Nobody Ran for the Board to Do Data Entry
You said yes at a meeting where nobody else raised a hand. What you signed up for was making decisions about your neighborhood. What you got was the dues spreadsheet, the shoebox of receipts, the group text at 10 p.m. about the pool gate, and a homeowner in row three who is convinced the money is going somewhere it should not.
Boards do not quit because the job is hard. They quit because the job is endless, thankless, and impossible to prove you did honestly.
HomeHerald is built around the three things that actually make a volunteer board sustainable:
- Get your time back. The routine work runs without a volunteer driving it.
- Transparency your neighbors can see. The money is visible before anyone has to ask.
- Books that hold up. Clean financials without an accountant sitting on the board.
Everything below is a shipped feature you can turn on during your trial, not a roadmap.
1. Get Your Time Back
Volunteer burnout is the disease. Automation is the cure. Not “we made the form shorter” automation - work that starts, finishes, and reports back without a board member touching it.
Six AI agents that work like staff you did not have to hire
Most HOA software gives your board a place to type things in. HomeHerald gives your board coworkers. Six agents run continuously on every plan:
- Herald Chat reads your CC&Rs, bylaws, and policies and answers residents with the specific rule cited. It also reads the live community record, so “what do I owe” and “is the clubhouse free Saturday” get real answers instead of “email the board.”
- Herald Shield screens violation reports, analyzes them against your actual governing documents, recommends warning, fine, or dismiss, and tracks repeat offenders by address on the escalation ladder you configure.
- Dues Chaser runs collections. More on that below.
- Email Integration works your HOA inbox. More on that below too.
- Pet Protect handles lost-pet matching so the 6 a.m. “has anyone seen a beagle” thread resolves itself.
- Herald Welcome detects listings in your community and gives the agent a portal with covenants, the welcome letter, the HOA balance, and a private AI chat, so closings stop landing on the secretary’s phone.
Your board also gets a private group chat with Herald in it. Mention it and it answers in the thread from live data: open tickets, the ledger, year-to-date expenses, vote results. Drop in a photo of a broken sprinkler and it files the ticket. Drop in a PDF of a vendor contract and it files the contract.
Dues collect themselves, and nobody has to be the bad guy
Chasing money from a neighbor is the single worst part of a volunteer board seat. Dues Chaser removes the person from the loop entirely.
It runs a collection ladder across five channels - in-app, email, SMS, push notification, and physical USPS mail with delivery tracking - on the schedule you set. It escalates on its own. It includes an automatic fine step that reapplies monthly until the balance clears, if your documents allow one. And when a resident pays, they drop out of the sequence automatically. No one has to remember to stop the letters.
The other half of collections is the residents who want to pay and forget. Dues AutoPay lets them save a card or bank account once. Their dues charge themselves on every due date, with an itemized heads-up three days before. If a charge fails, AutoPay retries, then pauses itself and tells the resident to update their payment method. Landlords with several rentals can cover the whole portfolio with one card.
The HOA inbox stops being someone’s second job
Email Integration connects to your HOA’s Gmail inbox and works it the way a staffer would. It categorizes what comes in. It extracts payment notifications from PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, and bank alerts, then smart-matches them to the right resident so recording the payment is one click instead of an evening of cross-referencing. It pulls vendor invoices out of attachments and drafts the expense. It converts resident questions into tracked tickets so nothing dies in a thread.
The clubhouse books, charges, and unlocks itself
Amenity booking is the clearest example of what “no human involved” means. A resident picks a date on a real-time calendar. Conflict detection blocks double bookings at the moment of reservation. Payment or deposit is collected through Stripe at booking. If the space has a paired smart lock, a unique 9-digit access code is issued to that resident automatically and arrives in their booking pass an hour before the reservation. The code works at the lock only during their window, works without network at the door, and the lock secures itself afterward. Deposits refund automatically about five days later.
No key handoff. No lockbox. No board member driving over with a fob. iglooHome locks are supported today, and admins can open separate decoration or cleanup windows with their own codes.
