In 2010, my wife and I bought a condo. After closing, we walked into our new home—and right inside the front door was a lone filing cabinet. The rest of the unit was empty. As luck would have it, our new neighbor across the hall was just heading out. We introduced ourselves and asked if…
You can track when your community amenities/resources are in use. For example, say your association has a clubhouse, pickleball court, or community room. You can use the reservable amenity feature to track when residents want to reserve those venues for private use. To start, scroll to the bottom of your calendar page, and click “Add…
We never thought this would be an issue until we started hearing folks say it the “wrong” way. We started the company to help neighbors… To be their ALLY (al-i, /ˈaˌlī,əˈlī/) like World War 2 allies. Allies in a war against apathy. But we started in Chicago and just about every condo building had an…
Getting a bit tired of all the emails coming from your association? That’s too bad, but know that you’re in full control! Go to My Profile to see your settings: Discussions If you’re getting too many emails from your group’s discussion group, you have a few options. You can open the discussion thread on your…
Groups on our premium plan are able see who has received a group email and, when supported, who has opened the email. Sending tracked emails embeds an invisible pixel into your emails that allows us to record information when the email is viewed. For every email you send and for each recipient you send to,…
Our email service provider (who does a great job making sure your association emails get passed your spam folder) has a 10MB attachment limit. This may seem low, but it’s a safe limit since most of the big providers have varying limits of their own. This way, we can be sure your attachment will make…
The maintenance tool (Click Documents & Info, then Maintenance) is a simple page to track improvement projects to your building or community. Many associations have recurring maintenance on a fixed or variable scheduled. For example, many condo associations in Chicago need to clean the building grease trap on a regular basis. Occasionally pipes back up…
We knew most small, self-managed associations use Excel/Google Sheets, which are very powerful and flexible. For our budget tool we didn’t want to compete with them so we focused on simplicity and consistency with the transactions page. Line Items The line items for the budget tool are controlled by the financial categories: To add new…
The Stripe dashboard is almost too powerful. You can get yourself into some trouble if you start clicking around and adding and editing users and adding editing payments. It’s your account and you can use it how you please, but our suggestion is that you should really only go into the Stripe Dashboard to add…
Thankfully, signing-up to make payments to your association via Stripe is pretty straightforward. If your group has enabled online payments, you’ll see a blue button on your home page to start the account connection process. Search for your bank and, if it’s listed, selected it, then follow Stripe’s sign-up instructions. If you can’t find your…