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Questions boards actually ask

50 answers, in plain language. Search below, or read the section that matches your question.

50 questions, in 15 sections.

General

What is HOAPrepared?

An administrative service for self-managed homeowners associations in Florida. We prepare the paperwork a board has to produce anyway — the compliance calendar, meeting notices, agendas, packets, minutes and owner mailings — and put it in front of your board for approval. The board decides. We prepare.

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Are you a management company?

No. A management company takes over running your association, usually including money, vendors and enforcement. We do none of that. We prepare documents and keep the calendar. Your board keeps every decision, every signature and every dollar.

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Are you a law firm?

No, and we do not give legal advice. When something needs a lawyer, we say so. Attorney review is available as a paid add-on that routes your documents to a Florida HOA attorney.

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Who is this actually for?

Volunteer boards running their own association without a manager, usually in communities of roughly 30 to 500 homes. If your secretary is doing this on a kitchen table at 10pm, you are who we built it for.

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Does this replace our secretary?

No. It gives them a system instead of a shoebox. The secretary still signs, still files, still runs the meeting. What changes is that the drafting, the chasing and the remembering stop being theirs alone.

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How HOAPrepared works

What happens when we start?

You give us your governing documents and your basic dates — fiscal year, annual meeting, how often the board meets. We build your calendar from those, then prepare your next meeting cycle end to end. You review everything before it goes anywhere.

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Who approves what goes out?

Your board, every time. Nothing is sent, mailed or filed on our own initiative. Each approval is recorded against the document, so a year later you can show who approved what and when.

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Is a person actually looking at this, or is it all software?

The software does the preparation and the tracking. Your board is the review step, and it is not optional. If you want a professional set of eyes as well, CAM review and attorney review are available as add-ons.

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How much time does our board actually spend?

The work that remains is reading and approving. That is deliberately the part a board cannot delegate. Everything before it — drafting, formatting, assembling, chasing dates — is ours.

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We are already behind. Is that a problem?

No, and it is the normal starting point. We build the calendar from where you actually are, mark what has slipped, and work forward. Nobody is graded on the state of the filing cabinet.

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Pricing

How much does it cost?

One flat monthly price, chosen by the size of your community. Every price is published — there is no quote and no sales call to find out what it costs.

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What do the cheaper plans not include?

Nothing from the core service. The same compliance calendar, the same meeting cycles prepared end to end, the same documents and the same records — from the first home, in every plan. We do not hold the service back to sell you a bigger plan. What a larger plan adds is scale and configuration: how many homes it covers, how many meeting cycles a year, what is included over a year before anything is ordered separately, and how far the platform bends to your association's own way of working.

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What costs extra?

Printing and postage, tracked mail, an owner portal, an association website, the annual meeting package, document migration, and professional or attorney review. Each is optional, billed only when you use it, and priced before anything is ordered.

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Is there a discount for paying yearly?

No. It is billed monthly, at the published price, with no annual discount.

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Can we cancel?

It is an annual agreement billed monthly, and you can cancel at the end of your current term with 30 days' notice. When you leave you get a full export of your association's documents and records within 10 business days, at no charge.

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Self-managed HOAs

Why do self-managed boards need something like this?

Because the work is relentless and the volunteers change. A board can run beautifully for two years and then lose the one person who remembered how the annual meeting worked. A system survives the turnover; a person's memory does not.

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What happens when our board changes?

The calendar, the documents and the history stay. A new secretary opens the same dashboard and sees what happened last cycle and what is due next. That handover is usually the single biggest reason boards come to us.

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We are a small association. Is this overkill?

A 40-home association has most of the same obligations as a 400-home one, with a tenth of the people to do them. Small boards often feel the relief faster.

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Board meetings

What does HOAPrepared do for a regular board meeting?

It prepares the notice, drafts the agenda, assembles the packet, routes everything for board approval, and afterwards drafts the minutes from the meeting record and files them. You get reminded before each step, not after.

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How often can we meet?

As often as your association needs. Meeting frequency is not limited by plan — the plan follows the size of your community, not your calendar.

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Can it handle a special or emergency meeting?

Yes. A special meeting runs the same cycle on a shorter runway. If it genuinely cannot wait, rush processing is available as an add-on.

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Is there a checklist we can use right now?

Yes, and it is free with no account. Pick your meeting type and it generates a before, during and after checklist you can print.

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Annual meetings

What is the annual meeting package?

An add-on covering the parts of an annual meeting a regular meeting does not have: notices, ballots, proxies and quorum tracking. It is available with any plan.

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Can you help us reach quorum?

We can track it and warn you early, which is the part boards usually miss. Whether you reach it depends on your owners — but knowing two weeks out that you are short is what gives you time to do something about it.

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When should we start preparing?

