Vantaca IQ: Community Brief

By Shelley Labrecque Updated

The Community Brief is an automatically generated email report that shows your HOA boards exactly what your management company delivered each month. It pulls from data already in Vantaca, summarizes the month in plain language, and arrives branded with your company's logo and colors. You review it, edit if needed, and send it to your board.

Contents

 

What is the Community Brief?

Management companies handle a tremendous amount of work for HOA boards every month: collecting homeowner dues, paying bills, processing maintenance requests, answering homeowner questions, coordinating vendors, and resolving community standards issues. The Community Brief gives you a standardized, professional way to show boards the work you have done, anchored to what your company is responsible for and populated by the data already in Vantaca. Once it's turned on for your company, it requires no further configuration to get started.

How it works

Vantaca builds a ready-to-review draft for each association every month. You open the draft, review the data and the AI-written summary, and edit anything you want to change. Your report is available to download as soon as it opens, and edits save as you make them, so you are always in control of what it shows.

Accessing your report

Vantaca generates a Community Brief for each association every month. To open it:

Note: If you don't see Community Brief under Reports > IQ, it hasn't been turned on for your company yet. Contact your Vantaca CSM to request access.

  1. Navigate to Reports > IQ > Community Brief.
  2. Click Open.

    Your report generates and displays.

    The generated Community Brief report displayed in Vantaca.
  3. (Optional) To edit the report, go to the Editing your report section. There's nothing else to do to make the report ready. It can be downloaded or sent as soon as it opens.

Accessing from a Financial Delivery action item

If your association's Financial Delivery process includes a Community Brief, you can also open the report directly from the action item, without navigating to Reports.

  1. Open the Financial Delivery action item for the association.
  2. In the Draft Financial Statements message, click Edit Community Brief.
  3. The report opens. To edit it, go to the Editing your report section below.

To set up which Financial Delivery steps include a Community Brief, see How To Create & Edit Your Financial Delivery Action Item.

What's in the report

Every Community Brief follows the same easy-to-read layout. The data changes from month to month, and sections adapt to the information available, but the structure stays consistent so boards always know where to look:

  • Header: Your company logo, the association name, and the month the report covers.
  • This Month's Narrative: A short, plain-language recap of how the month went. Vantaca writes this for you from the association's data, and you can edit it before you send.
  • At a Glance: The month's key numbers, grouped into Financial health (homeowner payments collected, spending vs. plan, and a balance card for each of your association's funds, such as Operating and Reserve) and Service activity (questions and requests, average response time, and bills reviewed and paid).
  • What We Delivered This Month: A checklist of the work completed, each with a result. Items can include financial reports delivered, homeowner dues collected, bills processed and paid, property inspection completed, homeowner questions handled, community standards addressed, home modification requests, work orders processed, and board meetings attended. Only items with activity that month are shown. When a property inspection or board meeting happens more than once in a month, the report shows the full date span (for example, Between August 5th and 26th 2026) rather than listing each date individually.
  • Actions Required: Items that need the board's attention or approval, such as invoices awaiting approval, home modification requests, a violation that requires a board hearing, and collections awaiting approval. Each card shows a count, the category, who reviews it (the Board, or your association's architectural committee for modification requests), and a short AI summary when one is available. The downloaded PDF shows the same card details.
  • A note from Your Management Team: An optional personal note from you to the board. If you leave it blank, this section is left out of the report.
  • Footer: A short "we're here to help" message and your community manager's contact details, including name, title, email, phone, and address. These fields can be edited; see Editing your report.

Editing your report

You are always in control of what the report shows. You can edit the written summary and adjust the content of each section at any time, before or after you download or send it. To edit a report:

  1. Click Edit report.

    The Community Report Builder displays.

    The Community Report Builder, where you edit each section of the report.
  2. Select a section to edit.
  3. Select a Tone and update the text, or click Regenerate with AI to have text generated for you.
  4. When done, click Save changes.

