Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
John Munn on
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service; I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Daniel Williams on
I agree whole-heartedly with Mr. John Munn's comments. I joined my investment club to learn more about investing, for the social aspects of membership, and to make a profit. I too believe that your product/service is underpriced.
With the relatively small amount of money generated through investment clubs, brokerage firms are not incentivized to aggressively market to IC's. I think Bivio and/or others in your niche are in need of a marketing campaign to have more clubs established and developed. In so doing, your market would grow.
Strong customer service and reporting accuracy are extremely important to our club and IC's in general, I believe. We have little to no alternative. I appreciate you inviting us to give input, and I hope that a good solution can be found for all involved.
--Dan Willliams
On Tuesday, August 2, 2022 at 07:41:36 PM CDT, John Munn via bivio.com <user*223700001@bivio.com> wrote:
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service; I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
ijh ijhill.com on
I concur with what is being said about the membership fees being too low. I once showed the program to my accountant. He stated that Bivio has no idea how powerful this is and it is was worth about $1,500 a year. Maybe that is too much but that is how impressed
he was of the program and we all need to find a solution to the problem. The two clubs I am in would have to fold if Bivio was not available
From: club_cafe@bivio.com <club_cafe@bivio.com> on behalf of Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> Sent: Tuesday, August 2, 2022 4:50 PM To: The Club Cafe <club_cafe@bivio.com> Subject: [club_cafe] Non-Profit Bivio
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is
already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues
to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind
the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services
so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit,
we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Carole Jansen on
I'm with John. Except for doubling the price.....maybe not that much 😁
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service; I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Robin Heller on
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service; I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Randy Purvis on
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that Bivio is the right thing for our club.
Randy Purvis
D & C Investment Club
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:18 PM, Robin Heller via bivio.com <user*24731500001@bivio.com> wrote:
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service; I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason. Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex. Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories). As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
barbara 5siegels.com on
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Barbara Lounsbury
San Diego Women's Investment Club
From:
club_cafe@bivio.com <club_cafe@bivio.com> on behalf of Randy Purvis via bivio.com <user*37247600001@bivio.com> Date: Tuesday, August 2, 2022 at 9:09 PM To: club_cafe@bivio.com <club_cafe@bivio.com> Subject: Re: [club_cafe] Non-Profit Bivio
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
Randy Purvis
D & C Investment Club
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:18 PM, Robin Heller via bivio.com <user*24731500001@bivio.com> wrote:
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
DrDave on
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Glenn Jenner on
Good morning my name is Glenn and I have been the treasurer of my club for the past 25 years most of the time we have use Bivio. I would have no problem if you had To double the price of your product. I pay QuickBooksQuickBooks over $600 a year just to be able to provide payroll to my employees. I don't even use any of your import features as we only have about 30 stocks that pay dividends four times a year so it may take maybe an hour or an hour and a half once a month to enter those manually into your system that way I am always sure it is done correctly and not worried about what the broker is forcing into my account. As for e-filing does not make a difference to me you're talking about seven cents a copy even if you had a 200 page return it would cost $14 not a big deal. I think people do not realize what we have and how difficult it would be to work without it. Do what you must do but without you we will probably disband our club.
V/R
Glenn
Eastern Virginia investment club
On Aug 3, 2022, at 1:07 AM, DrDave via bivio.com <user*34979900001@bivio.com> wrote:
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
John Munn on
I share Dr. Dave's thoughts about moving to a NFP model and pricing based on AUM.
bivio is vital to investment club operations and without its service I'm certain our club would fold. I would not want the cost of the service to price a new club from forming or cause our partnership to disband. I don't know what an "equitable" AUM fee structure would look like but our accounting fees are our only major expense. "Equitable" requires that bivio be financially viable and secure to continue providing its services and support, that its staff be paid the professional wages they deserve, and that the principals receive a return on their investment and efforts.
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Bill on
Bob,
I am also in agreement with the opinions below. I agree Bivio is underpriced and if Bivio raises the annual fee, our club would pay them.
I was our club treasurer for over 25 years. Before Bivio, I kept our accounting data on Excel spreadsheets which worked fairly well but taxes were a different story. Manually completing federal taxes and taxes for 2 states was a HUGE effort until Bivio came along. Taxes are much easier with your software.
We're good with a price increase and stay the same company you are today.
Regards,
Bill Austin
Making Cents Investors
On Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 08:47:14 AM EDT, John Munn via bivio.com <user*223700001@bivio.com> wrote:
I share Dr. Dave's thoughts about moving to a NFP model and pricing based on AUM.
bivio is vital to investment club operations and without its service I'm certain our club would fold. I would not want the cost of the service to price a new club from forming or cause our partnership to disband. I don't know what an "equitable" AUM fee structure would look like but our accounting fees are our only major expense. "Equitable" requires that bivio be financially viable and secure to continue providing its services and support, that its staff be paid the professional wages they deserve, and that the principals receive a return on their investment and efforts.
