Day-to-day in the app
Chat, notices, the calendar, work orders, projects, the marketplace, the places directory, the document library, parcels and households, and stokvel rotation.
The parts of the app that get used every week, in the order a new member meets them. Money has its own guide; decisions have theirs.
What a resident sees
The dashboard is the first page after login: what is due, what is closing, what changed. Menu items the person's role cannot use are absent rather than greyed out, so there is no screen full of locked doors.
- My dues — what this household owes, what it has paid, and a statement per period that can be downloaded.
- Chat — the community's channels and direct messages.
- Notices — bulletins the committee sent, in your own copy.
- Calendar — one agenda that includes meetings, deadlines, events and expected visitors.
- Proposals, meetings, documents — what is being decided, when you meet, and the rules you accepted when you joined.
- Visitors — pre-authorise a guest so the gate already expects them.
- Work orders — report a broken thing and follow it to completion.
Chat
Chat is channels plus direct messages. There is a community channel, announcement rooms, ordinary channels and group conversations.
- Joining is opt-in. You can read a public channel before joining; you must press Join to post. Nobody is auto-added to anything.
- Announcement rooms are one-way — no join or leave control, and messages can be acknowledged, which is how a committee knows a notice was seen.
- Group and private conversations are invisible to non-members; the link simply does not resolve for them.
- Channels are created by moderators. Only an admin can create an announcement channel.
Notices, announcements, notifications — three different things
These get confused constantly, so the short version:
| Surface | Who writes it | What it is |
|---|---|---|
Notices /notices | Treasurer, moderator or admin | A bulletin the committee composes and sends to a chosen audience — every member, owners, everyone in arrears, the payers of one levy schedule, the owners of one unit, or a role. Email and SMS are optional channels. |
Announcements /announcements | Platform operators | Broadcasts issued by tribe.one, not by your committee. Residents read and mark them read; there is no compose button here. |
Notifications /notifications | The app | The personal record of everything that happened to you — a payment marked, a vote closing, a task assigned. Clicking one opens it in a dialog with a single link to the record behind it. |
Sending a notice
- Pick the audience, not a mailing list. The database resolves who that is from memberships, current ownership and the arrears ledger. Who would get this? counts them first, and warns when the answer is nobody.
- Write the message. Tokens fill in each recipient's own details, and Preview with my details shows what one reader will get.
- Choose channels. In the app, email, SMS, or several. Quiet hours and opt-outs still apply, because a notice is a bulletin and not an emergency.
The outbox keeps the committee's text with its tokens; each recipient's rendered copy — their name, their parcels — lives on their own notification. So an admin reading the outbox sees their own version, not a generic one. The same page tells you honestly when no email went out because every recipient has email switched off.
Calendar
The calendar aggregates rather than duplicates: proposals closing, project milestones, contribution due dates, visitor passes expected, plus events an admin adds. Categories are filtered per community type, so a stokvel never sees guardhouse colours.
- Adding an event is an admin action; editing or deleting one is allowed for an admin or the person who created it.
- The month grid is padded either side, so the first and last rows of a month still show the neighbouring week's events instead of appearing empty.
Work orders
The maintenance path for anything broken, dirty or overdue. Any member may submit one, with up to three photos; the community's admins triage, quote, assign and close it.
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Submitted | Reported; the reporter can still edit the details |
| Triaged | Looked at and accepted as real work |
| Assigned | A member, contractor or vendor is on it; the contractor's phone turns on a WhatsApp button |
| In progress | Being worked on |
| Completed | Done — and if a final cost was entered, an expense is created for the treasurer to approve |
| Cancelled | Dropped, with a reason of at least three characters |
| Closed | The end state for both completed and cancelled work |
Finishing a work order with a cost does not move money. It creates a pending expense in the treasury, which the treasurer approves like any other. That two-step is why a handyman cannot be paid by pressing "completed".
Projects
Anything the community does together and wants to show progress on: a borehole, a repaint, a garden day. A project has milestones, a task board, volunteers and a budget that can be funded from the treasury.
