LIHTC compliance software buyer guide: make each vendor show the workflow.

A vendor can answer "do you support LIHTC?" honestly and still be useless to you. The question that separates systems is what the software knows about a specific project.

Project elections. Unit designations. The rent and income limits actually in force. Household composition, income and assets. The state or HFA context and its forms. Layered program markers riding on the TIC. Where each recertification stands and who approved it.

A system that holds those as property facts behaves differently from one that holds them as fields somebody filled in. You find out which you are looking at by asking it a question that requires knowing them.

Make that concrete in the demo. Ask what the system does once a recertified household passes 140 percent of the applicable income limitation. Does it apply the Next Available Unit Rule building by building, and can it name the comparable or smaller units in that building? Does it know that renting one of them wrong exposes the other over-income units too? Or does it raise a flag and hand the rest back to a spreadsheet? Ask an Average Income Test project the harder version. Which units form the qualifying group, and does that group still average at or below 60 percent? And what has the agency with jurisdiction actually put in writing about re-designating a unit?

Follow one household from application to signed TIC and count the re-entries. That is the whole test. A fact the system asks for twice is a fact it did not carry. It is also a place the file can disagree with itself eighteen months from now, when an auditor is looking for the discrepancy.

Then recertify the same household and watch which facts carry forward on their own and which have to be typed again.

Because a unit carrying two programs has to meet the stricter of two sets of limits, and the software has to know which one wins. HOME, tax-exempt bond and National Housing Trust Fund are layered program markers that ride the LIHTC TIC rather than standalone certification workflows. That changes what the software has to do, not just what it has to store.

"Supports layered funding" is a sentence, and sentences are cheap. Put your actual project stack in front of the system and watch what it does with a unit that carries two programs whose requirements disagree.

Anything it does not have the facts for. Ask each vendor to show you a case their software refuses to decide.

A system with no refusal cases is not more capable. It will produce an answer whether or not it has what the answer requires, and you will not find out which until an audit.

The good version names what is missing: the election that was never recorded, the contract that does not cover this date, the jurisdiction whose rule has not been configured, the authority it could not cite.

These nine questions, in the same order, against one project from your own portfolio. Vendors control their own demos, so comparing them means bringing the scenario yourself and staying on it. Pick your layered property if you have one. Copy or print the list; it is not a lead form.