Getting started
Setting up a community takes about an afternoon. The seven steps below are in the order that causes the fewest problems — each one is usable on its own, so you can stop after any of them and come back.
After those, everything else covers the settings you will reach for later, grouped by what they are for. If you came here from a help button in your admin portal, you have already landed on the right section.
You can follow this in the portal instead. A new community gets a setup checklist in the admin menu covering these same steps in the same order, ticking them off as you go and listing only what your plan includes. This page is the longer version, with the reasoning and the things that catch people out. Use whichever suits — the checklist links here at every step.
Before you start
Two things are worth digging out first, because they are the steps most likely to stall:
- Your member roster as a spreadsheet — names, emails, and who lives with whom
- Your logo, and a few photos of the pool, courts or clubhouse
Everything else can be done without them. If you have neither to hand, start at step one anyway and come back for steps two and four.
Make it look like your community
Settings → Branding, then Settings → Homepage · 15 min
Under Branding, set your colors and upload a logo. Everything else — your public site, member emails, the member app — picks these up automatically.
Under Homepage, choose one of four designs and fill in your hero heading, a short about section, and photos. Switching designs later changes only the layout — your content stays exactly where it is, so it's safe to try one and change your mind.
Add your amenities
Settings → Amenities · 10 min
Add each court, pool, pavilion and clubhouse as its own amenity. Give each one a type — court, pool, facility, clubhouse — because reservation rules are applied by type.
Add a main photo and a few more. Each amenity gets a section of its own on your public amenities page — photographs, opening hours, what it holds, what it costs to rent, and your own rules for it. Without a photo the cards on your homepage are blank rectangles, which is what every community's looked like until there was somewhere to set one.
Opening hours are enforced, not decorative. Set them per amenity and nobody can book outside them. The public page shows these same hours rather than a free-text note, so a member never reads “dawn to dusk” on the website and then finds bookings obeying something else.
Tick “Bookable” on anything members should be able to reserve. An amenity that isn't marked bookable won't appear in the member reservation calendar at all, and there's no warning — it simply isn't offered. This is the single most common reason a new court or the clubhouse “isn't showing up”.
Leave Sub-Type on “None” for anything that isn't a specific sport. Courts get tennis or pickleball; a clubhouse gets nothing.
Decide who can reserve what
Settings → General and Settings → Rules · 5 min
Two independent rule sets — one for courts, one for facilities — because most communities want different answers. Each has a Who Can Reserve setting:
- Any adult in the household — the default for courts
- Homeowner & spouse only — the default for the clubhouse and other facilities, which carry damage and liability
- Any active member — no restriction
Adult Age under Settings → General is yours to set. A swim club might treat 16 as old enough to book a court; an HOA clubhouse might want 21.
Members with no age or date of birth on file are treated as adults. That's deliberate — most rosters arrive without ages, and locking those members out of booking would be worse than letting them through.
The same screens set booking windows, time limits, whether approval is required, and whether recurring bookings are allowed.
Limits can also be set per amenity, which is what you want when the courts book a day ahead and the clubhouse books a month ahead. An amenity with nothing set follows the rule for its type.
Import your member roster
Members → Import · 20 min
Download the template first. It has every column we read plus an example household, which is quicker than guessing what a column should contain.
Email is required for anyone who needs a login, plus either a full name or first and last name. Column names are flexible — common variations are detected automatically, and you can correct the mapping before anything is written.
To keep families together, include two columns: a row type saying whether each row is a primary member or a dependent, and a column naming which primary each dependent belongs to. Without both, every row becomes its own member — and because families usually share an email address, most of them will be rejected as duplicates.
Put Spouse, Husband, Wife or Partner in the relationship column for co-homeowners. That's what lets them reserve facilities. Anything else — including “Family Member” — is recorded as a dependent, which you can change per person later.
Date of birth beats age. An age is a snapshot that goes stale; a birthday means access updates on its own as children grow up.
