How can I allow owners in the same association to choose which charges they pay via ACH and which charges to manually pay?

Question: "How can I allow owners in the same association to choose which charges they pay via ACH and which charges to manually pay? Don't the Assessment rules apply to the association as a whole?"

Answer:

In order to have some owners pay their regular assessments via ACH, their Special Assessments manually, and vice versa, you can set up different assessments within that association and give owners tags to determine how owners will pay their assessments.

For this example, we'll set up four different assessments for one association using Association > Assessments.

1. Regular Assessment - to be paid via ACH
2. Regular Assessment - to be paid manually
3. Special Assessment - to be paid via ACH
4. Special Assessment - to be paid manually

When creating the rules for each assessment, be sure to include the tag name for each rule so the system can match the assessment tag to the owner.

For more help with setting up assessments, please visit this article: How to Setup a New Charge or Assessment

Once you've setup the assessments, you'll create a spreadsheet for the owners within that association. The spreadsheet will contain the following columns:

1. Account (or OldAccount)
2. Tag (Regular Assessment, Regular Assessment (no ACH), Special Assessment, Special Assessment (no ACH))
3. AssocCode

When putting together that spreadsheet, you're going to tag every owner with all four tags. If you have 20 owners within that association, you should have 80 rows of owner tags, with each owner getting 4 tags each.

When you're ready to import, you'll go to Settings > Import and click +New Import. For the type of import, you'll choose Homeowner Charge Tags, Import Mode as Append, and then select your file. Once you've done all of that, click Update.

You'll have a chance to review the import before committing, but as long as you don't encounter any error messages, click Commit at the top.

To make sure the tags were placed onto an owner's account, go to Homeowners > Homeowner List and open up an owner's account from your spreadsheet. Once you select that owner, go to Homeowners > Tags, and a window will pop up with the Charge Tag options.

Be sure to check off one of each of the assessments so that owners will still get charged for the assessment, but not charged for both of them each month. If owners are used to paying the assessment via ACH, then check off that box for all owners in the association. Then, if an owner asks to pay one of their assessments manually, instead of ACH, you can check the box for the tag that doesn't run via ACH.