- Propose it. Anyone except a gate account can. The proposal sits as a draft until an admin approves it.
- Run it. Tasks move across To do, In progress, In review and Done — the board accepts drag and drop. Milestones mark the points that matter.
- Recruit. Anyone can join as a volunteer without an invitation; the lead can also add people directly.
- Close it. Marking complete keeps the record, the hours and the photographs; archive hides finished work without deleting it.
Hours volunteered are logged against the person and stay logged even if they later leave the team — the contribution is part of the community's history.
Marketplace and orders
Local trade inside the community: a service, a second-hand bicycle, a gardener who lives two streets away. It is a housing-community module, and it is off-ledger — money changes hands between buyer and vendor, and tribe.one records the order rather than holding the funds.
- You must become a vendor first. A first listing asks for a vendor profile; until then the listing form short-circuits and says so.
- New listings are reviewed. They start in review and are moderated before they go live, so the marketplace is not a free-for-all.
- "On request" listings cannot be ordered. With no price there is nothing to pay; you message the vendor instead.
An order moves awaiting vendor → accepted → in progress → shipped → delivered → completed, with cancelled, disputed and refunded as the exits. The vendor accepts and fulfils; the buyer confirms delivery and completes. A dispute or refund requires a reason both parties can see.
Procurement is the committee's version: post what you need, receive bids, shortlist, award — and the losing bidders are told, with their bids kept.
Community places
The directory of what is nearby and who to call: schools, clinics, the plumber everyone uses, the police station. Moderators and admins maintain it; everyone reads it.
Ticking Emergency contact is what promotes a place onto the safety page's shortlist. That single checkbox is the difference between an entry nobody finds at 2am and one that is one tap away.
Document library
Files the community keeps — plans, minutes as PDFs, insurance schedules, body corporate certificates. It is separate from the governing documents in Governance, which carry versions and an acceptance gate.
- Every file has its own visibility: All members or Admins only, and it can be flipped later. An admin-only file is not merely hidden in the list — residents cannot open it.
- Each community has a storage quota, shown to admins as a used-of-limit pill, so a library does not quietly become a file server.
- Uploading is an admin action. Residents read and download.
Parcels, households and moves
For estates, HOAs and neighbourhoods, the Units & owners register is the spine: each parcel, who owns it, what it owes and what has been paid. Its detail page is a readable summary; adding an owner, transferring ownership and viewing a statement are separate routes off it, so a record is not edited by accident.
| Surface | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Units & owners | The parcel register — owners, statements, clearance certificates, and the rate card used for per-unit charges |
| Households | People, not accounts: a household lists its members by name, relationship and date of birth, and needs no logins. Date of birth is visible only to the head of the household or an admin |
| Resident moves | Move-in and move-out. A move-out deactivates access and stops future member-based charges; the owner's unit-based levy continues, because the property is still owned |
| Rule notices | Conduct-rule infringements: issued, decided, kept |
| Design approvals | Alteration requests submitted to the trustees, with the decision recorded |
| Assets & reserve | The asset register and maintenance due dates behind a reserve-fund plan |
| Compliance | A checklist derived from your real records, for trustees who need to show the scheme is run properly |
Stokvel rotation
A stokvel is a wallet with an order. The group has a roster, a cycle, and one recipient per cycle — the app computes whose turn it is next, and the treasurer records the payout.
- Set the rotation. Add members in the order they receive, then save. The order is the whole agreement.
- Fund the pot. Contributions are recorded against the group. A member funding from their own wallet creates a request that the treasurer approves — it is not in the pot until it is approved.
- Record the payout. The amount is pre-filled with the current pot, and the page warns that it cannot be undone. The roster then marks that member Received · cycle n and names the next one.
Pausing keeps the roster and the pot and stops payouts; completing ends the group with its history intact. In a stokvel community the labels change throughout the app — Treasury reads Stokvel funds, and the rotation is Stokvel — because the same machinery is doing a different job.