, amenity rules, dues schedule, fine schedule, parking rules. It cites the source document in every answer.
• It knows the resident. It uses the resident’s address, role, household, and current balance to personalize answers. A resident asking about late fees gets their actual late fee, not a generic policy paragraph.
• It knows the software. A resident can ask “how do I pay my dues?” or “where do I RSVP for the block party?” or “how do I report a violation?” and Herald Chat walks them through the actual app.
• It knows everything that has ever happened in the community. Every board meeting summary, every vote opened or closed, every announcement sent, every event held, every vendor recommendation, every violation issued, every dues change, every amenity rule update. The community’s entire institutional memory lives inside Herald Chat. A new board member can ask “what did the previous board decide about the fence color rule?” and get the receipt.

That kind of memory works because Herald Chat is not a separate product wired into a portal; it is part of the same operating system that ran the vote, posted the announcement, and recorded the board decision. The training set updates every time HomeHerald ships a new feature. The day a feature goes live, Herald Chat already knows how to explain it.

Always-on for free-tier communities. Floating button on every screen across iOS, Android, and web.

2. Herald Shield - violations and ARC, on autopilot

Herald Shield auto-manages two of the most time-consuming jobs on the volunteer board: covenant violation reports and Architectural Review Committee submissions. Both have the same shape - a resident submits something, the board has to review it against the community’s rules, and there is a yes/no/needs-more-info verdict.

Herald Shield reads the submission against the community’s covenants and rules, applies a configurable threshold, and:

• Below threshold - rejects the submission and tells the resident exactly what is missing or incorrect. The board never sees it. The resident knows what to fix and resubmits.
• At or above threshold - returns one of three verdicts (VIOLATION_FOUND, NO_VIOLATION, NEEDS_REVIEW) with reasoning that cites the specific covenant section. For violations, it recommends a fine amount based on the community’s published fine schedule.

Three autonomy modes per community:

• AI recommends, board clicks to approve. AI does the analysis. The board hits the button.
• AI auto-applies based on the escalation ladder. AI finds a violation, applies the warning or fine according to the offense count at that property (tracked by address, not by complaint), notifies the resident, and logs the action. The board sees it in the audit trail.
• AI manages end to end. The board never touches it. AI handles intake, verdict, communication, and escalation across the full lifecycle.

Tracks repeat offenses by address, not by complaint. Can require photo evidence (strict mode).

3. Dues Chaser - the autonomous dues collector

Dues Chaser owns the entire dues lifecycle, end to end, with zero ongoing work from the treasurer. Set it once, it runs forever.

• Day 1 of each cycle. Generates the dues for every property with apply-standard-dues on. Sends a notice via email with the amount, due date, and a one-tap pay button.
• Grace period configurable per community. During grace, no late fees, no chase. Treasurer never touches it.
• Day after grace closes. Applies the late fee automatically. Sends a reminder via email and in-app notification.
• Day +7. Second reminder via SMS (if the resident has opted in).
• Day +14. Escalates to a formal letter, mailed via real physical mail. Tracked through delivery.
• Day +30. Final notice with collection-action language, mailed via physical mail.
• Throughout. Every reminder, every fee, every channel is logged on the resident’s ledger. The treasurer can see at a glance exactly what was sent, when, and through what channel.

Collecting dues is the most thankless, most time-consuming, most-likely-to-cause-a-neighbor-fight job on the board. Dues Chaser does all of it without the treasurer writing a single email, licking a single stamp, or having a single awkward driveway conversation.

4. Email Inbox - the shared board inbox

Every HomeHerald community gets a single shared inbox that the entire board sees. No more forwarding threads to the secretary. No more “who replied to Marcia about the tree?” The whole board reads the same inbox, sees the same threads, and knows the same status on every conversation.

AI takes over from there. Inbound emails are auto-categorized into five buckets - PAYMENT, INVOICE, VIOLATION REPORT, GENERAL INQUIRY, OTHER - each with a one-click resolution path:

• Payment notifications (Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, PayPal, bank transfers) - AI extracts the amount and the payer name, smart-matches to a resident, and offers a one-click “apply to balance” button. Treasurer approves, the ledger updates, the resident gets a receipt.
• Invoices from vendors - AI extracts vendor, amount, date, and line items. One click drafts an expense entry with the right category attached.
• Violation reports from neighbors - AI converts the email into a structured violation, attaches the photo, runs Herald Shield against the covenants, and queues a one-click “issue warning” or “open for review.”
• General inquiries from residents - AI reads the question, matches it against the HOA’s documents (CC&Rs, bylaws, amenity rules, dues schedule, board minutes, prior decisions), and drafts a complete reply in the board member’s voice. The board member opens the email, hits “AI Reply,” reviews the draft, and sends. The answer is grounded in the community’s own documents, not generic boilerplate.

For the board member who got nominated three weeks ago and has 60 unread emails to triage, this is the difference between an hour of work and four minutes.

