HOA Start by Membershine RETURN HOME

Release Notes

What’s new in HOA Start

What's live in the new HOA Start

October 7, 2026

We rebuilt HOA Start from the ground up. This is everything that’s live today.

Fourteen features are released and available to every customer. Here’s what they do and why they matter.


Your members and properties

Members — Every member in one place: contact details, the household they belong to, and the property they’re tied to. Filter the list by role and act on exactly that group. Bulk actions apply to precisely the members you selected, even as you change filters. Deleted members stay visible in a filtered view and can’t be edited or removed twice by mistake.

Properties & Addresses — Every property in the association, with its address and its owners. Several owners at the same address works the way it should — joint owners, a trust, a couple who both want access. The property is the unit of record, so dues and communication follow the home rather than a person who moved out.

Why it matters: board turnover stops erasing institutional memory. The next secretary inherits a current member list, not a folder of somebody’s exports. Joint owners, rentals, and mid-year sales stop being corrections you make twice.


Billing and payments

Invoicing — Bill monthly, annually, or one time. Choose exactly which properties a schedule applies to; your selections stick while you keep filtering. Once a schedule is running, invoices go out on their own. Members see current and past invoices, and every invoice is a PDF they can save or print.

Flat Fees — Charge a fixed amount alongside regular dues. Late fees apply automatically to overdue invoices and the member is emailed when they do. They post to their own revenue account, so your books show them separately.

Online Payments — Members pay by card or bank transfer (ACH). Funds settle to the association’s own account — we never hold your money. Payment applies against the invoice automatically, and members get a PDF receipt showing how they paid.

Member Account Balances — Every member can see what they owe and what they’ve paid, with open invoices and payment history in one view.

Why it matters: assessment season stops eating a week of your life, and nobody has to remember to send anything. Late fees get applied the same way every time, so enforcement stops feeling personal — it’s just the policy running. And the single most common question a treasurer fields now answers itself.


Real books

Financials — Double-entry accounting behind the association’s money, not a spreadsheet. Trial Balance, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Budget — both Summary and Actual-vs-Budgeted. Record expenses and manual entries when something happens outside the normal flow.

Custom GL Accounts — Your chart of accounts, in your association’s language. Start from a standard chart that’s ready to use, then rename accounts to match what your board and auditor already call them. Add the accounts you need for local and sales tax or additional funds, and retire the ones you don’t use without losing past reports.

Bank Reconciliation — Reconcile what the bank did against what your books expected. Connect a supported bank account so transactions arrive automatically, then see what your books expected beside what the bank actually did. Match one deposit to several invoices, including payments that came in short or over. Record bank-only items — fees, interest, an unexpected check — without leaving the screen, mark items cleared, and drive the difference to zero. You stay in control of matching; the system assists rather than reconciling on its own. It starts with one operating account, with more accounts and more banks to follow.

Why it matters: the reports your board meeting and your audit need come out of the same system that holds the money. The month-end spreadsheet goes away and the books actually tie to the bank. You can hand an auditor real books in your board’s language instead of reconstructing the year from a spreadsheet in March.


Documents

Document Storage — Governing documents, minutes, and notices in one place members can actually find. You decide who sees what, folder by folder: board-only material stays board-only, while bylaws and minutes stay visible to every member. Members only ever see and download the folders they’re authorized for — nothing else is visible to them. Change permissions across many folders at once when you reorganize. Upload in bulk, then search, filter, and sort to find a document again. Share by link. Delete in bulk when you’re cleaning up, with a confirmation step and a trash can before anything is gone for good.

Why it matters: a records or disclosure request becomes a link instead of a scavenger hunt — and board-only material stays board-only.


Communication

Email Communication — The system emails members when something concerns them: an invoice raised, a payment received, a fee applied. Emails show your association’s name as the sender, not a generic system address nobody recognizes. Invoices and receipts travel as attachments members can keep.

Organization Mass Email — Email your whole membership or a filtered slice of it. Filter by role, select all, then include or exclude individuals — and your selections survive changing the filter. It sends from the system that already knows who your members are, so there’s no stale distribution list.

Notifications — Members are emailed as things happen to their account: an invoice issued, a payment taken, a late fee applied. Notices go out on their own, so nothing depends on a volunteer remembering.

Why it matters: members recognize who’s emailing them, so notices get opened instead of filtered. One announcement reaches exactly the right people, and the follow-up happens whether or not anyone remembered to do it.


Signing in

Login & Identity — Secure sign-in for members and administrators. Members reset their own password from a link emailed to them, with no waiting on a volunteer. Sign-in is handled by a dedicated identity service rather than something we rolled ourselves, and there’s one account per person, so who did what stays clear.

Why it matters: you stop being the person who resets passwords for three hundred people.


What’s next

Address Validation is in active development — addresses checked as you enter them, with corrections suggested, so you find out an address is wrong before you pay to mail to it.

After that we’re designing member and property imports, and physical mail for the households that never log in. Further out we’re gathering feedback on Workflows & Requests — one configurable system covering violations, architectural requests, work orders, maintenance requests, and tickets — and downloadable financial reports.

You can follow all of it on the product roadmap, which shows every feature and the stage it’s in.