Reserve Planner is a $49/year self-serve reserve planning app for volunteer HOA and condo boards: it tracks percent funded, models funding scenarios, and exports a board-ready PDF between professional reserve studies. It keeps your study alive — so budget season never starts from scratch.
Reserve Planner is priced to sit alongside a professional study, not instead of one. The study is the four-figure line item on your budget; this is the $49-a-year tool that keeps its numbers current in the years between. Setting up a plan is free and takes about a minute — nothing asks for a card until you outgrow the free tier.
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Managing more than 5 associations? Contact usIncluded free with any core Effortless HOA subscription ($3/home/month) — dues tracking, communication, and reserve planning in one place.
Reserve Planner is a reserve fund planning app for homeowners associations and condominium associations. It holds your reserve component list with useful lives and replacement costs, calculates percent funded against the fully funded balance, models funding scenarios side by side, and exports a board-ready PDF — $49 a year per association, self-serve, with a free tier that asks for an email address rather than a card. It complements a professional reserve study instead of replacing one: the study supplies the on-site inspection and engineering judgment, and Reserve Planner keeps the numbers current in the years between.
It is built for the volunteer treasurer or board member who owns the budget, not for credentialed analysts producing studies for clients. Management companies running several communities use the multi-association plan.
HOA reserve planning software keeps an association's reserve fund plan current between professional reserve studies. It stores your component list — roofs, paving, pool equipment — with useful lives and replacement costs, calculates percent funded against the fully funded balance, and projects the fund 30 years forward under straight-line or cash-flow funding.
Unlike reserve study software built for credentialed analysts, Reserve Planner is built for volunteer boards: no site-inspection module, no per-report fees — just the numbers a board needs at budget season. Update a cost in two minutes, compare funding scenarios side by side, and export a board-ready PDF. It complements — never replaces — the on-site professional study your state may require.
A professional reserve study costs $2,000–$6,000 and is worth every dollar — for about a year. Then costs change, projects happen early or late, and the binder goes on a shelf. Three years later the next board inherits a plan nobody can explain. Reserve Planner is the working copy: update a cost in two minutes, rerun the plan, and every number your board sees stays current.
A live dashboard with your funding level, band, balance vs. fully funded balance, and the next five expenditures coming at you.
Unlimited components with lives, costs, and quantities. Remaining life ages automatically at fiscal-year rollover — with your confirmation.
Compare funding plans side by side: raise contributions, add a special assessment, take a loan. See the balance curves overlaid.
A clean, meeting-quality report: summary verdict, percent-funded gauge, component table, 30-year projection, and methodology.
Email nudges 60 and 30 days before fiscal year end — so the plan gets updated when it matters, not when someone remembers.
Give your board and homeowners a live view of the plan without accounts, attachments, or version confusion.
Seed your plan from 60 curated components with typical useful lives and national cost ranges — sourced and regularly reviewed.
Straight-line and cash-flow calculations from the same engine as our free calculator — the conventions professional studies use.
Free to set up. One association, eight components, one scenario — enough to see where your funding curve lands before you decide anything.
The whole thing runs in a browser. You sign in with a one-time link emailed to you — no password to reset when the treasurer changes — and create a workspace for the association: current reserve balance, fiscal year start month, and three assumptions (cost inflation, interest earned on reserves, and how fast contributions escalate). Those four numbers drive everything downstream.
Components go in three ways: typed one at a time, pulled from the library of common HOA components with typical useful lives and 2026 national cost ranges, or imported from CSV if a past treasurer already built a list. Export back to CSV whenever you want the raw data. The dashboard then shows one number the board actually argues about — percent funded, with its band — next to the balance, the fully funded balance, and the next five replacements coming at you.
Starting one takes about a minute: the association name, what is in the reserve account today, and the month your fiscal year starts. Sign-in is a one-time link emailed to you, so there is no password to invent and nothing asks for a card. If you came from the free calculator, the components and assumptions you already typed come with you rather than being re-entered.
The free tier is one association, eight components, and one scenario. That is enough to see whether the math changes your mind about next year's budget, and it is genuinely not enough for a real 30-component community — which is the honest reason the paid tier exists.
A calculator answers one question once. A platform has to keep answering it after the meeting ends, which takes four pieces: the engine, the data, a way to hand the numbers to other people, and something that makes the update actually happen.