And on Automate+, the phone stops being your phone
Every board member knows the real cost of the job: your personal cell becomes the HOA hotline. On the Automate+ plan your community gets its own local phone number and Herald answers it, 24 hours a day, in a normal speaking voice, from live community data. It handles calls and texts on the same number.
Residents check their balance and get a payment link texted to them, file a real tracked request, get a password reset link, or complete a move-out by voice. New neighbors can join the community entirely by phone using a join code, with their number becoming their account. Verified board members get board-level answers on the line: per-property balances, vendors, and work orders. Talk minutes are 500, 1,000, or 2,000 per month depending on community size.
Your phone stops ringing. The work still gets done.
2. Transparency Your Neighbors Can See
Here is the thing most HOA software gets wrong: it treats transparency as a reporting feature. It is not. It is conflict prevention.
Almost every ugly HOA fight is really the same fight underneath. Not landscaping, not the pool, not the fence color. Money, and whether anyone can see where it went. A homeowner who cannot see the books assumes the worst, because assuming the worst is what people do with information they cannot get. Then the special assessment lands like a surprise tax and the annual meeting turns into a deposition.
HomeHerald makes the money visible early enough that the argument never starts.
Live budget-vs-actual on every resident’s dashboard
The board builds the annual budget once - planned income lines, planned expense lines, pre-filled from the last twelve months if you want a head start - and shares it with one toggle.
From that moment, every resident’s dashboard carries a budget widget that is not a static PDF. It shows the plan next to actuals year to date, computed server-side on a cash basis, with the percent of the year elapsed for context. A homeowner can expand “Landscaping” and see what was budgeted against what has actually been spent, and the actuals move as transactions land. Herald Chat can answer their budget questions directly.
Cash basis is deliberate. It reports the community’s money the way people actually experience it: what came in, what went out, what is left.
You stay in control of what is published. The budget carries a clear status of Not started, Admins only, or Shared with residents, and the published version stays on file as a record even if you later stop sharing.
Financial transparency reports that generate themselves
Beyond the live budget, HomeHerald auto-generates resident financial transparency reports on a schedule you pick, so the “where is our money going” question gets answered before it is asked. Financial management also sends the board a daily or weekly digest, which means board members stay current without logging in and without one person volunteering to write the recap.
Votes with an instant tally and a printable audit trail
Community voting covers both board resolutions and community-wide ballots. Eligible voters cast Yes, No, or Abstain from their phone. Ballots carry the voter’s name and a timestamp. The tally computes instantly, and the audit is one click away as a printable PDF on your community letterhead with the vote metadata, the full tally, and the ballot list.
That PDF is what you hand your association attorney or attach to your minutes when someone challenges a dues increase eight months later. The residents’ view and the audit view are computed from the same record, so there is no drift between what was published and what actually happened.
Meeting notices that timestamp themselves
The hard part of noticing a meeting is not posting the notice. It is proving, months later, that you posted it far enough in advance. A flyer by the mailboxes does not timestamp itself.
Official Meetings stamps the moment you post and sends the notice out automatically. “We noticed it on time” becomes a record instead of a memory.
One members-only records portal
Governing documents, the budget, financials, contracts, bids, insurance certificates, and meeting notices all live behind one members-only login. It is built to the standard Florida’s HB 1203 sets for official records, which happens to be a good bar for any board that wants its paperwork in one findable place. Documents, contracts and bids, and insurance tracking all feed the same portal.
A board that can point to a link instead of promising to dig something up is a board people trust.
3. Books That Hold Up
Most self-managed boards do not have an accountant. They have a volunteer treasurer with a spreadsheet, a full-time job, and a real fear that one missed entry becomes a problem at the next meeting.
HomeHerald’s answer is not “learn accounting.” It is a system where the correct thing happens by default.
