When a community leaves its management company, everything the community owns has to come back: the owner roster, the vendor list, the income and expense categories, what each unit currently owes, and every governing document. In HOA-OS you bring those in one file at a time, through an import page built for that handover. The walkthrough below shows the whole move, including how to check the balances against your old system before a single row is written.
The management company has your roster, your ledger, your vendor list, and every document the community owns. Leaving means getting all of it back, and then having somewhere to put it. Here is how that second part works.
Ask for the turnover packet first
Ask for four things: the owner roster, the vendor list, your income and expense categories, and what each unit currently owes. Those four are exactly what the import page takes: members, vendors, categories, balances.
If the community's books live in QuickBooks, the page names the report to run for each one, so nobody has to hunt through the Reports menu working out which export is the right export.
Getting the packet is the one part of this that depends on somebody else. Everything after it is yours.
Start with the owner roster
The roster is the file a management company actually hands over, and it looks like it: names in mixed case, a few emails missing, unit numbers sitting in a column called whatever they decided to call it.
The importer reads your column headers and works out which is which, the name, the address, the unit number, then shows you what it decided before anything is imported. If it read a column wrong, you see that on screen rather than afterward. Then comes a preview of every row, so you see what is about to land before it lands.
Vendors next
The landscaper, the pool company, the insurance agent. It is the same wizard you just used for the roster, so you already know how this one goes.
A vendor name is the only column that has to be there. Contacts, phone numbers and addresses come along if the file has them, and nothing stalls because one of them is missing.
Match your income and expense categories
Then your income and expense categories, so the books you keep in HOA-OS line up with the books you kept there. Bank and receivable accounts do not apply to categories, and they are skipped for you, so the export goes in exactly as it came out. There is no cleaning up the file first.
Set opening balances as of your migration date
This is the part boards worry about: what every unit owed on the day you took the community over.
You set the migration date, the day those balances are true as of, and upload the aging report. Before a single row is written, the total is on screen. Compare it against the receivables total from your old system. If those two numbers agree, the move is clean.
When a row does not agree, it gets flagged instead of imported quietly. In the walkthrough one address in the file is cut off, so the row cannot find its property, and you fix it right there by pointing it at the property it belongs to. Once every row is matched and the total is the one the old system reported, you import, and every unit starts here owing exactly what it owed there.
Each balance lands on the unit's account as an opening balance, dated, in the same running history as every charge and payment that comes after it.
And if the file turns out to be wrong, an old export or the wrong quarter, the whole thing comes back out. Each balance import is one batch, and a batch can be undone. That is the difference between trying this and committing to it.
Upload the documents, with visibility set as you go
Last, the documents: the declaration, the bylaws, the rules residents ask about all year. Each one gets a visibility setting as you upload it, public, residents only, or board only. So the pool rules are there the moment somebody asks, and the board's correspondence is not.
That is the community moved in. Roster, vendors, categories, balances, documents, all of it on your side of the login.
What does not come across
Worth knowing before you start: what moves is where every unit stands today, not years of transaction history. Balances start on the migration date you picked.
The old statements and year-end reports are still worth uploading as documents. That becomes your record of everything before that day, kept alongside the governing documents rather than inside the ledger.
You can take it all back out again
Here is the part that should decide it. You can take all of it back out again, any day, without asking anyone.
It lives in Settings, under Your data. One download gives you every record as a spreadsheet, your stored files with links to them, and a readme explaining how it all fits together. A board that has just spent a month getting its records back from someone else tends to care about that more than any feature on the list.
Frequently asked questions
What do I ask the management company for? Four files: the owner roster, the vendor list, your income and expense categories, and what each unit currently owes. Those are the four the import page takes.
Do I have to clean up the spreadsheet first? No. The importer reads your column headers, works out which column is which, and shows you what it decided before importing. You also get a row-by-row preview.
What if the balances do not match my old system? The total appears on screen before anything is written, so you can compare it against the receivables total from the old system. Rows that cannot be matched are flagged, and you point them at the right property before importing.
Can I undo a balance import? Yes. Each balance import is one batch, and a batch can be undone, so a wrong file does not become a permanent problem.
Does my transaction history come across? No. What moves is where every unit stands as of the migration date you set. Upload the old statements and year-end reports as documents to keep the history.
Who can see the documents I upload? You choose as you upload each one: public, residents only, or board only.
Can I get my data back out later? Yes, any day, from Settings under Your data. One download gives you every record as a spreadsheet, your files with links, and a readme.
The records belong to the community
That is the move: ask for the packet, bring in the four files, upload the documents. An afternoon's work, and the community's records belong to the community again.
If you are still deciding whether to make the change, how to change your HOA management company walks through the notice period and the timing. If you already know, take a look at HOA-OS or get in touch with questions about your own turnover packet.