Guide: How to Draft a Budget with HOAi

Budget season does not have to be overwhelming. With HOAi, Community Association Managers can go from zero to a draft budget in minutes. HOAi drafts a full proposed budget for every association — automatically. It pulls historical actuals, contracts, and the reserve study straight from Vantaca, applies your company's preferences, and produces a board-ready Excel workbook with a justification on every line.

This article walks through the full flow, from one-time setup all the way to importing the approved budget back into Vantaca.

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What HOAi Budgets does

A few things to know up front:

• Automatic kickoff — budgets trigger from a Vantaca action item; no manual start needed
• Customizable template — coloring, columns, and spreadsheet tabs built to match your team
• Upfront configuration — a one-time questionnaire captures your company's preferences before HOAi touches anything
• Review & edit in HOAi — make changes by describing them in chat, or directly on the sheet in the UI
• Posted straight to the action item — once you click "Proceed," the draft lands in the Vantaca XN
• Vantaca import-friendly — once approved, the data is ready to import — no manual entry

Before you start

A few things that help the first draft come out as accurate as possible:

• Historical actuals in Vantaca — not required, but three or more years gives the best projections; fewer years still work, with less context
• Active management contract uploaded to Vantaca association documents — the agent reads renewal dates and escalators directly from the source
• Reserve study, if applicable, uploaded alongside it
• Current vendor contracts (landscape, insurance, pool, etc.) uploaded to the association documents — the agent applies contracted increase rates wherever they're available

Note: When uploading documents, don't overthink the document location - HOAi can find these documents in any association folder referring to contracts or reserves.

You'll also want a completed HOAi Budget Configuration Questionnaire (not required, but helpful) — that's Step 1.

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Step 1 — Set up your Configuration

Configuration is the one-time setup that tells HOAi how every future budget should look and behave. It has two parts, both done from the Budget Setup screen in HOAi:

• Part 1 — Configuration Questionnaire (see file at bottom of this article) — captures the decisions HOAi can't figure out on its own (your projection method, management fee policy, increase caps, etc.)
• Part 2 — Budget Template — captures the look and structure of the output (which columns, which sheets, how many years of history, your colors and fonts)

Together they're your company's budget setup. Once they're in place, every association draft uses them automatically - if you need to make any community-specific changes, you can do this when the first draft for that community is ready for modification! 

Step 1, Part 1 — Configuration Questionnaire

The questionnaire is short on purpose. It captures the few decisions the agent can't figure out on its own — everything else (GL accounts, contract terms, historical trends) is pulled automatically. Anything you leave blank, the agent auto-detects.

Six sections, each one a single decision:

Projection Method

How the agent estimates the "Projected" column — the full-year current-year total your proposed budget is compared against. Pick one:

• Historical average — uses past years in the database
• Annualized current year — YTD actuals ÷ months elapsed × 12
• Current year budget — uses the approved budget for unfilled months

Management Fee

Management fees are company-controlled, so the agent needs explicit input. Enter a company-wide % increase, a flat dollar change, or leave it blank — if blank, the agent reads the management contract from Vantaca documents (or falls back to current inflation if no contract is found). Add an anniversary month if renewals don't line up with the fiscal year. 

Utility Increase Overrides

Optional overrides per utility type. Blank = 3% inflation default.

Contract Increase Overrides

Optional overrides for landscape, insurance, pool, etc. Blank = the agent checks contract documents in Vantaca first, then falls back to 3%.

Reserve Funding Minimum

The floor below which the agent flags a warning. Options: no minimum, FHA 10% minimum, or a custom company target. The actual reserve transfer comes from the reserve study or prior-year method — this question is only about the warning threshold.

Assessment Increase Cap

Maximum regular assessment increase per year. If the budget needs more than that, the agent caps the regular assessment and recommends the excess as a special assessment. Leave blank if you don't have a cap.

Homeowner Fees

Whether to include non-assessment homeowner fees (key fob, parking, etc.) as line items.

Special Notes

Free-form field for anything else — known upcoming changes, groups of association-specific instructions, unusual GL treatments.

One thing to remember: save the completed questionnaire as a PDF before uploading. In Word: File → Save As → PDF.

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Step 1, Part 2 — Budget Template

The Budget Template is the structural side of configuration. It controls how the output workbook looks and what's in it. You configure it on the right-hand panel of the Budget Setup screen — no questionnaire needed.

What you can configure:

• Sheets — which tabs to include (Summary, Mailing Sheet, Current Year Monthly, Proposed Year Monthly, etc.)
• Columns — historical actual years (0–10), YTD, Remaining, Projected, Variance $, Variance %, Current Year Budget, Proposed Budget
• Projection thresholds — minimum months of actuals and minimum actual-to-budget ratio before the agent falls back to the approved budget
• Theming — colors, fonts, header styling to match your company's brand

Tweak any of these to match how your team and your boards expect to see budgets.

