Online Payment Processor

Hello Dustin, we are in a very similar situation. Our small (~50 unit) HOA had been using a local accounting firm for dues collection and accounting. Both the board and the members were frustrated with this solution because of the manual work and costs involved.

I spent a great deal of time researching online solutions that met our requirements:

- Must have a user/owner portal where current owners could log in and check their balance
- Must support online payments (ability to set up recurring payments preferred)
- Must have a way for board members to access aggregate information - owner balances, delinquency reports, etc.
- Must be largely automated for things like recurring monthly charges
- Must be completely cloud-based as board members rotate regularly and we didn't want to have to install software
- Must be economically priced

The solutions I found online generally fell into two buckets:

1) General accounting solutions for small businesses - most of these are focused on small contracting-like businesses where the key focus is on creating invoices and/or tracking inventory. Some have ways for the 'customers' to pay individual invoices online, but it was clear these weren't designed for ongoing relationship-type billing.

2) Property management solutions for large property management firms - most of these are focused on apartment rentals for agencies that have hundreds or thousands of units. They have lots of useful features (owner portal, online payments, even violation tracking) but the prices were hundreds of dollars per month and up - way out of our price range. And many still relied on local software installation.

In the end we selected a firm that had a cloud-based offering for about $1 per unit per month. This was well within our budget and the solution met all of our requirements and then some. We spent about 3 months trialing it and getting set up, and have been running full steam on it for about a year now. We now use this solution as our main association management tool as it combines accounting functionality (full general ledger support) as well as member management and communication features. So for example, at the end of the month when we look at delinquent accounts, we can send email reminders or even paper letters by just pushing a button. We expect to save close to $6,000 this year as we have been able to eliminate our accounting service in favor of the online automated accounting process.

HOATalk rules prohibit mentioning specific company names in posts, but PM me if you'd like to know the name of the solution we use. We've been very happy so far.

Gordon - we'd love to have the name of the cloud-based firm you've found..and are happy with. This information might be very helpful to us.

If you are willing to share, please send private email to me at [email protected]. Thanks!

oljim, in texas

Hi Gordon,

Thank you so much for your response! Those are exactly the challenges I am trying to solve! Could you please send me your recommended companies or the cloud based solution you are using to my email at [email protected]?

I inherited a property management company who has just been charging us a ridiculous amount of fees for basically nothing. It's gotten to the point where every little fix we need to have an assessment to pay for it. They made so many mistakes with vendors that it always ends up costing way more than it should have and then we have to pay them a project management fee on top of that.I now have to manage everything myself to make sure things function around here. Having this cloud base solution or any recommendations would help save my association!

thanks,

Dustin

I just opened a PayPal account for this very purpose today. It provides a commonly used platform at a reasonable rate for payments to the association. It was fast and easy.