Board Chat

Board Chat is a private, realtime group chat that only your community’s board members and admins can see. It lives inside the Herald chat window, so the conversation is one tap away on every screen. Herald is in the thread with you: mention it and it answers from your community’s live books, tickets, and records, and files what you ask it to file.

Where to find it

• On your phone: tap the Herald button in the bottom bar, then choose Board Chat from the Admin section of the menu. You can also open the Herald chat and flip to the Board tab at the top.
• On desktop: click the floating Herald bubble in the bottom-right corner, then switch to the Board tab.

If there are unread board messages, the Herald button pulses and shows a count, and opening the chat takes you straight to the Board tab.

Who can see it

Only members with the Admin or Board Member role. Residents never see the Board tab, and nothing posted there appears anywhere else in the app. Every message shows who wrote it, along with their board title.

Notifications

Each board member chooses how loud Board Chat is for them, in their profile under Board Notifications: Every message, Mentions & @board (only when someone @-mentions them by name or pings @board), Daily brief (nothing in the moment - the morning brief counts what they missed), or Off. Whatever they pick is delivered through the channels they already chose - app, email, and text. Tapping a notification opens the app directly to the conversation. Board Chat is one row on a larger card; the rest of it is covered under Board Notifications below.

Notifications are personalized. The same message reaches each member differently. If someone @mentions you, your notification reads “Sarah mentioned you” so you know it needs your eyes; everyone else on the board gets the normal preview of that message (“Sarah: the pool quote came back higher than…”). Nobody has to guess which messages were aimed at them.

Desktop notifications work too. Push isn’t phone-only. Turn on Push Notifications under Profile → Notification preferences while you’re in a desktop browser and allow the prompt, and board chat notifications arrive on that computer as well - including when the HomeHerald tab is closed. Clicking one brings the app back up on the conversation.

Every device, independently. Each device registers on its own, so a member who enables push on their phone, their tablet, and their desktop browser gets notified on all three. Enabling it in one place never turns it off somewhere else.

Board Notifications

Profile → Board Notifications is where an admin or board member decides what reaches them and when, one stream at a time. Residents don’t have this card at all - they have notification preferences, but no board streams to tune.

Every row answers when, never how. The channel is still your ordinary notification switches further up the same page - app, email, and text - so turning a stream up never opts you into a channel you didn’t pick.

Board Chat is the one row with four settings, described above. The others have three: Real-time, Daily brief, and Off.

• Tickets & Requests - new resident requests, replies, and escalations. Real-time out of the box, because a resident is waiting on the other end of one.
• Votes & Meetings - new board votes, meeting notices, and results. Real-time out of the box.
• Work Orders - work orders created and moved along by vendors. Held for the daily brief out of the box, because vendor churn rarely needs you in the moment.

Turning a stream Off never hides the work itself. Requests still queue up on the admin side, you can still cast a ballot on any open vote, and the work order board still shows everything. Off means it stops chasing you, not that it stops happening.

Every setting saves the moment you tap it - there’s no Save button - and each member’s choices are their own. Nobody can turn another board member’s notifications down.

The morning brief

Anything set to Daily brief arrives in one message at 7:30am Central, through the same channels you already picked. Counts lead, detail follows:

Since yesterday: 4 new requests, 12 board chat messages, 2 vote updates.

Three things worth knowing about it:

• A quiet night sends nothing. If none of your daily streams had anything in them, no brief goes out. There is no “nothing to report” message, because that is exactly the kind of message people learn to ignore.
• It’s built per person. Two board members with different settings get different briefs from the same night, and your own messages are never counted back to you.
• It looks back about a day. Each brief covers the last twenty-five hours, so nothing falls through the gap between two mornings.

Board Chat set to Daily brief is the setting for the member who wants to stay on the board without a phone that buzzes at 10pm. They see the whole conversation whenever they open the app; what they get in the morning is a count of what they missed, and how much of it was aimed at them.

@mentions

Type @ in the message box and a picker appears with Herald first, then your fellow board members. Keep typing to narrow the list, then pick a name with a tap, or with the arrow keys and Enter. Mentions are highlighted in the conversation, and the mentioned member gets a personalized notification.

Sharing photos and files

Tap the paperclip to attach up to four files per message, 20MB each. Photos (JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, HEIC), PDFs, plain text, CSV, and DOCX are all accepted, and a message can be nothing but an attachment when the picture says it all.

Photos post as thumbnails - tap one to open it full screen without leaving the app, with an icon to open it in your browser if you want to save or share it. Everything else posts as a file card showing the name and size, and opens when you tap it. Attachments stay in the thread for anyone scrolling back, and Herald can read the recent ones.

Working with @Herald in the chat

Herald is a member of your board chat, not a search box bolted onto the side of it. Mention @Herald anywhere in a message and it answers right in the conversation, where the whole board sees the answer, the numbers behind it, and what happened next.

Because everyone reading is a verified board member, Herald speaks at board level here: balances by property, who’s behind, vendors, spending, open work. Things it would never say to a resident.

What to ask it

Herald pulls live data every time it’s mentioned. It isn’t answering from a summary someone pasted in last month. Ask in plain language:

• “@Herald who still owes dues?” - per-property balances, highest first, with the total receivable
• “@Herald what did we spend on landscaping this year?” - year-to-date spending by category, plus the recent expense lines behind it
• “@Herald which work orders are still open?” - the open queue with status and vendor
• “@Herald anything still sitting in requests from last month?” - open requests and violations with the address, who reported it, and the last update on each
• “@Herald did the Fletcher payment land?” - recent ledger activity, payments and charges alike
• “@Herald what votes are still open?” - what’s in progress and when it closes
• “@Herald catch me up” - Herald reads the recent thread, so it can summarize what the board has been going back and forth about

Two things worth knowing about the shape of the answers. Herald sees open items, not closed ones, so a request that was resolved last spring gets an honest “I can’t see that one” instead of a guess. And replies are short by default, a few sentences; ask for the full list or the breakdown and you’ll get it.