Adults who have their own email address get their own login automatically. Everyone else is recorded on the household. The summary afterwards accounts for every row in the file and explains anything it skipped, by row number.
Connect payments
Settings → Payments · 15 min
Connect Stripe or Square to collect dues, membership fees and event payments online. Funds go directly to your community's own account — they never pass through us.
The same screen sets due dates, late fees, and whether payment is collected during registration. Settings → Membership is where you define your membership types and prices.
Set a due date. Nothing else in the system can work without one — dues reminders are scheduled relative to it, automatic payment has no moment to charge on, and the grace period that governs gate access cannot be worked out at all. A connected processor with no due date is a half-finished setup that looks finished.
Once you are connected you can offer automatic dues payment, so members save a card once and never get chased again.
On Stripe you can also accept bank transfers alongside cards, which cost a fraction of what a card costs on a large payment. Worth turning on before you bill an assessment.
The processor’s fee is recorded for you. Stripe and Square each keep a percentage of every card payment, and both pay out what is left rather than what the member paid. Whatever they keep is filed against Payment Processing Fees in the books automatically, so your balance matches your bank rather than sitting above it. Nothing to enter, and nothing to reconcile at the end of the season.
Point your domain at it
Domain · 10 min, plus DNS
Enter the address you want to use and the Domain page shows the exact DNS records to create at your provider. Certificates are handled for you.
If your DNS is behind Cloudflare, set those records to DNS only — the gray cloud, not orange. A proxied record prevents the certificate from being issued, and prevents us detecting that your DNS is correct.
Build and review the whole site before you switch DNS, so members never see a half-finished page.
The same page carries a search engine switch. Leave it on and your public site can be found, which is what an optional swim or tennis club wants. Turn it off and the site stays reachable to anyone with the address but is kept out of Google — the right answer for a private HOA, and worth setting before you point DNS rather than after you have been indexed.
Invite your members
Members · 5 min
Invite members individually or in bulk. They sign in with a link sent to their email — no passwords to set or reset — and can add a passkey afterwards if they want to skip the email step.
Under Roles you can give board members and committee chairs exactly the access they need: someone can manage events without seeing payments.
Start with your board rather than the whole community. A handful of people finding the rough edges first is much better than two hundred finding them at once.
Everything else
None of these are needed to open your community — mostly Settings tabs, plus a few pages elsewhere in the admin menu. They are here for when you get to them.
Members
Membership types and dues
Settings → Membership
Each type is a category somebody can join under — full, social, senior, associate — with its own price and billing cycle. A member holds one.
Initiation fee is charged once when somebody joins. Returning price applies to a member who lapsed and came back, if you charge them differently. Minimum age keeps a category off the registration form for anyone too young.
How members choose to be contacted
Messages, and each member’s profile
Text messages are off until a member turns them on themselves. A roster import gave you a phone number, not permission to use it, and under the rules governing business texting in the US there is no such thing as implied consent. Admins can remove somebody from texts but can never add them — that is the part the rules actually forbid.
Announcement emails work the other way: on by default, with one-click unsubscribe and no login needed. Members gave the community their address in the ordinary sense, so existing rosters keep working.
Every community sends from one domain. A member who cannot find the way out reports the message as spam instead, and that damage lands on every community here — which is why the unsubscribe link is prominent rather than buried.
Sign-in links, payment receipts and a notice that a payment failed are never filtered. Somebody who left the announcement list has not opted out of being told their card was declined.
The compose screen counts who will actually be reached rather than who has an address on file, so a send to 140 of 366 explains itself before you press the button.
Waiting lists
Nothing to set up — Premium
When an event is full or a court is taken, members join a queue instead of giving up. A place given back moves to the next person straight away, and is held for them for 48 hours while they confirm — nobody loses it to whoever happened to refresh faster.
A hold never outlives the thing it is for. A place freed the day before an event is held for a couple of hours, not two days, so it is used rather than sitting empty through the event and being released afterwards.