Earlier than most boards think. Work backwards from the meeting date rather than forwards from today: fix the date first, then place the roster, the notice, the packet and the proxy chase behind it, each with the lead time your own documents require. The value is not the list — it is that the dates exist somewhere other than one person's memory.

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Notices

Do you write our notices?

We draft and format them, ready for the board to approve. The board decides what the notice says; we make sure it exists, on time, and in a form you can send.

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How do we know when a notice has to go out?

Your notice period comes from your declaration, your bylaws and Florida law — check them or ask your attorney. Once you know the period, the arithmetic is the easy part, and our free calculator does it: enter the meeting date and the period, and it gives you the last day to mail and the last day to post.

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Can we prove a notice went out?

Yes. The notice, the recipient list, the date it went out and the mailing record are kept together with the meeting. Tracked mail with proof of delivery is available as an add-on when it matters more.

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Agendas and minutes

Who writes the minutes?

They are drafted from the meeting record and returned to your board for review. Your board approves them, and the approved version is what gets filed. That is the same in every plan.

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How accurate can drafted minutes be?

They are as good as the record the meeting produced — motions, seconds, votes and decisions. That is exactly what minutes are supposed to contain, and it is the part boards most often write down badly at 9pm. Your board still reads and corrects them.

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Communications and mailings

Do you handle communications to owners?

We prepare and format them — announcements, owner letters, meeting notices — for the board to release. Coordination of the mailing itself is included; printing and postage are ordered separately.

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Who pays for printing and postage?

You do, and only when you use it. Printing and mailing are billed per piece at a published price, and nothing is ordered without the board asking for it.

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Can we send by email instead of mail?

Whether email is acceptable for a given communication depends on your governing documents and on what each owner has consented to — check that with your attorney. Practically, we can prepare either.

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Documents and records

Where do our documents live?

In one vault, instead of five inboxes and a hard drive. Governing documents, minutes, notices, mailings and approvals are kept together and stay searchable.

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What about the records we already have?

Document migration is an add-on: we bring your existing records in, year by year, priced by volume. You can also start clean and add history later.

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Can we get our documents out?

Yes, at any time, and automatically within 10 business days if you leave. Your records belong to your association, not to us.

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Florida HOA compliance

Does using HOAPrepared make us compliant?

No service can promise that, and you should be wary of one that does. What we do is make sure the work is prepared and on a calendar, that the board sees it in time, and that what you did is documented. Whether a given obligation applies to your association is a question for your governing documents and your attorney.

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Where do the deadlines on our calendar come from?

From your own documents and your own cycle — your fiscal year, your annual meeting, your board's meeting rhythm. We do not publish a generic list of statutory deadlines, because the ones that apply depend on your association and on advice we are not qualified to give.

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Do you work outside Florida?

Not today. Florida is what we know, and doing one state properly is worth more to a board than doing fifty vaguely.

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CAM and attorney review

What is professional CAM review?

An optional add-on in which a community association manager reviews your meeting packet before the board meets. It is a second opinion on a difficult cycle, not a substitute for your board's judgement.

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When should we get an attorney involved?

Amendments, enforcement, fines, disputes, and anything where being wrong is expensive. Attorney review is available as an add-on that routes your documents to a Florida HOA attorney. We will tell you when we think something is above our line.

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Privacy

What happens to our owners' information?

It is used to do the work you asked for — addressing notices, tracking who was mailed — and nothing else. We do not sell it, and we do not use it for advertising.

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Does the free tools page collect what we type?

No. The free tools calculate in your browser. What you type stays there unless you press « Email me my result » and give us an address.

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Do you track visitors on this website?

Yes, and we say which tools: Google Analytics counts visits, and Microsoft Clarity records how pages are used so we can see where the site confuses people. Form fields and tool results are masked. Our privacy policy is published and describes all of this; it has not yet been reviewed by an attorney.

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Getting started

How long before we are running?

Loading your documents and building the first calendar is the bulk of it. Assisted onboarding is available if you would rather we did that part with you.

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Can we try something before committing?

Use the free tools — they need no account and no email, and they are the same logic we run on a bigger scale. After that, book a demo and we will walk a full meeting cycle with you.

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What do you need from us to start?

Your governing documents, your owner roster, and your dates. That is genuinely it for the first cycle.

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What we do not do

Will you ever decide something for us?

No. We do not vote, we do not sign on your behalf, and we do not send anything your board has not approved.

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Do you handle our money?

No. We do not collect assessments, hold funds, pay vendors or manage bank accounts. Financial documents can be attached to a packet; the money stays with your association.

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Do you handle violations and enforcement?

We can prepare the correspondence your board decides to send, including tracked mail with proof of delivery. Deciding to enforce, and how far to go, is your board's — usually with your attorney.

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Still not sure?

Book a demo and we'll walk one full meeting cycle with you, start to finish — the notice, the packet, the approvals and the minutes. Bring the question that isn't answered above.