Understanding Billing in HOA Hub

Applies to:Owner, Admin, Board Member, Resident

Billing in HOA Hub gives your community a complete system for collecting assessments, recording payments, and tracking balances. You can process both manual payments (checks, cash, bank transfers), and when you’re ready to offer online payments, connect Stripe to add cards, ACH, and autopay.

Before you dive into the individual docs, it’s worth understanding how the pieces fit together. The system is built around a few core concepts: charges, installment options, billing accounts, invoices, and payments.

Charges: what properties owe

A charge defines something a property owes the community. Every charge has a type, an amount, and an interval — Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annual, Annual, or One-Time. The charge types are:

Regular Assessment — the regular assessment every property pays, often called dues
Special Assessment — a community-wide charge for a specific project (roof project, road resurfacing, etc.)
Fee — a charge for using something the community provides (storage unit, parking space, pool key rental, etc.)
Fine — a specific penalty (often tied to a violation)

Residents see the type next to each charge they pay, and a late fee rule can apply to a single type.

A charge might look like:

“Annual Assessment” — type: Regular Assessment, amount: $1,200, interval: Annual
“Roof Project Assessment” — type: Special Assessment, amount: $500, interval: One-Time
“Pool Key Rental” — type: Fee, amount: $10, interval: Monthly

Late fees and reimbursements aren’t charges. A late fee rule adds late fees to overdue invoices for you. To bill a one-time amount, such as a reimbursement for common-area damage, click Quick Invoice on the property’s billing page, or create invoices in batch to bill several properties at once.

Installment options: how residents pay

A charge can offer one or more installment options — ways to break the charge amount into smaller invoices within the billing cycle.

An annual $1,200 regular assessment might offer three installment options:

Pay in full — 1 invoice of $1,200
Quarterly — 4 invoices of $300
Monthly — 12 invoices of $100

Admins decide which options to make available. When a charge is assigned to a property, the resident (or an admin) picks the installment option that fits. Each option can optionally carry a small installment fee (flat or percentage) to offset the overhead of more frequent billing.

This is what lets your community offer flexible payment options without giving up control over what’s owed. The total stays the same — only the cadence changes.

Billing accounts: the financial record of a property

Every property in HOA Hub has a billing account. This is the central place where all of that property’s billing activity lives — charge assignments, invoices, payments, credits, balance, autopay settings, and the full transaction history.

A billing account moves through three states, in order:

Interim — Set up but not yet being actively billed
Active — Actively billed. This happens automatically as soon as a current owner is assigned to the property
Archived — No longer active. This only happens when the last owner moves out (see below)

Invoices, payments, and credit memos all attach to the billing account rather than directly to a contact. This is what makes ownership changes work cleanly: the billing account and its history stay with the property.

How invoices get created

HOA Hub generates invoices automatically based on each property’s charge assignments and installment options. You don’t have to click “send bill” every month — the system does it on a rolling basis, creating the next upcoming invoice a configurable number of days before it’s due (the invoice lead time, set in Billing settings).

New invoices go out one of two ways, depending on your community’s invoice generation mode:

Automatic — invoices are created and issued directly to residents on schedule, with no admin step.
Admin review — invoices are created as drafts. Admins review them, edit them if needed, and send them from the Invoices list — individually or all at once.

Both modes lead to the same end state: an Open invoice sitting on the resident’s account, waiting for payment.

You can also create invoices anytime for one-off charges — a single invoice, a batch across many properties, or a one-line “Quick Invoice” from a property’s own page. See Creating invoices and recording payments.

The invoice lifecycle

Every invoice moves through a defined set of states:

Draft — Created but not sent. Fully editable — add, remove, or change line items.
Open — Sent to the resident. No one can edit the line items from this point forward, by design — this protects the audit trail.
Partial — The resident has paid part of the balance.
Overdue — Past the due date with a remaining balance. If you have a late fee rule configured, this is the only point at which a late fee is automatically appended to the invoice.
Paid — The balance is zero.
Voided — Cancelled, with any remaining balance reversed.
Written Off — Intentionally removed from the books. Stays in the system for audit purposes.
Transferred — Moved from one billing account to another, as part of a move-out balance resolution (see below).

If a late fee or an NSF fee needs to be forgiven, it isn’t deleted or edited — it’s marked waived, and a credit memo for the same amount is issued and applied to the invoice automatically.

Payments, transactions, and credits

When money comes in, HOA Hub records it as a transaction and allocates it to one or more invoices. If a resident pays $300 toward a $500 invoice, the invoice moves to Partial. Pay the remaining $200 and it moves to Paid.

You can record payments manually — check, cash, money order, ACH received outside Stripe — or, with Stripe connected, residents can pay online. Either way, the rest of the billing system treats them the same.

A few things to know about how payments behave:

Overpayments become account credit. If a resident sends $600 on a $500 invoice, the invoice is marked Paid and the extra $100 is added to the account’s credit balance. That credit balance auto-applies to the next invoice that comes due.
Payment allocation follows a strategy you configure. By default, payments apply to the oldest open invoices first. You can change this in Billing settings to prioritize invoices with late fees, or invoices without them, instead.
Manual override is always available. Payments can be recorded against a specific invoice directly, bypassing the default allocation.

Every money movement in the system — charges, payments, credits, refunds, adjustments, late fees, write-offs, opening balances — is recorded in the transaction ledger on the billing account, with a running balance. See Transactions and exports.

What Stripe adds (and what works without it)

HOA Hub does not require Stripe to work. Every feature described above — charges, installment options, automatic invoice generation, manual payment recording, late fees, payment arrangements, credit memos, transaction exports — runs perfectly well without any payment processor connected. Communities that prefer checks and bank transfers can use HOA Hub exactly as-is.

When you’re ready to offer online payments, connecting Stripe adds:

Card and ACH payments — residents pay online from any device
Autopay — residents enroll once and HOA Hub charges their saved payment method on each due date, with an advance notice email before each withdrawal
Self-service payment methods — residents manage their own saved cards and bank accounts
Optional convenience fee pass-through — if your board wants to offset processing costs, you can configure a convenience fee that residents see and pay on top of the invoice amount

See Connecting Stripe / online payments for the guided setup.

What happens when a property changes owners

Because invoices, payments, credits, and transaction history all live on the property’s billing account, day-to-day ownership changes don’t disrupt anything. If a co-owner is added or removed while another current owner remains on the property, the same billing account and its full history just carry on unchanged.

When the last owner moves out, an admin resolves the outstanding balance as part of the move-out workflow, choosing one of three options:

Write off — open invoices are written off and any credit balance is forfeited. The old account is archived and a fresh, empty account is created for the property.
Carry forward — open invoices are marked Transferred, and the balance (or credit) moves to a new account along with a single consolidated invoice summarizing what’s owed.
Refund — the credit balance is logged as a refund transaction and zeroed out.

Between the last owner moving out and a new owner being assigned, billing continues to run normally on the property — charges keep renewing and invoices keep generating. That’s intentional: it keeps the ledger accurate no matter how long the property goes without an owner, so whichever resolution is chosen when a new owner is assigned has a complete and correct balance to work from.

Where to go next

Setting up charges and billing configuration? See Setting up billing.
Working a specific property’s balance? See Managing a property’s billing.
Creating and sending invoices? See Creating invoices and recording payments.
Configuring late fees or a payment plan for a delinquent resident? See Late fees and payment arrangements.
Turning on online payments? See Connecting Stripe / online payments.
Reviewing the ledger or exporting to QuickBooks? See Transactions and exports.
You’re a resident, not an admin? See Paying Your Assessments.