Note: If you opened the report from a Financial Delivery action item, clicking Save changes regenerates the attachments on that action item's note. The current attachments are deleted and this cannot be undone, so review your edits before saving.

Editing your community manager's contact information: From the Community Report Builder, select the Footer section to edit the community manager's name, email, phone, and office address.

  • Changes to the Community Manager field are automatically saved for that association and apply to every future Community Brief for it. A caption below the field confirms: "Changes to Community Manager name will apply only to this association."
  • By default, changes to Email, Phone, and Address apply to every association in your company's portfolio. A caption below the Address field confirms: "Changes to Email/Phone/Address will apply to all associations in the company's portfolio." Uncheck Apply changes to all future Community Briefs if you only want the change to apply to this one report.
  • If you don't make any changes, all four fields continue to pull automatically from CMP.
  • You can still hide the community manager's name, email, phone, or address independently using the section visibility toggles, regardless of what you've entered.

Choosing how fund balances show

The At a Glance section shows a balance card for each fund your association reports on, up to three cards. If your association has more than three funds, the third card, Other funds, combines the rest. For what each card shows, see the "Vantaca IQ: Community Brief Metrics Explained" article.

To change which balances show for an association:

  1. Click Edit report.
  2. Select At a Glance. The fund controls appear below the list of cards.
  3. Use Fund reporting and Manage funds, as described below. Changes update the cards right away.
  4. When done, click Save changes. The short AI sentence on each fund card refreshes after you save.

Fund reporting. This toggle controls how the cards are built:

  • On: Each fund's balance shows separately, as on your balance sheet, using the general ledger balance of your bank accounts.
  • Off: Balances show as combined bank balances, using the Book balance from your Bank Reconciliation for your active bank accounts.

Vantaca chooses the starting setting from the balance sheets it has sent to the board in the past 12 months through Financial Delivery action items. If they include a fund balance sheet, such as Balance Sheet (Funds), Balance Sheet (2 Col), or Balance Sheet (Multi Col), Fund reporting starts on. See the "How To Create & Edit Your Financial Delivery Action Item" article for how your financial package is set up. The toggle appears only when both views have balances to show; if only one view has balances, the report shows that one. The setting is saved for the association, so it also applies to its future reports.

Accounts that look like cash. Some associations hold money in asset accounts that are not set up as bank accounts, such as certificates of deposit (CDs) or investment accounts. When an association has asset accounts like this with a balance, this area appears and shows how many are included in the Brief, for example, 0 of 4. Click Manage funds to open the Manage funds screen, check the accounts that belong in the Brief's fund balances, and click Done. Each included account is added to its fund's card, whether Fund reporting is on or off. If you close the screen without clicking Done, your changes are not saved.

To review how your funds are set up, see the "Association Funds and Bank (Pay) Accounts" article.

Regenerating your report

If you update information in Vantaca and want the report to reflect it, you can regenerate the draft to pull in fresh data and a new summary. Regenerating replaces any manual edits you made, so Vantaca will confirm before doing it.

Your branding

Each report carries your management company's branding: your logo, your primary and secondary colors, and an optional banner image. The result looks like it came directly from your company, not from Vantaca.

If your management company already has a logo saved in Logo Management, Community Brief uses it automatically across every association. If you don't have one yet, a placeholder shows until you upload one.

To upload or change your logo, click Edit report, select the Logo section, and drag in an image or click Browse file to choose one. Vantaca resizes it to fit without cropping, and you can try different logos before saving. When you save, the logo applies to Community Brief reports across all of your associations.

Built for board members

Boards shouldn't need industry knowledge to understand what they're paying for. Every label in the report is written in plain language: "homeowner dues" instead of "assessments," "home modification requests" instead of "ARC requests," "community standards issues" instead of "violations," and "spending vs. plan" instead of "budget variance." The goal is for any board member to understand what was delivered in under a minute.

 

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