Share your community budget with residents

The Community Budget lets your board plan the year’s income and expenses, then share it with residents as a live budget-vs-actual view. A shared budget satisfies the Florida HB 1203 budget-posting requirement and, more practically, heads off the “where does our money go?” argument before the next assessment.

Where to find it

Open Budget in the admin dashboard.

Build the budget

1. Pick the year at the top.
2. Add Planned Income lines. Choose a source - Dues, Assessments, Fines, Amenity Fees, or Other - and enter an amount. Add a note if it helps.
3. Add Planned Expenses lines. Name each one (“Landscaping”, “Pool maintenance”, “Insurance”) and enter an amount.
4. The totals row rolls up Income, Expenses, and the resulting Surplus or Deficit automatically.

You do not have to start from scratch:

• Pre-fill from last 12 months seeds your expense lines from what the community actually paid out over the past year.
• Copy from last year brings forward last year’s budget as a starting point.
• Import from file reads a budget you already have and fills the lines in for you. See below.

Use Board Notes to add context that residents will see once the budget is shared.

Import a budget from a file

Most boards already have a budget somewhere - a spreadsheet, a PDF in last year’s board packet, or a printed page in the treasurer’s binder. You do not have to retype it.

Click Import from file and choose one of:

• A spreadsheet (.xlsx or .xls)
• A CSV export
• A PDF, including a scanned board packet
• A photo of a printed budget

Files up to 8 MB are supported. If your file is bigger, export just the budget sheet or save the PDF at a smaller size.

What happens next

Herald reads the file and proposes lines. Nothing is written to your budget yet.

• Multi-column files are common: last year’s actuals, this year’s budget, a proposed column. Herald picks the budget column for the year you are editing and shows you which column it used, so you can catch a wrong pick before you apply anything.
• Monthly columns are added up into an annual figure, since the budget is a yearly document.
• Total and subtotal rows are skipped. The editor totals your lines itself, so importing them would double-count.
• Every expense line is categorized into one of the same 13 categories your bills are filed under, which is what makes Budget vs Actual line up later.
• Income lines are read too and mapped to Dues, Assessments, Fines, Amenity Fees, or Other.

Review before anything is saved

The review screen shows every proposed line with an editable name, amount, and category. You can change any of it or delete a row outright.

• Lines Herald was unsure about are highlighted, with the confidence shown. It is a nudge to look, not a block - you can apply them either way.
• Lines it could not place land under Other with the file’s original wording kept, so nothing is silently dropped.
• Reserve contributions and transfers to reserves come in as Capital Improvements, flagged for you to confirm. How your association treats a reserve transfer is a board decision, not something to guess at.

By default the imported lines are added to whatever is already in the editor. Tick Replace all existing rows if you want the file to be the budget instead.

Then press the green Add lines button at the bottom of the review screen, look the lines over in the editor, and press Save Budget. The import never saves on your behalf.

Share it with residents

Turn on Share live budget with residents and Save Budget. A budget widget appears on every resident’s dashboard, and Herald Chat can answer their budget questions.

The resident view is not a static PDF. It shows your planned figures next to actuals year to date on a cash basis, so a homeowner can expand a line and see budgeted versus spent. The plan is fixed when you share it; the actuals update as money moves.

Status at a glance

The budget shows one of three states:

• Not started - no budget for this year yet
• Admins only - saved but not shared; residents cannot see it
• Shared with residents - live on resident dashboards

You can keep a working draft private and only flip the share toggle when the budget is final. The version you shared is preserved as a record even if you later stop sharing it.

Related

• Florida HB 1203 compliance checklist
• Community Budget feature overview