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…
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…
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…
The Stripe sign-up process for the association is a bit complicated, so we provide this guide to help walk you through it. Stripe periodically updates their sign-up process, so if you notice something out of date, please let us know via your site’s help page or the tech support chat widget. The first step is…
One of the most powerful features of Community Ally’s tools is the private group email addresses. We offer the ability for you to define your own custom group email addresses that will forward to any members you select. You can define and modify custom group email addresses at the bottom of your directory page. Creating…
It’s easy to backup your site data. Visit each of these locations to choose what you want to back up: Documents: Go to the Documents page then click “Generate Zip Of All Files” in the bottom right of the page to generate a zip file of all documents. You may also want to do this…