Creating an HOA budget requires balancing historical financial performance with future planning, weighing prior spending, recurring expenses, vendor contracts, reserve studies, planned projects, and economic conditions to meet the association's financial goals.
The Cephai Budget Skill uses AI to streamline this process, generating an initial budget from your organization's financial data in CINC, selected budgeting preferences, and supporting documents. Instead of building a budget from scratch, you start with AI-generated recommendations that you review, refine, and approve.
To create these recommendations, Cephai analyzes:
Historical budget and actual spending data
Inflation and spending trends
Seasonal spending patterns (if enabled)
Supporting documents, such as contracts, reserve studies, invoices, and vendor agreements
From these inputs, Cephai recommends amounts for each general ledger (GL) account, flags significant changes worth a closer look, and offers AI-generated summaries to guide your review.
What AI Does and Doesn't Do
Cephai is designed to assist, not replace, your judgment. Understanding exactly where its role begins and ends will help you set realistic expectations and know what to check before you approve a budget.
Cephai does:
Generate a recommended starting budget.
Analyze historical financial trends.
Consider uploaded supporting documents.
Apply inflation and seasonality settings.
Highlight significant changes for review.
Apply confirmed dollar amounts and GL account recommendations from uploaded documents directly to the matching budget line items.
Cephai does not:
Make final budgeting decisions.
Know about projects or contracts that have not been uploaded.
Automatically understand community-specific decisions made outside CINC.
Replace your professional judgment.
You remain responsible for evaluating Cephai's recommendations, adjusting for your community's needs, and giving final approval. Always review AI-generated recommendations before approving or posting a budget.
Key Terminology
Term | Description |
Budget Forecast Basis
| Determines which historical data Cephai uses as the foundation for its recommendations. |
Ending Date for Actuals | The cutoff date for historical financial data used during budget generation. |
Seasonality | Uses historical monthly spending patterns to distribute annual budget amounts across the year. |
Scenario | An alternate version of a budget used to compare different assumptions without affecting the primary budget. |
AI Suggestion | Cephai's recommended budget amount for a GL account. |
Your Budget | The final budget values that you review and edit before posting. |
Applied Indicator | A marker in the Uploaded Documents Overview showing whether a document’s figures have been applied to the budget. |
Rebalance | A manual action, separate from the auto-balance that runs at budget creation, that nets the budget back to zero after edits by adjusting the Assessments account. |