Perhaps enough for self-managed HOAs, but NOT READY for third-party management companies
March 26, 2024
Perhaps enough for self-managed HOAs, but NOT READY for third-party management companies
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PayHOA
We are a third-party professional property management company that has begun to offer association management for Home Owner Associations (HOAs). PayHOA purports to be a comprehensive HOA management platform for third-party managers and self-managed associations.
The most critical function of any such software is the accounting function: sending bills and invoices to owners in the association, providing various methods for owners to remit their payments, entering vendor bills and tracking their payment, reconciling bank accounts, creating a budget and comparing expenses against the budget, etc.
Other nice-to-have features we were looking for included violation management, architectural request management, association notices and owner-member communications, mailing services, etc.
PayHOA purports to offer all of these features in a robust way. About 90 days into our use of PayHOA, we've found PayHOA fails in some of the most mission-critical ways.
The most critical function of any such software is the accounting function: sending bills and invoices to owners in the association, providing various methods for owners to remit their payments, entering vendor bills and tracking their payment, reconciling bank accounts, creating a budget and comparing expenses against the budget, etc.
Other nice-to-have features we were looking for included violation management, architectural request management, association notices and owner-member communications, mailing services, etc.
PayHOA purports to offer all of these features in a robust way. About 90 days into our use of PayHOA, we've found PayHOA fails in some of the most mission-critical ways.
- Auto-generating owner invoices
- Budget feature
- Poor documentation
- Unreliable lockbox processing service
- Owners unable to access their own invoices online
- Limited accounting functionality
- No real A/P: cannot enter vendor bills separately
- Duplicate field names that don't replicate correctly across the software
- All owner payment options have additional charges
- Though the software is relatively inexpensive, we're constantly spending additional time creating and using separate software to help manage or make up for things that PayHOA doesn't really do.
- It's light on cost, light on functionality. Heavy on time.
We wanted to use CINC Systems (not mentioned above) but we're not yet at the scale where we can afford their higher cost.
TownSq and FrontSteps were also beyond our budget due to smaller <500 unit count.
We had a misperception that Buildium would be too expensive as well, but with our frustrations we reached out to Buildium and learned this was not necessarily the case.
At the time, we selected PayHOA due to cost being within budget and having the appearance of being a comprehensive association management software. However the further we got into use of the software, the more issues, limitations, and frustrations we encountered. If it was not such a big effort to onboard the association already, we would have already switched to Buildium.
TownSq and FrontSteps were also beyond our budget due to smaller <500 unit count.
We had a misperception that Buildium would be too expensive as well, but with our frustrations we reached out to Buildium and learned this was not necessarily the case.
At the time, we selected PayHOA due to cost being within budget and having the appearance of being a comprehensive association management software. However the further we got into use of the software, the more issues, limitations, and frustrations we encountered. If it was not such a big effort to onboard the association already, we would have already switched to Buildium.
Do you think PayHOA delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with PayHOA's feature set?
No
Did PayHOA live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of PayHOA go as expected?
No
Would you buy PayHOA again?
No