HOA Management Software

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum and have gotten quite a bit of information from it so far. Some of the information dates back a few years and I was hoping to see if anyone has some current information that may be of help.

My wife 'volunteered' me to be our HOA's treasurer. When I said I would, our president backed up his car and proceeded to deliver several boxes of stuff (I am saying that nicely). We have a 250 lot HOA community here in Oklahoma. I was an uber specialist in IT for quite a while but retired around 12 years ago. I know nothing of what is out there now. Essentially, I would like to manage our HOA as simply as possible. We have a new laptop with the usual MS Office offerings (including Access). Has anyone had any experience with managing their HOA with an Access/Excel solution?

Google and I are on intimate terms in trying to find this out. When you do the search, all you get are companies wanting to sell their solutions (and I don't begrudge them that - but really, $300 a month for hosting?). Our needs are really simple:

1. Establish a master list of addresses and deeded owners.
2. Track dues payment by property (by year).
3. Track CCR violations with remedial actions taken.
4. Generate reports on who has paid/not paid, what we have in our coffers vs. what we need, liens and amounts, violations and resolutions, and finally variances identified by property.

I really would like to perform data entry from one screen and populate Access with a link to Excel for totaling.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and credited!

Greg,

We are a self managed 130 lot community. We use:

Excel - Income/Expense report & budget
Word - membership list (in a mailing label format) but could use excel
Paper - Lot ledgers (we like pen & ink for tracking purposes) but have considered using excel for this as well.

I should note that we hire an independent contractor for bookkeeping service to collect the checks, track payments and make deposits.

As far as tracking architectural approvals, we had one person take the time and make an access database for this purpose. When she left, the person who took over that position didn't know how to use access and kept stuff on paper. When I served on the committee in 2008 I discovered that the database was 8 years out of date. As a committee, we decided to keep it simple and make sure everyone could follow it we decided to use paper. We organized the information and filed it into classification folders.

It's a great idea to computerize. The problem is if the next or future person who volunteers to serve isn't computer savvy they likely will not use the program. Lets face it, most people know word processing programs and e-mail. Some know spreadsheets. Less know database software.

Hope this helps,

Tim

Yep, I've seen this at companies I've worked at. Someone writes a complicated program or code, next person who takes over doesn't know how to update it or it doesn't work on the new version of windows, throws it away. When thinking of "software" solutions for associations, you need something that will work for decades. Word/Excel or even paper are a pretty good match. I still print hard copies of my reports, etc, because I know years from now someone might not be able to open my files or even have a cdrom drive.