Importing your property roster

The property roster is the foundation. Once it’s loaded, every other feature — dues, residents, ledger, violations — has something to attach to. This is usually a 5–15 minute job depending on the size of your community.

What you’re importing

You’re creating a Property record for every lot, unit, or townhome in your community. Each property holds:

• Address (or unit number)
• Lot / block (if your community uses them)
• Monthly or annual dues amount
• An initial balance (if the property already owes money from a previous system)
• A status (active by default)

Residents are not part of this import. You’ll connect them after the import is done. See Inviting residents.

What format to use

A CSV or Excel file. Either works. The AI parses headers automatically, so you don’t need to match a specific template.

Recommended columns:

Column	Required?	Notes
Address	Yes	Full street address. The AI handles minor formatting differences.
Lot	If you use them	Lot number — typically 1, 2, 3…
Block	If you use them	Block letter or number, usually for larger communities
Monthly Dues	Recommended	Dollar amount, e.g. 225 or $225.00. If your dues are annual, see below.
Annual Dues	If applicable	Use this instead of monthly. The system stores the annual amount as-is.
Initial Balance	If migrating	Carry-over balance from your old system. Positive = owes, negative = credit.
Owner Name	Optional	The AI will use this later if you want to pre-fill resident invitations
Owner Email	Optional	Same — speeds up resident invites

Don’t worry about column names. The importer recognizes common variants (Property Address, Street, Unit #, etc.). If it can’t tell, it asks.

Step-by-step

1. Log in as admin
2. Go to Admin → Onboarding (or Getting Started)
3. Click Upload Files under “Import properties”
4. Drag in your CSV or Excel file
5. Wait ~10 seconds while the AI parses it
6. Review the preview. This is the important part — see below
7. Fix anything wrong, then click Confirm import

After confirm, the system creates a Property record for each row. You’ll see them under Properties in the admin sidebar.

Reviewing the preview (don’t skip this)

The AI gets it right ~95% of the time, but the 5% can bite you. Things to scan for:

• Duplicate addresses. If you see “123 Maple St” twice, the source spreadsheet probably had a header row mid-file or a stray empty row. The importer will flag it; just remove duplicates.
• Missing dues amounts. Properties with $0 or blank dues will be created — but they won’t be charged anything when dues run. If that’s intentional (e.g., a developer-held lot), fine. If not, fix the source data.
• Wrong dues frequency. If your community runs annual dues but the importer parsed it as monthly, every charge will be 12× too small. Check a few rows.
• Initial balances. If you put $50 for a property that owes $50, that’s fine. If your spreadsheet had (50) or -50 for a credit, confirm the system parsed it as negative.
• Lot vs. address. If your community uses lot numbers and the spreadsheet had them in a column called something weird (“Property #” or “Site”), make sure they didn’t end up in the address field.

Common import problems

“It didn’t pick up my dues amounts.” Likely the column header was unusual (like “HOA Fee” or “Quarterly Pmt”). Rename it to something obvious like Monthly Dues and re-upload.

“My addresses got split weirdly across columns.” The source spreadsheet probably had street, city, state, zip in separate columns. The importer combines them, but if the columns aren’t labeled it can guess wrong. Combine them into a single Address column before uploading.

“I have 50 properties but only 47 imported.” Three rows were probably skipped because they had no address. Check the source for empty rows or rows with only a lot number and no address.

“Some properties are duplicates of ones I already had.” If you imported once already and re-upload, the importer adds new properties — it doesn’t deduplicate against existing ones automatically. If you need to re-import, archive the old set first or delete them in Properties (admin sidebar).

After the import

You should now have:

• A property under Properties (admin sidebar) for every lot in your community
• Each property showing the correct dues amount
• An initial balance on any properties that were carrying one over

What you don’t have yet:

• Residents. No one is linked to any property. That’s the next step.
• Pending dues charges. Dues won’t generate until you configure the dues schedule under Settings → Community Settings → Dues Settings panel. See Configuring dues.

Re-importing or updating in bulk

You generally don’t re-import — you edit individual properties as things change. But if you need to do a bulk update (e.g., a community-wide dues increase), there are two options:

1. Bulk edit in the UI. Select all properties and apply a change.
2. Email support. For larger restructures (renumbering lots, splitting properties), support@homeherald.ai is faster than fighting the UI.

Where to go next

• Configuring dues — turn the imported amounts into recurring charges
• Inviting residents — link people to the properties
• Editing a property — fix individual records after import