What it is not: there is no site-inspection or work-order module, no general ledger (that lives in the core Effortless HOA platform), and it does not issue a stamped study. Management companies get five association workspaces on one login for $249 a year. If you are evaluating vendors rather than deciding between us and a spreadsheet, compare reserve study software across analyst platforms, board planning tools, and done-for-you services, with each vendor's published pricing and the cases where they beat this one.
Condominium and co-op reserve planning uses the same component math as an HOA, but the money sits in different places. A detached-home HOA's reserve is mostly paving, painting, and amenities; a COA's is dominated by structural and building-systems components — roofs, envelope and waterproofing, elevators, plumbing risers, common HVAC. Those items are expensive, they fail as a building-safety problem rather than a budget problem, and lenders and legislatures have started asking associations to show the money is there.
In Florida, residential condo buildings three or more habitable stories tall must obtain a structural integrity reserve study at least every 10 years, and for budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024 owners can no longer vote to waive or reduce reserves for the SIRS structural components. Separately, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tie condo project eligibility to how the association funds reserves, which makes an underfunded reserve a problem for every owner trying to sell or refinance.
Reserve Planner handles the planning side of that: enter the structural components with their remaining lives and replacement costs, and the projection treats them like any other component — inflated to the replacement year, drawn out of the balance, reflected in percent funded. It will also show you plainly what a waived or reduced contribution does to the 30-year curve, which is usually a more persuasive slide than a paragraph of statute. It does not produce the SIRS itself; that has to come from the licensed professional the statute names.
Every scenario produces a 30-year table, one row per year: opening balance, contribution, interest earned, each component replacement falling due that year, closing balance, fully funded balance, and percent funded. Replacement costs inflate at your inflation rate, balances earn your interest rate, and under the cash-flow method contributions escalate by the rate you set. Components recur — a 20-year roof replaced in year 8 comes back in year 28 if the horizon reaches it.
Two outputs do most of the work at a board meeting. The first is the shortfall year: at your current contribution, the first year the projected balance drops below your minimum balance floor. The second is the recommended contribution — the smallest first-year contribution that keeps the balance at or above that floor for the entire horizon, rounded up to the nearest $100 a year. The gap between what you contribute now and that number is the conversation.
Forecasts can include the things boards actually do about a shortfall: a special assessment landing in a chosen year, or a loan whose principal arrives in one year and amortizes over its term at its rate, with the debt service showing up in every projection row after that. Compare those against a straight contribution increase side by side and the trade-off stops being abstract.
One caveat worth stating plainly: a forecast is arithmetic on your assumptions, not a prediction. Change inflation from 3% to 5% and the 30-year number moves a lot. Run it both ways, put both in the packet, and let the board see how much of the plan hangs on that one input.
Most boards manage reserves one of three ways: commission a professional reserve study and let it sit, keep a spreadsheet a past treasurer built, or use dedicated reserve planning software. Each has a place. A professional study — typically $1,500–$10,000 depending on property size and scope — delivers an on-site inspection and engineering judgment no software can match, but it's a snapshot that starts aging the day it's delivered. A spreadsheet is free and flexible, but formulas break, the author moves away, and percent funded rarely gets recalculated. Reserve Planner sits between the two: it applies the same CAI funding conventions professional studies use, recalculates percent funded every time a number changes, and produces a report your board can vote on — for $49 a year. For most associations the right answer is a professional study on your state's cycle, plus software to keep it current in between.
| Feature | Professional reserve study | Spreadsheet | Reserve Planner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $1,500–$10,000 per study | Free | $49/yr |
| Update cadence | Every 3–5 years, on your state's cycle | Whenever someone remembers | Anytime — recalculates instantly |
| Percent-funded tracking | Snapshot as of the study date | Manual formulas, easy to break | Live, updated on every change |
| Board-ready output | Full narrative report with site photos | Raw cells and homemade charts | One-click PDF report |
Professional reserve studies include on-site inspections and engineering judgment that software can't replicate, and several states require them on a fixed cycle. Use Reserve Planner to keep the plan current between studies — so each study starts from clean data, and budget season never starts from a stale PDF.
Reserve study requirements by state →Create the association, enter your components, and see where percent funded actually lands. One association, eight components, and one scenario are free — no card, no sales call, and sign-in is a one-time email link. Upgrade to $49 a year only once the free caps are in your way.
Not ready to start a plan? Check what your state requires or see what a professional study costs.