Money
Discount codes
Settings → Discount Codes
Codes a member can enter at registration — a percentage or a fixed amount off, optionally limited by how many times it may be used or a date it stops working. Useful for a founding-member rate or a referral offer.
Dues reminders
Settings → Payments
Notices sent before and after the dues date, scheduled relative to it — so “30 days before” moves with the date rather than needing rewriting each year.
Off until you turn it on, deliberately. A community that has not set a due date or read the wording should not start emailing its members because it upgraded.
Bank transfers
Settings → Payments
Turn on Accept bank transfers and members get a choice at checkout: pay by card as before, or pay straight from their bank account. They pick their bank, sign in, and confirm — the same few steps as a card, and nothing extra to pay either way.
It is dramatically cheaper on large payments. A card costs 2.9% plus 30¢, with no ceiling. A bank transfer costs 0.8% and stops at $5 however large the payment is.
- $100 dues — $3.20 by card, 80¢ by bank
- $500 dues — $14.80 by card, $4.00 by bank
- $1,500 assessment — $43.80 by card, $5.00 by bank
Across two hundred households paying $500, that is roughly $2,900 a year in card fees against $800. The saving is the community’s — a member pays the same either way.
A bank transfer takes three to five days to clear, where a card is instant. The membership activates as soon as the member submits it rather than making a family wait a week for the pool, and the payment shows as Clearing until the money lands. It only reaches the books once it has actually settled, so your balance never counts money that has not arrived.
Dues only. Court and clubhouse reservations stay card-only, because a booking holds its slot from the moment it is paid for — a reservation paid by a method that clears next week would block the court all week and might still bounce.
Stripe only, and US dollars only. Square’s checkout has no bank transfer option, so the setting explains that rather than simply not appearing. Automatic dues payment stays on cards for now.
A transfer can be returned days later — usually for insufficient funds — in which case the payment is marked failed and the member is asked again, exactly as with a declined card.
Automatic dues payment
Settings → Payments
Members save a card once and their dues are taken each year without anyone doing anything. Two things are needed before it can be offered: Stripe connected, and a due date set. Square cannot do this yet — a community on Square collects dues the ordinary way.
Members enroll themselves, from their own payments page. You cannot enroll anybody, and neither can we. That is not an oversight to work around: agreeing to a card being charged is the member's to give, and an arrangement made on their behalf is the one that gets disputed.
You choose how many days before the due date the charge is taken. Seven is usually right; fourteen leaves room for both retries before the date itself.
Every member is emailed the amount ten days before any charge. Dues go up, and a member surprised by a larger figure disputes it. The notice is what gives them time to turn it off and pay another way instead.
A declined card is retried twice more over the following week, telling the member each time, and then left with them to pay manually. Their membership and their access to the community are untouched while that happens — a card that expired is not a reason to shut somebody out of the pool.
Card details are held by Stripe and never by your community or by us. Stripe's usual per-transaction fee applies to each automatic charge, the same as any other card payment.
Turning it off cancels real arrangements. Saved cards are removed and every enrolled member is emailed to say dues need paying the usual way from now on. They cannot be put back — each member has to set it up again. The same is true if you disconnect Stripe or connect a different account, because a saved card belongs to the account it was saved on.
Your own subscription
Billing
Your plan, your card, and your invoices — separate from the dues your members pay you, which go straight to your own Stripe or Square account and never pass through us.
You are warned before the trial ends, before the card is charged, and every time a payment fails. Those notices go to every administrator, not only whoever signed up — the treasurer who created the account is often not the person still reading that inbox a year later.
A failed payment does not lock you out on the day. There is a grace period, and warnings throughout it, because a community that has spent two weeks setting this up should not lose access to it over an expired card.
The books
Finances
Every dues payment, event fee and rental posts to the ledger the moment it is received, filed to the right account and the right fiscal year and attributed to the household rather than to whichever member happened to be holding the phone. The other half of the year — the pool contract, the power bill, the check written at a board meeting — a treasurer enters by hand.
