Your HOA’s budget plays a big part in operating your association efficiently. Still, creating a budget for an HOA can seem intimidating, especially if you are a new association without previous financials to reference.
To make this process easier, there are HOA budget templates that can give you a starting point. But before diving in, it’s important to know the information you’ll need to accurately populate it.
What Goes in Your Budget
The first step to filling out a budget template is to have all your numbers readily available including income, expenses, and reserve.
- Income– For an HOA, income can come from various sources such as assessments, dues, interest, and other miscellaneous forms, like fundraising strategies.
- Expenses– Similar to income, your expenses will vary and include management fees, bank charges, administrative costs, marketing services, and community maintenance.
- Reserve Budget– Your reserve budget is what you can set aside to ensure your association is prepared for emergency purchases, like paying for an overage on snow removal or to fix a damaged playground set.
Having these numbers categorized and organized will help immensely as you create your budget through one of the templates to follow.
Convenient Budget Templates to Use
Once you have a grasp on numbers, there are HOA budget templates available to make the process easier and help you avoid starting from scratch.
Here are a few places online where you can find a homeowner’s association budget sample:
- Cedar Group Management– This online resource guides you through the creation of a budget with a free HOA budget excel template. No email address or information is required.
- Comsource– For a general or condo association budget template, you can give Comsource an email address to have a free template delivered to your inbox.
- Condo Control Center– With helpful tips for board members creating a budget, you can use this source to download a free template by giving a few points of professional information.
- HOA Support Forms– Using this site, you can get a glimpse at what your final budget might look like by downloading their free sample budget or viewing other helpful budget resources.
How to Use HOA Budget Templates
After you download one of these budget templates or samples, you can immediately start filling in the budget for your HOA. For most templates, that means simply opening the excel file and editing its fields according to your unique numbers. Here’s how to accurately capture your budget using these templates:
- Collect your income, expense, and reserve budget numbers for easy calculation and entry.
- Enter the appropriate information under each section according to the template’s description of your income, expenses, and reserve budget.
- Review that your numbers and calculations are correct, editing the template as needed to capture your unique association categories.
- Run these numbers by others you may know that are on the board of their HOA to get a quick gut check. If you don’t know anyone on an HOA board, try looking up some local community associations online and give them a call!