Receipts stop being data entry
Snap a photo of a vendor receipt or invoice. The AI reads it and extracts the vendor name, amount, due date, invoice number, and the expense category, across the thirteen categories that cover HOA operations. Email Integration does the same thing to invoices that arrive as attachments and drafts the expense for you.
The shoebox and the manual keying go away together.
Every payment lands on a real ledger, not a spreadsheet
Card, ACH, and Apple Pay all run through Stripe, and each payment records its Stripe identifier against the resident’s financial record. Payments and the ledger are the same system, so what a resident paid, what the community received, and what the books say are one record instead of three that need reconciling.
Public processing rates are 4% plus $0.30 on card and 2% on ACH, and your HOA can choose to pass those fees to residents.
Spending is matched to the budget by category
Budget lines and expenses share the same category set, which is what makes the resident-facing budget-vs-actual report real rather than decorative. When the landscaper’s invoice is logged as Landscaping, it lands in the Landscaping row on every homeowner’s dashboard automatically. There is no second reconciliation step where a volunteer maps expenses onto budget lines by hand.
Refunds are handled the right way
A refund reverses cash. It does not erase what a resident owed. HomeHerald processes refunds from the financial record itself and logs the amount, the reason, and the timestamp, so the ledger tells the true story afterward instead of quietly disagreeing with the Stripe dashboard.
Nothing disappears
Every change to every financial record is recorded: who created it, who edited it, what changed, and when. Corrections are made as tracked changes rather than deletions, so the audit trail survives the correction. Reconciliation periods lock when you close them, and reopening one requires a reason and is logged.
If a resident asks why an expense was adjusted in March, the answer is in the changelog, not in somebody’s memory.
The books back themselves up
HomeHerald takes automatic daily and monthly backups. Restores are not a leap of faith: the system previews exactly what would change before anything is written back. Boards change hands every year or two. The records should not depend on whether the outgoing treasurer remembered to export anything.
For the fuller picture of reports, bank reconciliation, P&L, and AR aging, see financial management and the full bookkeeping toolkit.
The Three Pillars, Side by Side
| What it fixes | What does the work | |
|---|---|---|
| Get your time back | Volunteer burnout and the endless routine | Six AI agents, Dues Chaser across five channels, AutoPay, Email Integration, self-serve amenity booking with digital lock codes, Herald on the phone 24/7 on Automate+ |
| Transparency neighbors can see | Distrust about money, which is what most HOA conflict actually is | Live budget-vs-actual on every dashboard, auto-generated transparency reports, voting with a printable audit PDF, timestamped meeting notices, a members-only records portal |
| Books that hold up | No accountant on the board | Receipt and invoice AI, a real Stripe ledger, category-matched budget tracking, correct refunds, a permanent changelog, automatic daily and monthly backups with preview before restore |
What It Costs, Plainly
Prices are set by property count, never per unit or per resident.
- Automate - $49/month up to 105 properties, $99 up to 205, $199 up to 400. The whole platform, all six agents included.
- Automate+ - $65, $125, or $250 at the same sizes. Adds your community’s own local phone number with Herald answering calls and texts, a community website, and 500 to 2,000 talk minutes a month. The number is included - changing it later is a one-time $5, with one free swap in your first 7 days.
- Custom - above 400 properties, or for boards running more than one community.
Every community can try HomeHerald free - no card needed. The first 14 days run the full Automate plan, with nothing to enter and nothing to cancel. Add a card any time to start a full 30-day free trial on Automate or Automate+, which can total up to 44 free days. Automate+ requires a card, because it provisions a real phone line and your community’s own local number. Nothing is charged until the card trial ends, and you can cancel before then and pay nothing. See full pricing.
Start With Your Own Community, Not a Sales Call
You do not have to take any of this on faith. Getting started begins in a working sandbox, and AI Import will read your roster from a spreadsheet, a PDF, or a photo of a printed list, map the columns itself, and show you a preview before anything is saved. Residents join by scanning a QR code. Your board can be running on real data the same evening.
Give the routine work to the software. Give your neighbors a view of the money. Keep books that would survive a question.