Card fees are recorded with the payment they came out of. A member paying $100 by card shows as $100 of income and whatever the processor kept — usually around $3 — as a separate expense under Payment Processing Fees. Income stays at what the member actually paid, which is the figure your membership records and your tax package both depend on, and the balance lands where the bank does. Stripe reports its fee immediately; Square reports at settlement, so a Square community sees the fee appear the following day rather than the same afternoon.
Your fiscal year is whatever your community actually uses. Set the month it starts in and everything below follows it; a year is named for the calendar year it ends in.
Budget by account, with a month-by-month spread for the seasonal ones, and compare it to what happened. Cash flow uses actuals for months that have passed and the budget for months ahead, and names the month the balance drops below the line you set — and the month it runs out, if it does.
Capital planning holds the work that comes round every few years and outlasts the board that last paid for it: the cycle, the last cost, the next window, and what to set aside each year for all of it. Year end carries the closing balance forward as next year’s opening figure, and tells you first what it is about to do.
Tax produces the schedule of figures an accountant asks for — income split between members and non-members, spending split between the association and everything else, gross receipts, and the percentages a 501(c)(7) or an 1120-H election turns on. It is a package to hand to a tax professional. It is not a return, and it is not tax advice.
What Gather Commons does not do is accounts payable, payroll, bank feeds, or formal and audited financial statements. Communities that need those keep a tool built for them.
Access and season
Gate and door access
Settings → Card Access
If your pool gate or clubhouse door reads cards or fobs, this publishes the list of who should be let in. The platform never talks to the hardware — panels differ too much — it produces a feed your access system reads on a schedule.
The number on each member's card or fob is set against that member, under Members. It is not a payment card and nothing here holds card details of that kind.
Grace days is how long after the dues date somebody keeps access. It needs a due date set under Payments — without one, no grace period can be worked out and nobody is ever shut out.
Gate codes
Settings → Gate Codes
Shared keypad codes, shown to members in the app. Separate from card access and useful on its own — plenty of communities have a keypad and no card reader. Change the code here and every member sees the new one; nobody needs telling separately.
Pool season and management
Settings → Pool Mgmt
Season open and close dates, guard hours, and closures. Members see the season dates on the pool amenity, so a pool that has shut for the year says so rather than appearing bookable.
Communications and records
Email templates
Settings → Email Templates
The wording of the automatic emails — welcome, invitation, reservation confirmed. Edit the text and leave the placeholders alone; they fill in the member's name, your community name and the like when the email goes out.
Board minutes
Settings → Board Minutes
Meeting minutes published to members. Separate from Documents because minutes are dated and ordered, and most communities want them listed by meeting rather than sitting in a folder.
Sponsors
Settings → Sponsors
Local businesses supporting the community, shown on your public homepage with their logo and a link. Tiers order them — a headline sponsor above the rest. Included on Premium.
Oversight
Analytics
Analytics — Premium
What proportion of dues has come in, which courts get used and when, which events people turned up to and which nobody did. Plus the number that settles the renewal argument at a board meeting: how much of your community used any of it at all.
Audit log
Audit Log — Premium
Who approved that reservation, who removed that member, who changed the dues date. Recorded permanently and impossible to edit, including by the person who did it. Searchable by person or by what they touched — most boards never open it until the one week they need it badly.
When something isn't working
There's a Help & Support page at the bottom of the admin menu. It sends straight to us with your community, plan and account details already attached, so you don't have to explain who you are. Replies come back to your email.
It's for community admins only. Members with questions about pool hours, their dues or an event should ask you — you can answer those far faster than we can, and it keeps your members out of a queue they don't belong in.
Where to go next
See everything included, the four site designs, or what it costs. The blog covers the community side rather than the software — dues collection, pool season, court rules, and getting people to actually turn up.
Bring your community together
Start a 14-day free trial. No setup fees, and cancel anytime.
Start free trial