Key Takeaways Homeowners association (HOA) reserves are the money an association sets aside for major future repairs and replacements. When boards are trying to keep dues down, reserve contributions can become the number that gets adjusted to make the budget work. But putting less money aside does not make the roof last longer or the…

Managing the finances of a small homeowners association can seem relatively straightforward. Collect assessments, pay the bills, reconcile the bank account, and provide the board with a basic financial report. As the community gets larger, the financial workload grows with it. Maintenance activity increases, capital projects begin, delinquencies may appear, and the association may have…

Every October, boards across the country sit down to build their 2027 HOA budget. Most of them start in the same place: they pull up last year’s budget, add a percentage across the board, and call it a draft. It is fast, it feels reasonable, and it is almost always wrong. The problem is not…

Every month, Community Financials hosts webinars for HOA and condo board members. The questions that come in are consistent: What are my legal obligations as a board member? How do I read my financial reports? What happens if we do not fund our reserves properly? What does a collection policy actually look like in practice?…

The comparative income and expense report is the number one report I have used to run communities for 25 years. Most boards either do not receive it or do not know what to do with it when they do. The part that matters most is a single column that most board members scroll past without…

Nobody joins an HOA board because they want to charge their neighbors late fees. Yet assessments have to be collected. The association still has insurance premiums, vendor contracts, utilities, maintenance costs, reserve contributions, and other obligations to pay whether every homeowner pays on time or not. When assessments arrive late, somebody has to address the…

Starting January 4, 2027, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are raising the minimum reserve funding requirement for condominium and HOA communities from 10% to 15% of annual assessment income. Most boards heading into budget season are not yet asking what this means for their community, and the window to act on it before the deadline…

In part one we covered pulling the right reports, reviewing your delinquency picture, budgeting with a cushion, and knowing your true accounting costs. This post covers the three steps that protect your community’s long-term financial health: getting a reserve study, protecting your reserves, and setting a collection policy that actually gets followed. Dust Off or…

Budget season has a way of sneaking up on boards. One week it is summer, and the next the calendar is turning toward fall and someone realizes the budget needs to be finalized before the new year. The boards that navigate this well are the ones that do a few specific things before they sit…

After more than two years of legal battles, regulatory reversals, court injunctions, and genuine uncertainty for volunteer board members across the country, the Corporate Transparency Act’s beneficial ownership reporting requirements are now off the table for U.S. community associations under the current federal regulatory framework. On August 11, 2026, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes…

Gay Hawkins has been president of her 8-unit HOA in Riverside, California for about ten years. Before she became president, her community had already been through one full-service property management company. During her tenure, she went through two more. Three in total over 22 years. Each one taught the board something about what to look…

For many HOA boards, budget approval can start to feel like an annual administrative ritual. Someone updates last year’s spreadsheet, a few expense categories are adjusted, the board reviews the totals, and the proposed budget is approved so everyone can move on to the next agenda item. That approach may work when expenses are predictable…

A Wall Street Journal report published this week documented something that should get every HOA and condo board’s attention. Foreclosure filings tied to unpaid HOA dues are rising sharply, up nearly 40% over two years according to real estate analytics firm Attom, with more than 6,300 properties affected in just the first quarter of 2026…

Most HOA boards assume that when they hire a property management company, the accounting comes with it. The manager handles the vendors, attends the meetings, fields homeowner calls, and produces the financial reports. Everything in one place. One relationship. One invoice. That bundled model is how most of the industry works. It is also why…

Accounting for condominium associations is not just regular bookkeeping with a property address attached. While both involve tracking income, expenses, bank balances, and vendor payments, condominium association accounting has a very different purpose. A regular business uses bookkeeping to understand profitability, manage cash flow, and support tax reporting. A condominium association uses accounting to manage…

Francisco Gomez became board president of Doral Gardens HOA in Doral, Florida in 2022. What he inherited was not a community in good shape. The property manager had stolen $168,000. A special assessment had to be issued just to recapitalize the association. Two replacement managers were brought in after the fraud was discovered. Neither was…

Every board eventually faces the same uncomfortable moment. A reserve study lands on the table, the professional assessment that maps out what the community’s major components, including the roof, pavement and elevators, will cost to repair or replace and when. The numbers are higher than anyone wanted to see, and someone in the room asks…

It starts with the best of intentions. The operating budget runs short, a repair comes in over estimate, or the year just did not go as planned. The reserve fund is sitting there, the board knows the money is there, and someone suggests borrowing from it temporarily with a plan to pay it back later….

When boards come to us looking to make a change, I always ask the same question: why now? After talking with hundreds of boards over the years, the answers almost always come back to the same two things. They lost trust in how the accounting was being handled, or they were not getting responsive service….

HOA accounting should not feel like mystery math. Board members should not have to squint at reports, guess whether vendor payments went out, wonder if assessments were posted correctly, or spend half the meeting trying to figure out what the numbers actually mean. Yet for many HOA boards, that is exactly what happens. The financials…