How Healthy is Your HOA? A 20-Question Diagnostic

Running a self-managed HOA is a balancing act. You're juggling finances, compliance, resident relationships, vendor coordination, and your own day jobs. It's easy to lose track of whether your community is thriving — building reserves, communicating well, staying out of legal trouble — or just surviving one crisis to the next.

This 20-question diagnostic measures HOA health across four areas: Financial Operations, Compliance & Risk, Communication, and Day-to-Day Operations. Score yourself honestly. At the end you'll see what your number means and where to start.

How to use this

• Score each question 0 (no / not really), 1 (sometimes), or 2 (yes, consistently).
• Add up your total. Maximum is 40.
• Read the scoring guide at the bottom.

Financial Operations

1. Can you produce the current balance for any resident in under 60 seconds? If answering "what does Unit 23 owe?" means digging through spreadsheets and an email thread, you're losing money to missed late fees and double-charges. Healthy boards have one authoritative number per resident.

2. Do you reconcile your operating account monthly against invoices and payments? The single most common reason boards lose track of money isn't theft — it's drift. Monthly reconciliation catches errors at 30 days. Quarterly catches them at 90 if you're disciplined; if you're not, you find them at year-end.

3. Do you have a written reserve study updated within the last three years? In most states this is legally required. Even where it isn't, it tells you whether you can afford the roof when it leaks. Without one, the answer is "no, we'll do a special assessment" — and assessments destroy trust faster than any other board decision.

4. Is your annual budget published to residents at least 30 days before adoption? Residents who feel ambushed by dues increases push back hard. Residents who saw the budget months in advance accept the same increase. Same dollars, very different relationship.

5. Do you collect dues automatically — ACH, card, or scheduled bank pay? Manual check collection has a 5–15% delinquency rate from sheer forgetfulness. Auto-pay drops it below 2%.

Compliance & Risk

6. Do you hold a documented Annual General Meeting every year? Minutes filed, quorum confirmed, decisions recorded. This is the single most common gap that surfaces during a lawsuit or insurance claim.

7. When you issue a violation, is there a paper trail with date, description, photos, and resident response? Verbal warnings escalate to fines, fines escalate to liens, liens escalate to court. The board that can produce a clean three-month history wins every time.

8. Do you keep architectural review committee (ARC) decisions on file with the request, approval, and conditions? Three years from now, when a buyer's title search asks whether the fence was approved, the answer needs to come from the file — not from the neighbor's memory.

9. Do you carry current Directors & Officers (D&O) liability insurance? Without it, a board member's personal assets are exposed in any resident lawsuit. Most policies are under ,000 a year. Most boards without one don't know they don't have one.

10. Is your HOA registered where your state requires registration? Texas, Florida, California, Colorado, Virginia, and others have HOA registries with annual filings. Missing them can void your ability to enforce violations.

Communication

11. Can you reach every resident by email in under five minutes? Not "do you have most emails." Every resident, current addresses, in one place.

12. Do residents have a self-service way to see their balance and pay it without calling you? Every minute spent answering "what do I owe?" is a minute you didn't spend on the things only the board can do.

13. Are governing documents (bylaws, CC&Rs, rules) available to every resident in one place — not a binder in the secretary's house?

14. Do you publish meeting minutes within 14 days of the meeting? Communities where minutes lag by months are communities where residents stop believing the board does anything.

15. Is there a documented way for residents to submit a maintenance request — not "text Janet"?

Day-to-Day Operations

16. Is there a single, current vendor list with contracts, expirations, and contacts?

17. Could a brand-new board member take over your role using only what's documented today? If the answer is "no, they'd have to call me," your community has a continuity problem.

18. Do you have a digital backup of every important document — bylaws, CC&Rs, minutes, financials — that survives if a laptop dies?

19. When the last board member rolled off, was the transition documented?

20. Is there a written process for handling resident complaints? "Ad hoc" is the answer that produces the most lawsuits.

Scoring

What healthy HOAs have in common

The communities scoring 35+ share one thing: they don't rely on any single person's memory — they run on documented process: a budget that survives the year, a violation workflow, and the wider self-managed operating playbook. The treasurer doesn't carry finances in their head. Violations don't live in one inbox. The vendor list doesn't disappear when a board member moves.

That's the structural fix. Tools matter less than discipline, but the right tools make the discipline cheap. That's what we built The Good HOA for — to make "we know where everything is" the default, not something you have to fight for every meeting.

Start a 14-day free trial if you want to see how it handles your worst-scoring category. No credit card. Bring your records as they exist today.