Dues & payments

How regular HOA dues, late fees, and special assessments show up on your account, and how to pay them depending on which payment mode your community uses.

Three payment modes

Your board picks one of three payment modes in the Payment settings card on the Dues & Payments admin page (/admin/dues), and the /dues page changes shape accordingly:

Stripe. The full in-app experience. You see your open charges with a Pay button next to each, you can opt into auto-pay per schedule, and your payment history records each Stripe charge. This mode requires the admin to connect a Stripe account first.

External. The community uses a different payment system (a property management portal, for example). Your dues page shows a single pay link that opens the admin-configured URL (always an https:// address) in a new tab, plus any instructions the admin wrote. When the link goes to a bank the app recognizes, the button names it, for example “Pay at Alliance Association Bank”. The payment itself happens on that other site, so it reaches your history here once the board records it, usually by importing the payment file their bank sends them.

None. Payments are handled outside the platform entirely. The dues page tells you to contact the board to arrange payment, and there’s nothing else to click.

How charges appear

Charges are created by a daily server job, not when you load the page. Each active dues schedule (which your admin defines: label, amount, frequency, due-day-of-month) opens a new charge against your property when the period starts. A monthly schedule opens 12 charges a year; a quarterly schedule opens 4.

Until the job runs the charge doesn’t exist on your ledger. Your outstanding balance only reflects charges the system has actually generated, not future amounts you’ll owe.

Each charge has a status (pending, paid, waived, or refunded) and a charge_type that tells you what it is: dues for regular assessments, late_fee for a late fee, or assessment for a special assessment.

Paying a charge

In Stripe mode, each open charge has a Pay button. If you have more than one open charge, a Pay All button appears at the top so you can clear the entire balance in a single checkout. Both routes hand off to Stripe Checkout in a new tab; when the payment succeeds, Stripe redirects you back to /dues and the charge flips to paid.

Payment methods & fees

In Stripe mode you can usually pay by bank account (ACH), card, or a wallet like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App Pay, or Amazon Pay. Your board chooses which methods the community accepts from the Dues & Payments admin page. Bank payment is always available; some boards turn cards off because bank payments cost the association much less to process.

By default the association covers the payment processing cost, and you pay exactly your assessment. A board can instead opt in to a small service fee added at checkout. If your community does that, you pick between bank and card before paying, the exact fee shows in dollars up front, and the bank option always carries the lower fee. Debit cards are the exception: card network rules do not allow service fees on debit payments, so paying by debit never carries the fee. The fee goes to your association to cover its processing cost, not to Neighbors.fyi.

Setting up auto-pay

Auto-pay is available per schedule, not per charge. You opt into automatic payments for, say, monthly HOA dues, but a one-time assessment still needs a manual pay. Auto-pay is only offered on recurring schedules (monthly, quarterly, annual). One-time schedules don’t expose the auto-pay card.

Enrolling sends you through Stripe Checkout one time to enter a payment method (bank account or card, depending on what your community accepts). Stripe stores it, and from then on it charges you automatically on the schedule’s due-day-of-month. You can update the payment method or cancel auto-pay from the same card on the dues page; updating sends you back through Stripe’s portal.

Late fees & overdue charges

A charge is shown as Late in the UI when its due date has passed and the status is still pending. That’s a visual flag. It doesn’t add anything to your balance by itself.

Late fees are separate. They get added by the daily server job, and only if the schedule was configured with a late-fee amount. Each schedule has a grace-period setting (default 15 days). When the daily job runs and finds a pending dues charge older than <due_date> + grace_period, it opens a corresponding late_fee charge for that schedule’s late-fee amount. The fee can be flat-dollar or a percentage of the original charge, depending on how the schedule is configured.

Late fees show up alongside the original charge on your ledger and can be paid the same way (individually or via Pay All).

Payment history

Below the open-charges section, the dues page lists every non-pending row on your property’s ledger: paid, waived, refunded. Each row shows the schedule label (or the assessment label for one-off charges), the amount, the due date, when it was paid, and which method was used (check, cash, ACH, card, external portal, or other).

For Stripe-paid charges, the method is card and there’s a Stripe payment reference. For admin-recorded payments (check, cash, ACH), the admin enters the reference number when they record the payment, so you have a paper trail.

Special assessments

Special assessments are one-time, community-wide charges: roof reserve, legal fund, emergency repairs. The board creates a special assessment with a label, an amount-per-property, and a due date, then “assesses” it, which opens a charge against every active property in the community. From a resident’s perspective they pay the same way as a regular dues charge.

Assessments don’t support auto-pay; they’re one-off by nature. They appear in the open-charges list with their own label so they don’t get confused with regular dues.