Starting without a spreadsheet

Most boards arrive with a spreadsheet. Plenty don’t - the roster lives in a filing cabinet, in the last treasurer’s email, or nowhere anyone can find on a Tuesday night. You can still start.

Explore a sample community first

Signup opens on a dropzone that says Drop your spreadsheet here. Underneath it there’s a quieter link:

No spreadsheet handy? Explore a sample community instead

Click that and HomeHerald opens a fully populated sample community - properties, residents, balances, the ledger, violations, bookings, the whole admin app. Every screen is live and nothing is saved. It isn’t a slideshow or a set of screenshots; you’re clicking around the real product with someone else’s data in it.

Two things worth doing while you’re in there:

• Let Herald show you around. Herald starts a narrated tour on its own, and the button in the banner at the top restarts it whenever you want.
• Break things. Nothing you do in the sample community is written anywhere, and you can’t damage a real community from inside it.

When you’ve seen enough, Start your free trial in the same banner takes you to activation.

Choosing how your community starts

Activation asks for your community name, your street address (optional), and the plan and size that fit. If you came in without a spreadsheet, it also asks:

How should your community start?

• Start empty - a clean community with no properties in it. This is the default.
• Start with practice data - your community is created with editable sample records already in it.

Either way you get the same real community on the same 14-day free trial, with no credit card needed and nothing to cancel when it ends. Add a card at any point and a full 30-day free trial starts on the plan you pick. Nothing is charged until that card trial ends, and you can cancel before then and pay nothing.

Boards who upload a spreadsheet never see this question. Their roster is already decided, and it imports as soon as the trial starts.

What practice data actually is

Practice records are real, editable records in your real community - not a demo mode you toggle off. They’re drawn from the sample community you just explored, so it’s the same streets and the same neighbors, with every way of reaching anyone stripped out.

What you get:

• A property roster with addresses, lot numbers, and balances
• Recent payments posted against those properties, so the dashboards, AR aging, and cash-basis reports have something in them

What you deliberately don’t get:

• No contact details. No email addresses, no phone numbers, no mailing addresses, no billing contacts. This is the point: your automations are pointed at this community for real, and a practice record has to have no way of being reached.
• No documents, covenants, amenities, or operating expenses. Only records that clearing the roster can take back out again are seeded in the first place.

The “Practice data” chip

While your community still carries practice records, admins and board members see a small amber Practice data chip just under the community name - in the desktop sidebar and in the mobile header. Residents never see it.

It’s a reminder, not a restriction. Everything works normally underneath it.

Clearing practice data

Replacing the roster is how practice data ends. Go to Properties in the admin sidebar, open AI Import, upload your real roster, and pick Replace everything. The practice properties and the financial records attached to them are deleted, your real roster lands, and the chip disappears.

Full walkthrough, including the confirmations that stand in the way: Importing your property roster.

You can also just leave them. Practice records behave like any other property, so you can edit them into your real roster one at a time if your community is small enough that a spreadsheet was never going to be worth it.

Where to go next

• First-day setup checklist - the full launch sequence
• Importing your property roster - AI Import, and how to replace what’s there
• Plan and billing - what the trial turns into