Upload + preview

Once your questionnaire is ready and you know roughly how you want the template to look:

1. Log into HOAi and click your name in the top-right corner.

2. Select Company from the dropdown:

   

3. Click Budget Setup. You'll have this option only if your user is set up as an "Admin" role in HOAi. Still don't see this option? Reach out to your FDE for help.
4. Click Edit.
5. There may already be a budget configuration sheet uploaded. If so, click the "Replace" button to upload the one you just filled out:
6. Upload your completed questionnaire PDF. Or, leave it as-is to accept the default values outlined in the document. 
7. Adjust the Budget Template settings on the right (sheets, columns, thresholds, theming).
8. Pick any association from the preview dropdown to see a sample render in real time.
9. Select the Action Item Type and Step the test run should target (e.g., Budget Delivery → Draft Budget). You won't be able to run a test budget until both are set.
10. Click Run Budget to generate a one-off test budget for that association — no XN needed.

The preview + Run Budget combo is your sandbox — use it to confirm the structure matches your team's expectations before you start kicking off real runs.

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Step 2 — Draft a Budget

Two ways to draft, depending on whether you're running production budgets or just testing:

Option A — Scheduled runs (recommended for production)

Each association has a Budget Delivery action item scheduled on its Vantaca calendar. When the calendar date hits, the XN is auto-created and routed to HOAi. No manual work — you'll see the draft show up in the Vantaca action item, where you'll be linked to the HOAi proposal.

Option B — Ad-hoc runs (testing or re-runs)

Trigger a one-off draft for any association whenever you want:

• From HOAi: Company → Budget Setup → Run Budget
• From Vantaca: Action Items → create a new XN, select Budget Delivery as the action type, starting in the first step (note: if your team wants to use a different type of action item to run the budget, you are welcome to! Make sure you connect with your FDE and tell them which action item step you'd like the budget to generate on, and they can customize the settings).

Either path opens an HOAi chat where the agent walks you through what it's doing — pulling GL accounts, income statements, historical budgets, reserve study, contracts — and drops the draft budget as an artifact in the chat.

What the agent does behind the scenes

The agent works the same way a manager would, but all at once:

1. Lists every GL account for the association
2. Pulls multiple years of income statement actuals
3. Reads prior approved budgets
4. For each GL, picks a projection method (average of actuals, annualized, or fall back to the approved budget when actuals are thin) and a proposed-budget method (inflation %, contract amount, match-to-expenses for assessment income, etc.)
5. Writes a justification in the Notes column for every line item
6. Renders the workbook — one Operating Budget sheet per fund, plus Current Year Monthly and Proposed Year Monthly tabs, and any optional sheets you turned on

Note: With all the work the agent is doing, drafts may take up to 30 minutes. 

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Step 3 — Review and Modify the Draft

Open the generated budget in HOAi chat. As you look it over, the questions to ask yourself:

• Does the structure and layout match how your team works?
• Are all the right tabs there?
• Is the data formatted in a way that makes sense?
• Would you show this to a board as a first draft?

Every line item in the Operating Budget has a Notes column explaining the agent's reasoning — the contract reference, historical trend, or assumption it applied. No black box.

When you want to change something, click Modify. Then, there are two ways to make changes: 

Modify via chat

Type natural-language requests. For example:

• "Increase landscaping by 5% across all months."
• "Set management fee to $3,739.68 per month per the new contract."
• "Zero out the special assessment line — it ended last year."

The agent applies the change, re-renders the workbook, and shows you a before/after summary.

Modify directly in the document

Click a cell in the on-screen budget table and type a new value. Once you click "Modify & Review," the change is captured, the workbook re-renders, and the Notes column stays put unless you edit it directly. No more messing up Excel formulas!

Every modification is tracked and auditable — you can see every change the agent made vs. every change you made.

Step 4 — "Proceed" to Review

When the draft is ready to share with the board or the next user in your workflow:

1. Click Proceed on the HOAi recommendation card.

   

2. The Budget XN advances to the next step in Vantaca.
3. The draft Excel workbook is automatically attached to the action item, ready to bring to board review.

That's it — no copying, no re-uploading, no manual handoff.

Step 5 — Board Review & Final Adjustments

Once the budget is back in Vantaca, the manager and board review the Excel workbook directly. Any last-minute adjustments — board-requested changes, revised assumptions, late-breaking contract info — happen by editing the file in Excel.

Save the edited file back to the action item. That eventually becomes the "approved" budget.

Step 6 — Import the Approved Budget into Vantaca

Once the board has signed off:

1. Open the approved HOAi budget document.
2. Find the Export for Import tab for one of the funds (e.g., Operating).
3. Select and copy the import data.
4. Paste as values into a new blank spreadsheet — don't use a standard paste. The source tab has formulas linked to other tabs; Vantaca needs clean values.
   • In Excel: right-click destination cell → Paste Special → Values, or Ctrl+Shift+V (Windows) / ⌘+Shift+V (Mac).
5. Save the blank spreadsheet as a new Excel file. It should contain only the import data — nothing else.
6. In Vantaca, navigate to Settings → Import. 
7. Navigate to the "Imports" tab.
8. Select Budget as the import type. Import mode: Append.
9. Select the association, fund, and upload the file you just made, with only the import data.
10. Click Commit to post the budget to Vantaca. For more information on Vantaca imports, see this article: https://support.vantaca.com/hc/en-us/articles/23618354922523-Import-Basics 
11. Repeat for each fund (Reserve, Capital, etc.).

Questions or feedback?

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