4 free tools for condo board members

Managing a condo association is like running a business and it comes with challenging responsibilities. Condo board members are responsible to keep maintenance costs low while managing resources, communicating with residents, keeping tabs on suppliers and so many other things.

It requires commitment with a great amount of effort. This is even more challenging with volunteer board members who spend their spare time being responsible for an entire building including the lives in it.

Using Excel spreadsheets can be a solution for some but it is not viable for maintenance, scalability and collaborative work. Also using Excel does not mean your HOA is organized. Using Excel is one-sided and is not accessible to residents.

At Propty, we know how challenging it is to manage a condo association so we compiled a list of the 4 most essential tools, an HOA must have to save time and be organized.

Free doesn’t mean they’re low quality but hence give your condo association a productivity boost and a foundation to build a sustainable building.

Propty as your building platform

Propty is an essential building management software designed for HOA, Strata or condominiums.

that helps you store and organize all building records, track maintenance issues and centralize communication in one place.

The platform also comes with a resident experience application where tenants and co-owners can easily onboard, maintain their profile, receive notices and log any maintenance issues related to the building. Residents will also be able to book building amenities such as the gym, pool or even the elevator for resident move-in/move-out.

Condo board members can also organize their board meetings, annual general meetings using the platform, save time on calculating the quorum and vote electronically.

Propty also comes with simple accounting software that can be integrated with popular advanced accounting software including Wave accounting and Quickbooks.

You can use Propty for free to send surveys to your resident community to get a snapshot of what most people want.

Wave for property accounting

There are many accounting software out there, some with the longest list of features you can imagine but the problem is, are they easy to use or useful by any chance?

Wave is not only 100% free accounting software but also has all the features to you help property managers and condo board members manage their cash flow.

You can also integrate bank transactions into your Wave account and set up an auto data sync to make sure you’re always up to date.

Wave also comes with a mobile receipt scanning feature that can be handy when you’re moving around to document the expense on the move.

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Slack for board members’ communication

Emails will never go away, in fact, you still need an email to communicate with suppliers and any external discussion however for internal communication, there are better tools for more organized and efficient messaging than using emails.

Slack helps you organize topics by ‘Channels”. You can also send private messages to your members as if you’re texting or sending a Whatsapp message.

For example, you can create channels:

• #Project-water-heater
• #Violations
• #Finance

Discussing certain topics can be done by emails but the more back, and forth messages, can make it hard to keep conversations organized and this is where Slack comes in.

The only con with Slack is that the free version only saves the first 10k messages you send. After that, you have to pay to view the old messages.

Notion for wikis and tasks

Internal documentation is also important. If property managers or board members don’t know where to access company documents, then you probably lack a central hub for information. Every question about company-related materials should start at the same place — and a folder full of pages with no connections or hierarchy doesn’t count.

Your team deserves a single resource for:

• Work procedures
• Company Policies
• Residence assistance procedures
• Maintenance references
• Onboarding processes, so new employees can access (and go back to reference) the information they need to start doing important work.
• Building announcements

To be sure, consolidating these resources will enable continuity and save time for old and future members. Instead of asking someone, team members already know where to go for the answer.

Your wiki is the set of digital keys to your company that team members new and old share.

Conclusion

Managing an HOA or a condo building is a daunting task for anyone, especially for new and volunteer board members just starting to figure things out, however, there are solutions that are free and don’t have to break the bank.

Using any of the 4 free business tools we listed above is a great way for building board members or property managers to run a building more efficiently while saving time for everyone and making it fun to work with others.

We hope this was a helpful insight into some possible ways you could improve your digital workflow. Are you using something different? We would love to hear your thoughts, let us know at contact@getpropty.com