Herald’s replies come with a way in

When an answer points at a place in the app, Herald attaches a single tappable chip at the bottom of its reply, labelled for where it goes - something like View Contracts & Bids or Open Requests. Tap it and the app opens right there, closing the chat so you’re looking at the screen instead of the thread.

One chip per reply, no more. And in Board Chat a chip never navigates on its own, it waits to be tapped. That’s deliberate: Herald’s reply lands on five people’s phones at once, and none of those phones should jump to a new screen unasked.

Hand Herald a file

Drop a photo or a PDF into the chat, mention Herald in the same message or the next one, and ask about it:

• “@Herald what is this quote actually charging us for?”
• “@Herald is this the same vendor as the bid Tom posted?”
• “@Herald summarize this and tell me what’s missing.”

Herald reads the recent photos and PDFs posted in the chat - up to four of the newest files, 15MB in total. Older files scroll out of its reach, and a file that’s too large or a type it can’t read gets an honest “re-post that one” rather than an invented answer. Either way the file stays in the thread for the board.

”@Herald file this contract”

This is the one where Herald writes to your records. Post a signed agreement, a proposal, or a competing bid, and Herald recognizes what it is and offers: Want me to file this in your Contracts records?

Say yes - “yes”, “file it”, “yes, as a bid”, “go ahead” - and it files it. Herald reads the fields off the document itself: vendor, title, category, contract amount, effective and end dates, and for a bid, the project it belongs to. Anything the document doesn’t say is left blank rather than guessed at. The record is created under your name, not Herald’s, with a note that it came from a board chat attachment, and the file is copied into the community’s document storage so the contract survives even if the chat message is deleted later.

Herald confirms in the thread with what it filed and the amount, plus a chip straight to Admin Panel > Contracts (under Operations in the sidebar). From there it’s an ordinary contract or bid record: see Record contracts and competitive bids.

Two guardrails worth naming. Herald never files on the strength of its own suggestion; it offers, and a person confirms in the next message. And if it ever announces a filing that didn’t actually go through, the message corrects itself in the thread, so a false “I’ve filed it” can’t sit in the board’s record of the conversation.

”How do I…” questions

Herald knows its way around the app, so nobody has to hunt for a screen. “@Herald how do I record a check that came in the mail?” or “@Herald where do I set late fees?” gets a short answer, a link into the HomeHerald Handbook for the full walkthrough, and where it applies, a chip to the screen itself. Faster than three board members trading screenshots.

What to expect

• Answers post in the thread. Herald replies as an ordinary message from Herald, so the whole board sees it, it lives in your history, and it works with read receipts and notifications like anything else. The person who asked doesn’t get pushed their own answer.
• Actions land in the real records. When Herald files a contract, the record is in Contracts a moment later, with your name on it. Nothing waits in a draft state.
• Filing a contract or bid is the one change Herald makes from the chat. Everything else is an answer plus a chip to the screen where you make the change yourself. Herald won’t post an announcement, charge a property, or dispatch a vendor because someone asked for it in the group thread.
• It counts toward your AI usage. Board Chat questions draw on the same monthly AI allowance as the rest of Herald.

Asking Herald on the phone

Where your community has a Herald phone line, the board conversation follows you off the app. Call or text the line from the phone number on your member record and Herald recognizes you as a board member, so you get the same board-level answers you’d get on the Board tab - delinquency, per-property balances, vendors, open work orders - spoken out loud.

Herald also knows what’s in the board chat, including what you personally haven’t caught up on:

• “How many board messages haven’t I read?”
• “What has the board been talking about?”
• “Catch me up before I walk into this meeting.”

Handy on the drive to a meeting, or any time reading thirty messages on a phone screen is the last thing you want to do.

Herald in your board’s WhatsApp group

If your board already lives in a WhatsApp group, Herald can join that thread too - available on request, and we set it up with you.

What Herald will and won’t share

This is the boundary that makes board-level answers safe to hand out, so it’s worth stating plainly:

• Board-level data stays in board surfaces. Balances by property, who’s delinquent, vendor detail, open work orders - Herald discusses these only where it has verified it’s talking to the board: the Board tab, and the phone line when your number matches a board member. Never in the resident chat.
• Residents only ever get their own information. A resident asking Herald anything gets their data and nothing else - their balance, their requests, their bookings. There’s no phrasing that gets them a neighbor’s balance or a community-wide delinquency list.
• Private messages are off-limits everywhere. Herald never sees direct messages between members. Not in board chat, not on the phone, not anywhere. That includes your own DMs when you’re the one asking, because a board chat answer is read by the whole board. Ask it what someone said in a DM and it will tell you it has no access.

Everyday details

• Seen by - under your latest message you’ll see who has read it.
• Delete - you can delete your own messages (tap the small trash icon, then tap again to confirm).
• Day markers - the conversation is grouped under Today, Yesterday, or the date, so it’s easy to find where a thread started.
• History - the chat keeps everything; use “Load earlier messages” to scroll back through older conversation.

Board Chat and official records

Board Chat is a working conversation, not a system of record. Decisions that need a paper trail - votes, approved expenses, policy changes - should still go through Voting, the financial ledger, or an announcement. A good habit: hash it out in Board Chat, then make it official in the right place. Where Herald can make it official for you, as it does with a filed contract, it writes to the real record rather than to the chat - which is exactly the line to hold.