Platform Architecture

Most HOA accounting errors share a root cause: decisions that were never logged and controls that were optional. CommunityPay eliminates both by making enforcement mandatory and decisions immutable.

Guards run in order until one blocks. A pass never stops the chain. The full signal state is captured at the moment of evaluation, so any decision can be reconstructed from its snapshot alone.

The ledger is the foundation — the system of record everything else sits on. Each layer above it consumes only the layer directly beneath: from enforcement and decision telemetry at the base, through origination, governed workflows, risk intelligence, and attestation, up to intelligence and distribution at the outer edge. Select any layer to see what it is, what it governs, and what it produces.

Three concerns cut across the stack rather than sitting in any one layer: Legal & Compliance (the living legal corpus), Identity & Authority (the member-bound authority model), and Immutability & Audit (tamper-evidence spanning every record). Read by many layers, owned by none.

The foundation layer. True double-entry fund accounting with operating and reserve segregation. Every journal entry flows through a single posting interface and is evaluated by the enforcement dispatcher before persisting. Production guards check invariants ranging from balance verification to fund segregation to debt covenant compliance.

How Dues Are Determined

Assessment calculation is a system-of-record function, not a spreadsheet exercise. The platform stores the allocation method, applies it consistently across every unit, and posts the result through the enforcement-evaluated journal engine.

Enterprise Debt Subledger

Event-sourced loan management for both HOA liabilities and resident receivables. Every loan state change is an immutable event. Amortization schedules are versioned and never edited. The subledger balance reconciles to the general ledger daily.

Identity and authority are not a layer — they are a cross-cutting plane, read wherever an action must be authorized. Before a posting can be evaluated, the platform must know who is authorized to act, what policies govern them, and what limits apply. Board member tenure, approval workflows, and policy snapshots are written through governed workflows and read at enforcement to gate every action.

Association money movement runs as governed workflows on top of origination — resident payments, vendor disbursements, refunds, and reconciliation runs. Resident payments flow directly from bank account to HOA bank account via Stripe Connect. CommunityPay is the platform — not an intermediary in the funds flow. A provider-agnostic gateway interface ensures business logic never couples to a single processor.

Every posting passes through the enforcement dispatcher — the mandatory choke point that records ALLOW, BLOCK, or OVERRIDE with the full signal state captured at decision time. Approval latency, override attempts, and policy violations are logged as immutable decision telemetry. These records feed upward into risk intelligence, where they inform eligibility evaluation, exclusion triggers, and governance risk scoring.

How Telemetry Feeds Risk Intelligence

Contractor compliance monitoring that combines public record data — licenses, bonds, insurance, violations, debarment — with proprietary payment history from the accounting layer below. Compliance signals feed upward into the risk intelligence layer.

Attestation turns governed state into immutable artifacts designed for third-party verification. Each artifact includes a SHA-256 content hash computed from canonical JSON serialization, enabling independent verification that content has not been altered after generation.

• HDEP HOA Disclosure & Evidence Packet — combined disclosure package for resale, refinance, or regulatory inquiry
• RC Resale Certificate — statute-compliant unit disclosure for sales and escrow
• RSR Reserve Funding Status Report — 30-year projection, component register, funding adequacy
• GCA Governance Controls Attestation — board-facing controls summary and effectiveness scoring
• VECR Vendor Eligibility & Compliance Record — contractor attestation for audit and escrow
• FADR Funds Authorization & Disbursement Record — payment evidence chain
• LDS Loan Disclosure Statement — loan terms, schedule, subledger/GL reconciliation

The CARI (Community Association Risk Index) layer generates four additional report types for third-party subscribers via authenticated API: Lender Report, Insurer Report, Title/Escrow Report, and Buyer Summary. Each is a signed attestation artifact with SHA-256 content hash.

Risk intelligence scores governance and financial risk from governed ledger data. It consumes the enforcement decision telemetry produced one layer down — guard outcomes, override rates, approval latency, and policy-violation patterns — as first-class signals, and turns them into eligibility evaluations, exclusion triggers, and governance scores. Every evaluation is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same outputs.

HOA boards turn over. Property managers change. Treasurers rotate. In most systems, institutional knowledge leaves when people do. Decisions that were made last year — why a vendor was chosen, why a reserve transfer was approved, what the board agreed to — become hearsay.

CommunityPay is designed so the ledger is the institutional memory. Every enforcement decision, every approval workflow, every policy snapshot persists in the system of record. When a new board member takes office, a firm takes over the books, or a CPA begins an engagement, the full history is there — not in someone's email, not in a spreadsheet, not with the person who left.