How to choose society management software: a committee's checklist

Most software evaluations in a housing society run on a feature checklist supplied by the vendor. That is the wrong instrument: every platform in this category has visitor management, complaint tickets and billing. The differences that matter show up eighteen months later, and they are almost all commercial or structural rather than functional.

Here are the questions worth asking, roughly in order of how much they will cost you if you get them wrong.

1. Where does the money settle?

When a resident pays maintenance in the app, whose bank account does it land in first, and how long does it stay there?

The answer should be that funds settle to your society's own bank account. Ask specifically:

• Does the platform hold funds at any point, and for how long?
• Is the payment partner authorised by the RBI for what it is doing?
• Is there any commission, platform fee or "convenience charge" deducted from

the maintenance collected — and is it disclosed on the resident's receipt?

• What is the settlement timeline, and what happens to a failed or disputed

payment?

This is the single most consequential question on the list. It concerns your members' money, and it should be answered in writing, not on a call.

2. What is the real cost at your size?

Published per-unit pricing is comparable. Quoted annual packages are not, and the gap between them is where most societies overpay.

Normalise every quote to the same shape:

Then ask the questions the headline hides:

• Is there a minimum billing size? A 28-flat society charged for a 50-flat

minimum is paying nearly double the advertised rate.

• What is the renewal price, as opposed to the first-year price?
• Are payment gateway charges absorbed, passed through, or marked up?
• Which of the features you were shown are in the tier you were quoted?

A vendor that will not publish pricing is not necessarily overcharging, but it does mean you cannot benchmark, and it usually means the price varies by how hard you negotiate.

3. Can you leave?

Ask for a data export before you sign, not after.

• Can you export members, units, and billing history in a standard format

(CSV/Excel), on demand, without raising a support ticket?

• Do you get documents and uploaded files back, or only tabular data?
• What is the notice period, and what happens to your data after termination?
• Is there any lock-in tied to the payment rail — can you switch software

without disrupting collections?

If the honest answer is that leaving means re-keying everything, the price you were quoted is not the price you will pay.

4. Does it produce what your auditor needs?

A society's software has one non-negotiable output: the statements that go to the auditor and the general body.

• Receipts and payments, income and expenditure, balance sheet.
• Head-wise fund schedules — sinking fund and repair fund shown separately

with opening balance, additions, interest, withdrawals, closing balance.

• Member-wise aged arrears, not a single outstanding figure.
• An audit trail of who changed what and when.

Ask to see a real sample of each, generated from the system, not a screenshot in a deck. Platforms that were built as visitor-management apps and had accounting added later tend to fail this question specifically.

5. Will the residents actually use it?

The features a committee buys and the features residents use are different sets. In practice adoption is driven by three things:

• Paying is one tap and produces an immediate receipt.
• The gate flow is faster than calling, so guards and residents both prefer

it.

• Notices arrive where people already look, rather than in an app they open

monthly.

Everything else — polls, forums, classifieds, event calendars — is genuinely useful in engaged societies and dead weight in the rest. Weight your evaluation accordingly, and be honest about which kind of society you have.

Ask about the parts that determine whether older residents adopt at all: does it work in the languages your members read? Is there a way to pay for someone who will not install an app? Can a member see their own ledger without asking the treasurer?

6. The questions about data that nobody asks

• Where is the data hosted, and under whose control?
• Who inside the vendor can see your members' details?
• Is resident data used for advertising, or shared with or sold to third

parties?

• If the platform offers AI features, **what leaves the device or the society's

account** — is resident content sent to a third-party model?

• What is the process if a member exercises their rights over their personal

data?

The right posture here is to ask for specifics and be sceptical of certification claims that are asserted rather than evidenced. If a vendor claims a formal certification, ask which body issued it and when it expires.

7. What does support look like on a bad day?

Not the sales response time — the response time when billing is wrong on the 1st of the month.

• Is there a named contact, or a shared inbox?
• What are the support hours, and are they in your timezone?
• Is onboarding assistance included, or a paid add-on?
• Who does the initial data import — you or them?

A scoring sheet you can take to the committee

Score the criticals first. If a platform fails any of the three, the rest of the sheet does not matter much.

For what it is worth, Societly publishes its pricing, settles maintenance collections to the society's own bank account without taking a cut of them, and lets you export your data at any time — and our Why Societly page carries an explicit list of what we do not do yet. We would rather you ran the checklist above properly and chose something else than adopted us on a demo.

Related: what apartment management software actually costs in India for how to normalise two quotes, whether you need to leave the spreadsheet at all, and moving off spreadsheets without losing history.