5. Pet Protect - lost pet vision matching

Residents register their pet (photo, breed, description). When a pet goes missing, the resident files a lost-pet report. The system broadcasts to every resident in the community.

If somebody files a sighting with a photo, AI compares the sighting photo against every registered pet and returns a confidence score (0-100) plus a list of matching and differing features. Score 80+ triggers an automatic notification to the lost pet’s owner, with the sighting photo and the location.

A pet registry is a passive list. Pet Protect is an active workflow. When a beloved family member goes missing, the difference is everything.

6. Herald Welcome - closings without the phone tag

Every sale in a community starts a closing scramble: a real estate agent the board has never met needs covenants, dues balance, the welcome letter for the buyer, and contact info, on a deadline. Herald Welcome emails the listing agent a private HomeHerald portal containing the welcome letter, covenants, current account balance on that property, annual dues, and an AI chat assistant trained on the HOA’s rules.

There are two ways to use it: Manual Listing Entry (free with HomeHerald), where the board adds each listing themselves in seconds, or Herald Automate ($49/mo), where HomeHerald preemptively finds new for-sale homes in your community and reaches out to the listing agent the moment a home goes on the market. Both paths produce the same private agent portal and audit trail.

The agent verifies their email with a 6-digit code and has everything they need to close - no estoppel request, no phone tag, no 9pm follow-up. Replies route to the HOA’s connected inbox so the board stays in the loop. Every link minted and every download by the agent is logged for a full audit trail.

For boards: the buyer arrives at closing already familiar with the rules, which means fewer covenant violations from new owners in the first six months. For agents: they get the documents on day one of the listing instead of waiting two weeks for the board to respond.

Learn more about Herald Welcome.

Internal links: Herald Chat, Herald Shield, Email Inbox, Pet Protect, Herald Welcome.

Communications: 5 channels

The hardest part of HOA communication is not writing the message. It is reaching the resident who only opens email twice a month, the one who never installed the app, and the one who told you in 2019 that they prefer paper.

HomeHerald sends through five channels:

1. In-app notifications - real-time, with read tracking.
2. Email - via the community’s own Gmail (authentic sender) or platform fallback (hello@homeherald.ai).
3. SMS - per-resident opt-in.
4. Push notifications - native, for users on iOS and Android.
5. Physical mail - real USPS-stamped letters with delivery tracking.

A board admin writes one announcement and sends it across push, email, and physical mail in the same flow. Pick the channels, pick the audience, hit send. The system handles delivery, tracking, and retry on every channel independently.

Residents pick how they want to be notified. Email, text, push - their settings, their channel. The board never overrides the resident’s preference.

Internal link: Communications.

Amenities and bookings

Three amenity types: bookable assets (pool, pavilion, court), common areas (parking lot, mail room, fitness room), and external link assets (a venue with its own booking URL).

What it does:

• Calendar-based booking with conflict detection.
• Booking duration types: hourly, half-day, full-day.
• Per-amenity rules display: capacity, quiet hours, guest limits, damage policy, cancellation window.
• Stripe deposit hold (card validated, not charged) plus rental fee (charged 24 hours before the rental).
• 5-day deposit auto-refund post-checkout. Daily refund cycle, automatic notification to the renter.
• 24-hour pre-booking reminder. Renter gets a push and email. Board members get a check-in alert so somebody can prep the amenity if needed.
• QR-code booking confirmations for amenity check-in.
• Booking detail modal with cancellation, refund, and full history.

The calendar fails when nobody can see what is booked. The deposit fails when the board collects the money and forgets to refund it three weeks later. HomeHerald solves both in one flow.

Internal link: Amenity Booking.

Requests and work orders

The single biggest reason vendor portals fail is that vendors do not log in. They run on email and text. They have ten different communities all asking them to learn ten different platforms. They are not going to.

HomeHerald accepted that reality and built around it. Work orders dispatch by email. The vendor never sees a portal. The vendor replies to the email. The system threads every reply back to the work order, advances the status when AI detects “estimate provided” or “scheduled” or “completed,” and timestamps every transition. Vendor SMS replies thread back the same way.

Status lifecycle: DRAFT → REQUESTED → ESTIMATED → APPROVED → SCHEDULED → IN_PROGRESS → COMPLETED → INVOICED → PAID.

Vendor records include name, email, phone, trade categories, preferred-vendor toggle (for AI suggestions), and a Certificate of Insurance upload with expiration date.

The vendor list is community-wide. Residents and board members both contribute. A neighbor who loved their plumber adds them; the board sees the recommendation; the next person who needs a plumber starts with vendors their neighbors already vetted. The whole community’s accumulated vendor knowledge lives in one place, owned by the HOA, not lost in a Facebook group.

For resident requests, AI classifies the intake into COMPLAINT, ARC_REQUEST, MAINTENANCE, or GENERAL. Maintenance requests can convert to work orders with one click - AI reads the description and the photo and produces structured fields (trade, urgency, summary, suggested vendor).

