The books are the product
Most association software collects dues and leaves the books to a spreadsheet or a bookkeeper. OurRidge runs a double-entry ledger, and every statement a board argues over is produced from it.
What is in the ledger
A chart of accounts seeded when the community is created, organised by fund so operating money and reserve money never mix. Journal entries post to it, and an entry is never edited or deleted after posting: a mistake is corrected by posting a reversal, which keeps both sides of the story.
- Trial balance, general ledger, and a ledger per unit
- Accounting periods, with a year-end close that records who closed it and when
- Opening balances when a community moves its books from another system
- Reopening a closed year, refusals included, rather than quietly editing history
Billing and cash
A billing run charges every unit once for the period and posts the matching entry, so the ledger and the receivables never disagree. Payments are applied to the oldest open charge first, and anything left over stays unapplied rather than silently disappearing.
- Regular and special assessments, with effective-dated rates per unit
- Payment application, partial payments, and unapplied credit
- A reconciliation report that checks the books against the subledger and says which check failed
Statements a board can present
- Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow
- Budget versus actual
- Reserve statement, separate from operating
- Trailing twelve months: prior eleven, current month, total
- Excel exports of each statement, and a board packet PDF
HOA, condominium, and co-op
A community is created as one of the three, and that choice is fixed once the community is live, because it decides the chart of accounts it was seeded with. A conversion is a new community with its own books, not a setting flip.
What differs between the types is real: a condominium allocates common charges by percentage of common interest, and a co-op carries an underlying mortgage and pays corporate real estate tax. Today all three use the same double-entry engine and the same default chart of accounts. Type-specific charts and allocation are the next step, and we will say so on this page until they exist rather than implying otherwise.
Who does the work
A self-managed board can run this without an accountant, because the statements are generated rather than assembled. A management company can run many communities on it, each with its own database and its own books, and hand the accountant an export instead of a reconciliation project.