Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: payment systems?

[Diana Carroll (dianaecarroll]

Agreed on the irony -- why does having a bank print and physically mail a
paper check (with first class postage!) cost me nothing but it costs big
money to perform the same transaction electronically?

Like you, most of our folks pay via automated paper check and I enter those
manually into Quickbooks. It's not terrible, but it could be so much better
-- in a perfect world, members could pay however they like electronically
with ease, whether that's by credit card (fee to be covered by themselves),
member-initiated transfer, or automatic transfer, and it would all go
straight into quickbooks without manual (i.e. error-prone) involvement from
me. They could also have a record of past payments, view open invoices,
securely put in their banking info, etc. Our condo fees are significant --
$300 - $1300 a month! I can manage all my other big bills (mortgage,
electricity, insurance) and most small ones (Netflix, magazine
subscriptions) this way, why not this one?

In addition to the convenience both to myself as bookkeeper and to our
members (including me!), it's also not a great look that we are using paper
and snail mail at our "eco village". It's also a totally foreign system to
younger folks at a time when we would really like to attract younger buyers
and renters so as not to become a NORC (naturally occurring retirement
community).  I recently rented my mom's house out to a pair of
20-somethings who looked at me like I had two heads when I suggested they
could pay the rent by check. (We settled on PayPal, which isn't an option
for the HOA fees because PayPal charges business an outrageous 2.99%.)

Finally, I am acutely aware that as the bookkeeper, I am (as we say in the
software field), a SPOF (single point of failure). Having automated payment
and bookkeeping systems would make it so much easier and faster to onboard
new folks into my job when needed.

Diana

On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 12:50 PM roger cunningham <nengaku1 [at] gmail.com>
wrote:

> Here at Cantine’s Island Cohousing HOA we continue using Quickbooks online
> but we don’t do online payments. Nearly all of our members have automatic
> payment set up through their banks and I don’t think banks charge for this.
> We receive a paper check directly from the bank. It’s a little more work
> than direct deposits but we only have 19 households so I really don’t mind.
> I do find it ironic though. Processing a paper check costs at least ten
> times more than processing a direct deposit. Maybe someday the banks will
> figure that out.
> Cheers
> Roger Cunningham
> Bookkeeper
> Cantine’s island
>
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 12:39 PM Diana Carroll <dianaecarroll [at] gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hello, fellow cohousing bookkeepers, accountants, treasurers or
> > trustee-type-folk!
> >
> > Here at Mosaic Commons, we have used QuickBooks for managing our
> community
> > finances for many years.  For a long time, our members were able to pay
> > their HOA fees via QuickBooks bank transfer for no fee, but a couple
> years
> > ago, Intuit started charging a 1% fee for ACH transfers, which is kind of
> > nuts.
> >
> > Looking around for other options, I see there are HOA management
> platforms
> > that would let us do this much cheaper, e.g. PayHOA which would charge a
> > much more reasonable $1.95 flat fee per transaction.
> >
> > Does anyone have experience with this or other similar platforms for
> > payments? (Or for general HOA management?) What do you think?
> >
> > I know about Gather and Mosaic cohousing management applications but as
> > best I can tell, neither offer any help with managing payments.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Diana, on behalf of Mosaic Commons in Berlin, MA
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