Internal links: Work Orders, Smart Request Management, Maintenance Requests.

Native iOS and native Android

HomeHerald ships as a real native iOS app and a real native Android app. Both available, both in production. Apple Pay for one-tap dues on iOS. Push notifications on both. Biometric login. Camera integration for photo evidence on requests, receipts, and lost-pet reports. Native share sheet for exporting reports.

Mobile-first design is structural. The interface was designed for the volunteer treasurer reviewing late dues from a phone in the school parking lot, not retrofitted from a desktop layout.

Internal link: Mobile App.

AI-assisted onboarding

The onboarding wizard is where the platform shows up at full strength. A new community goes live in an afternoon.

1. Drag a CSV of properties, residents, balances. AI auto-detects column headers (address, name, email, phone, dues, balance) and handles every variant header name a treasurer has ever invented. No “map this column to that field” busywork.
2. Drag a PDF of the CC&Rs, bylaws, rules, policies, minutes. AI runs OCR, classifies the document type, and mines the rules. Every rule comes out as a structured record (title, description, suggested fine). The fine schedule is pre-populated from the rules. The covenants are indexed for Herald Chat. The system is prepped before the board has time to look up.
3. Optional: drag a logo image. Auto-set as community branding.
4. Optional: drag floor plan images for amenity setup.
5. Review the parsed results. Property count, balance summary, classified documents, extracted rules, amenities detected, dues amount.
6. One-click approve and import.
7. Generate a QR code for residents to join (pending board approval).
8. Bulk-invite residents from the CSV by email.

Realistic time-to-launch: 30-90 minutes for a 75-property community. No consultant. No training session. No multi-week implementation. The CSV is what the treasurer already has. The PDF is what the secretary already has. There is nothing else to learn.

Internal link: Onboarding.

Pricing

Three tiers. Free is permanent.

• Free - up to 50 properties and 100 users. Includes the full Email Inbox (the entire shared-inbox workflow, no feature limits), Herald Chat, Pet Protect, native iOS and Android apps, basic dues tracking, Stripe Connect for payments, and every resident-facing feature in the platform. No credit card. No trial expiration.

• Herald Automate - tiered, transparently:

  • $49/mo for up to 105 properties
  • $99/mo for up to 205 properties
  • $150/mo for up to 300 properties

  This is the price gate for the AI agents and accounting depth that do the board’s heavy lifting: Herald Shield (auto-violations and ARC), Dues Chaser (autonomous dues collection), full bank reconciliation, P&L reporting, and the five-channel communication stack including physical mail rolled in (no per-letter charges).

• Herald Enterprise - custom. For groups managing multiple HOA communities from a single specialized dashboard, with whitelabeling options to brand the platform as your own.

Small communities should not have to pay enterprise prices for basic management tools. Free is permanent because the alternative is a treasurer trying to run a 30-property HOA on a spreadsheet, and that is the problem we set out to solve. The Automate tiers are priced lower than the closest alternative at every property count, with no per-letter or per-payment fees stacked on top.

The founder’s promise

Four things, in writing, to every customer:

1. I will never sell your data. It belongs to your HOA. I do not sell it, rent it, share it with marketing partners, or train third-party models on it. Full stop.
2. Your data is yours and you can leave with it. If HomeHerald is not the right tool for your community, you can export everything - residents, ledger, transactions, documents, votes, events, work orders, the entire database for your community - as an open .json.gz archive. The format is not proprietary. It is universally accepted by every application that handles data, including Excel. You came in with a spreadsheet; you leave with a complete archive.
3. I will never sell ads to your residents based on their data. Your residents will never learn about the latest laundry detergent here because of what they post, who they message, how often they pay, or what they own. The data your community generates stays inside your community.
4. No contracts. No obligations. Ever. Month-to-month on every paid tier, free forever on the free tier. No annual minimums. No early-termination fees. No “talk to your account executive” before you can cancel. Come, try the platform, run your community on it, and if it is not right for you, leave the same week.

This is the founder writing this. It is not a corporate “values” page. It is a commitment. If any of it ever changes, every customer hears it from me first, in plain English, with reasoning - not buried in a Terms of Service update.

Get started

Free signup, no credit card, no trial expiration: homeherald.ai/app

Onboarding promise: drag-and-drop your CSV and your CC&R PDF. We will have your community live before dinner. If you get stuck, contact us and a real human will respond - not a ticket queue.

The volunteer board did not sign up to be a help desk. The treasurer did not sign up to spend Saturday mornings reconciling Venmo screenshots. The secretary did not sign up to get yelled at on Nextdoor. HomeHerald is the platform that does the work, so the board can do the part that actually mattered to them when they raised their hand. I know, I raised my hand too.

Start Free

Sincerely,

Brett Haralson Founder

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HomeHerald is HOA management software built for volunteer board members. Five almost-autonomous AI agents, native iOS and Android apps, automated dues collection across email, text, push and physical mail, and the full operating stack - free for up to 50 properties.