HOA Bookkeeping: Software, a Service, or Your Treasurer, and What Each Costs

Last verified: October 13, 2026 · See updates

Three people can keep an association’s books: a volunteer treasurer with a spreadsheet, software the board runs itself, or a service you pay to do the posting. For the 24-unit association in our free chart of accounts, published prices put those routes between $0 and $6,084 a year. This page prices all three against the same ledger, and gives you the volume test that decides.

What bookkeeping means for an association

An association does one thing a corner shop does not: it keeps two pots of money and may not mix them. Dues for this year’s electricity sit in the operating fund. Money set aside for the roof sits in the reserve fund. Both have to be reported separately, and a transfer between them has to show on both sides.

Our free chart of accounts is built that way. It holds 54 numbered accounts: 42 in the operating fund and 12 in the reserve fund, including a matched pair of interfund accounts (1400 Due from reserve fund, 1410 Due from operating fund) for the month one fund pays the other’s bill.

So the job has five parts, and any route you buy has to do all five:

• Bill the assessments and record what each owner owes, owner by owner.
• Record what arrives and apply it to the right owner and the right month.
• Pay the bills against an approval, and keep the vendor records a 1099 needs.
• Reconcile every bank account to its statement, every month, operating and reserve.
• Report by fund, so the board sees operating and reserve apart, plus who is behind.

How much bookkeeping does your association have?

Price per unit is the wrong unit of measure. Bookkeeping cost follows the number of lines somebody posts, and two associations of the same size can differ by a factor of three. Count yours instead of guessing.

The sample January inside our general ledger is a 24-unit association: 8 one-bedroom units at $340 a month, 10 two-bedroom at $410, 6 three-bedroom at $470, which bills $9,640 a month and $115,680 a year. That January is 14 transactions, posted as 32 debit and credit lines, plus 4 opening-balance lines. You can open the file and count them:

At that rate the year is about 168 transactions. One choice moves that number more than anything else: whether you post the month’s receipts as a single bank deposit, as the ledger sample does, or one line per owner, as our dues tracker does. Post them individually and 24 units add 288 lines a year, taking the total to about 444. Neither is wrong. The batch is faster and the per-owner version gives you an aging report without extra work.

Your own count, in four steps. Add up the vendors you pay in a normal month. Add one for the billing run, one for the reserve transfer, one for bank charges, one for interest. Add 1 if you deposit receipts in a batch, or your unit count if you post them one by one. Multiply by 12. That number, not your unit count, is what you are buying when you pay somebody to keep the books.

What the file cannot tell you is how long those 32 lines take, because that depends on the person and the tools. Time one month’s close before you price the alternatives. Officer time in self-managed associations is the subject of our self-managed versus management company cost page.

What each route costs for the same 24-unit association

Every price below is published by the company on its own site and was read there on the date in the last column. The annual, per-unit and per-transaction columns are our arithmetic on those published figures, at 24 units and 168 transactions a year. They are not quotes, and published rates are asking rates.

What the table shows, read across. Software that keeps association books starts under half a percent of the money it counts. Paying a person to post the lines starts near one percent and reaches five. Between those two sits the only question that matters: whether a volunteer will do the posting, and keep doing it.

Three figures that did not go in the table, and why

• HOA Messenger publishes its double-entry bookkeeping feature at $20 a month billed yearly, or $25 billed monthly, but the feature needs the Premium plan and the price of Premium is not on the pricing page. The total cannot be worked out from what is published, so no annual figure appears above (read 2026-10-13).
• Intuit’s own bookkeeping service carried no dollar figure anywhere on its page when we read it on 2026-10-13, so QuickBooks appears above as software only.
• Community Financials, a long-running association financial-management firm, states in its own words that pricing is a per-door monthly base fee plus usage fees and requires a quote. It publishes no number, so it cannot be priced here (read 2026-08-16, re-confirmed in our pricing dataset).

