Thank you for this feed back!
Runell Seale
Land of Enchantment Investment Partners

Wow! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions. We really do appreciate them.

I thought I would address Jack and Kenneth's requests here, just to talk about the trade offs in designing software, especially a complex and collaborative "app" like bivio.com.

Jack, we did have a home page login box at one time. You can go to archive.org and search bivio.com to see how the site has changed over the last two decades. For example, here's a link from 2001 which shows the login box.

Why did we remove it? To help people who were trying to find their club, which turns out to be one of our biggest support challenges. You would think it would be easy for people to click on a link in the invite email. However, people don't do that. They get a phone call or a separate email from their treasurer to tell them "go to bivio and sign up!" This then leads them to the login box, but they don't have a password yet, so they get frustrated and try to register. It turns out that one of our most common support problems is that people end up registering a duplicate club instead of joining their existing club. By not having a login box, we avoid (some of) them going down this path, which is a very frustrating experience for a first time user.

Jack, I would recommend for you to bookmark https://www.bivio.com/pub/login  With modern browsers, when you start to type "bivio" in the address bar, the browser will find this bookmark and you can tab or hit enter to login. BTW, our login page can be bookmarked (unlike many sites nowadays) and that link hasn't changed since we launched in 1999. This is a subtle and important part of web development that many sites get wrong. Also, by having a separate login page, bivio.com works well with modern password managers like lastpass.com, which we highly recommend, to help you keep your identity secure.

Now to Kenneth's request for a mobile version. As you noted, we have discussions about "mobile" with our users as well as internally. As you have seen, many users don't want to use their phone for Bivio. It would be "nice", but we have found for complex applications like ours, it is very tricky to create a positive mobile experience. 

Frankly, our main goal is eliminating the time you have to spend on our site. We don't make money when users visit our site. We make money when the software just works, and our users sleep peacefully knowing that their tax returns are correct and their data is safe.

Most of our time is spent on solving problems users don't see. For example, to get approved in NY State for the 2017 tax year, we had to handle over 30 new test cases to our software.  And, that's just one state. Every week we fix bugs related to the brokerage importer. Our goal is to catch those errors so you don't have to. It's a fine art, frankly, to figure out broker data feeds. You would not believe the number of the ways brokers spell "check", for example.

Also, you have a real advocate at Bivio. Laurie is constantly looking out for you by suggesting fixes to workflows as well as keeping up with tax law changes. We are plowing through a list of requests from her including the new audit regime. These tasks take time to implement, and present the bulk of our development.

I hope this helps you understand what goes on behind the scenes at Bivio.

Cheers,

Rob

CEO & Founder

Bivio Inc.

Rob,

Thanks for a stellar project that makes our work easy. And we always have Laurie as backup to correct our misteaks. Put our club down as not wanting you to spend valuable effort on a mobile app. I like 2 screens up when working with Bivio to make sure it is in lockstep with our Schwab account. Can't do that on a tiny phone. Plus, I would have to buy a phone.

Dave Vandaveer

Friday Depositors Investment Club (FDIC)

Wow! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions. We really do appreciate them.

I thought I would address Jack and Kenneth's requests here, just to talk about the trade offs in designing software, especially a complex and collaborative "app" like bivio.com.

Jack, we did have a home page login box at one time. You can go to archive.org and search bivio.com to see how the site has changed over the last two decades. For example, here's a link from 2001 which shows the login box.

Why did we remove it? To help people who were trying to find their club, which turns out to be one of our biggest support challenges. You would think it would be easy for people to click on a link in the invite email. However, people don't do that. They get a phone call or a separate email from their treasurer to tell them "go to bivio and sign up!" This then leads them to the login box, but they don't have a password yet, so they get frustrated and try to register. It turns out that one of our most common support problems is that people end up registering a duplicate club instead of joining their existing club. By not having a login box, we avoid (some of) them going down this path, which is a very frustrating experience for a first time user.

Jack, I would recommend for you to bookmark https://www.bivio.com/pub/login With modern browsers, when you start to type "bivio" in the address bar, the browser will find this bookmark and you can tab or hit enter to login. BTW, our login page can be bookmarked (unlike many sites nowadays) and that link hasn't changed since we launched in 1999. This is a subtle and important part of web development that many sites get wrong. Also, by having a separate login page, bivio.com works well with modern password managers like lastpass.com, which we highly recommend, to help you keep your identity secure.

Now to Kenneth's request for a mobile version. As you noted, we have discussions about "mobile" with our users as well as internally. As you have seen, many users don't want to use their phone for Bivio. It would be "nice", but we have found for complex applications like ours, it is very tricky to create a positive mobile experience.

Frankly, our main goal is eliminating the time you have to spend on our site. We don't make money when users visit our site. We make money when the software just works, and our users sleep peacefully knowing that their tax returns are correct and their data is safe.

Most of our time is spent on solving problems users don't see. For example, to get approved in NY State for the 2017 tax year, we had to handle over 30 new test cases to our software. And, that's just one state. Every week we fix bugs related to the brokerage importer. Our goal is to catch those errors so you don't have to. It's a fine art, frankly, to figure out broker data feeds. You would not believe the number of the ways brokers spell "check", for example.

Also, you have a real advocate at Bivio. Laurie is constantly looking out for you by suggesting fixes to workflows as well as keeping up with tax law changes. We are plowing through a list of requests from her including the new audit regime. These tasks take time to implement, and present the bulk of our development.

I hope this helps you understand what goes on behind the scenes at Bivio.

Cheers,

Rob

CEO & Founder

Bivio Inc.