Eleven of the 32 vendors in our software directory publish no price at all. A quote-only firm is not a dear one; it is an unknown one, and you will need two or three quotes to find the market rate.

The fees no monthly price includes

Every figure above is the subscription or the service fee. Four costs sit outside it, and one of them can exceed the subscription several times over.

Card fees are the line that catches boards out. If every owner paid by card every month, the association in our example would pay about $4,193 a year in processing, against a $588 subscription. Who absorbs that fee is a choice the platform leaves to the board, and the wording differs by vendor. Our HOA payment processing page sets out each published fee and who each vendor says pays it.

Which route fits, by the thing that forces the decision

Boards rarely choose this on price. Something forces it. Find the line below that matches your situation.

Twelve questions to ask before you sign

Ask all twelve, of every candidate, in the same order, and write the answers down. The comparison is the point.

1. Will the balance sheet show the operating fund and the reserve fund in separate columns?
2. Do you track assessments receivable owner by owner, and will we get an aging report every month?
3. Who holds signature authority on our bank accounts, and does your staff ever have it?
4. Will you reconcile every account, operating and reserve, every month, and will we see each reconciliation?
5. Are the books ours to take if we leave, and in what file format?
6. Is the price flat, per door, or per hour, and what makes it go up?
7. What is the minimum monthly charge, and is there a setup or onboarding fee?
8. Does the price include the federal return, the 1099s, and the year-end package for an accountant?
9. Is catch-up work for the months we are behind included or extra?
10. Who answers an owner who disputes a balance, you or the board?
11. Will you work in software we already own, or do we have to move to yours?
12. What is not included?

Question 12 does the most work. Ask it last, after the eleven specifics, and leave a silence.

Where every price came from

Each figure was read at the company’s own page, in a browser, on the date shown. Where a page publishes nothing, that is recorded too. Links open the pricing page the figure came from.

The wage figure is a national median for people employed in that occupation. It is not a contractor’s billing rate, and a firm’s published hourly rate is not the same thing as a wage. Both are shown so you can see the gap and ask about it.

Frequently asked questions

Does a small HOA need bookkeeping software, or will a spreadsheet do?

A spreadsheet does the job for a small association with a willing treasurer. The sample January in our free general ledger is 14 transactions and 32 posting lines for 24 units, which is a spreadsheet-sized month. Software earns its price when the board wants an owner portal, online payments, or an aging report without building one, or when the treasurer changes often and a shared system survives the handover better than a file on one laptop.

How much does an HOA bookkeeping service cost?

Published floors we read at each company’s own site on October 13, 2026: Maxim Liberty from $75 a month at $15 an hour, with $75 to $300 a month described as typical for a small self-managed association; PayHOA from $199 a month on top of its subscription; EasyHOA from $299 a month. HOA Services USA publishes $395 a month for its self-service plan, plus a $100 monthly software fee and $0.50 per unit for accounting. Several specialist firms publish no price and quote per door.

Can we just use QuickBooks for our HOA?

Many associations do, and it keeps a clean set of books, but it is not built for an association. It has one set of books rather than an operating fund and a reserve fund, and no concept of an assessment billed to a unit, so both have to be built with classes and sub-accounts. QuickBooks Online Simple Start was $38 a month when we read Intuit’s pricing page on October 13, 2026. Our QuickBooks Online for HOAs page sets out the workarounds and their limits.

Is a bookkeeper the same as an auditor?

No, and one cannot replace the other. A bookkeeper records transactions and reconciles accounts through the year. An audit, a review or a compilation is a separate engagement by an accountant who reports on the finished statements, and most states that require one require it of an independent licensee. Good bookkeeping makes that engagement cheaper, not unnecessary.

What does bookkeeping not include?

Payment processing fees, postage, the federal return and the 1099s are charged on top by every vendor we checked, and so are an audit, a review and a reserve study. Card processing is the largest of them: at PayHOA’s published 3.5% plus $0.50, a 24-unit association whose owners all paid by card every month would pay about $4,193 a year in fees, against a $588 subscription.