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Irina Clements on
Rob as long time treasurer until dissolution I loved bivio, the user friendliness of the interface, the easy to understand reports, this forum. But I cannot see a way clear to a non profit status, agreeing w all points already stated. I also cannot foresee a path where I can persuade my club members (I am not treasurer of my new club) to switch from my Iclub (where I had been persuading them to do so) for a "similar" product (when I air quote similar I mean superior in my eyes but similar in theirs) which does the same service but for twice the price. I chose bivio for three clubs I was involved in as Treasurer so I get the value and specialness on so many levels, but I do not think I could persuade 8 frugal women to pay more. Reality bites!!
A board of 12 people making it work a la REI... can't see it.
Finally, as much as it pains me to write this, perhaps another options is to explore talks w my club for an acquisition/merger.
Between some brokerages not accepting new investment club partnerships and bivio's situation as described, I fear for the continued existence of small investment clubs as an education and investing vehicle.
With Genuine Sorrow at the news, Irina Clements
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 3, 2022, at 9:03 AM, Bill via bivio.com <user*23414000001@bivio.com> wrote:
Bob,
I am also in agreement with the opinions below. I agree Bivio is underpriced and if Bivio raises the annual fee, our club would pay them.
I was our club treasurer for over 25 years. Before Bivio, I kept our accounting data on Excel spreadsheets which worked fairly well but taxes were a different story. Manually completing federal taxes and taxes for 2 states was a HUGE effort until Bivio came along. Taxes are much easier with your software.
We're good with a price increase and stay the same company you are today.
Regards,
Bill Austin
Making Cents Investors
On Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 08:47:14 AM EDT, John Munn via bivio.com <user*223700001@bivio.com> wrote:
I share Dr. Dave's thoughts about moving to a NFP model and pricing based on AUM.
bivio is vital to investment club operations and without its service I'm certain our club would fold. I would not want the cost of the service to price a new club from forming or cause our partnership to disband. I don't know what an "equitable" AUM fee structure would look like but our accounting fees are our only major expense. "Equitable" requires that bivio be financially viable and secure to continue providing its services and support, that its staff be paid the professional wages they deserve, and that the principals receive a return on their investment and efforts.
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Michael Grove on
We would support higher fees to bring Bivio to solvency. The only advantage I could see for the non- profit route would be access to Grants.
Rob as long time treasurer until dissolution I loved bivio, the user friendliness of the interface, the easy to understand reports, this forum. But I cannot see a way clear to a non profit status, agreeing w all points already stated. I also cannot foresee a path where I can persuade my club members (I am not treasurer of my new club) to switch from my Iclub (where I had been persuading them to do so) for a "similar" product (when I air quote similar I mean superior in my eyes but similar in theirs) which does the same service but for twice the price. I chose bivio for three clubs I was involved in as Treasurer so I get the value and specialness on so many levels, but I do not think I could persuade 8 frugal women to pay more. Reality bites!!
A board of 12 people making it work a la REI... can't see it.
Finally, as much as it pains me to write this, perhaps another options is to explore talks w my club for an acquisition/merger.
Between some brokerages not accepting new investment club partnerships and bivio's situation as described, I fear for the continued existence of small investment clubs as an education and investing vehicle.
I am also in agreement with the opinions below. I agree Bivio is underpriced and if Bivio raises the annual fee, our club would pay them.
I was our club treasurer for over 25 years. Before Bivio, I kept our accounting data on Excel spreadsheets which worked fairly well but taxes were a different story. Manually completing federal taxes and taxes for 2 states was a HUGE effort until Bivio came along. Taxes are much easier with your software.
We're good with a price increase and stay the same company you are today.
I share Dr. Dave's thoughts about moving to a NFP model and pricing based on AUM.
bivio is vital to investment club operations and without its service I'm certain our club would fold. I would not want the cost of the service to price a new club from forming or cause our partnership to disband. I don't know what an "equitable" AUM fee structure would look like but our accounting fees are our only major expense. "Equitable" requires that bivio be financially viable and secure to continue providing its services and support, that its staff be paid the professional wages they deserve, and that the principals receive a return on their investment and efforts.
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!
Thank you for using Bivio.
Sincerely,
Robert Nagler
CEO
Bivio Inc.
Margaret Wentworth on
Hi Ya'll,
My club has been with Bivio since they had an exhibition at the Money Show in Orlando at least 20 years ago. I was using NAIC computer-based accounting when I took the Bivio trial. When my computer crashed, I lost all the NAIC data but had the Bivio account on the web that I had copied data into just a few months before! Saved my bacon, big time!!
If Bivio were to cease doing our accounting, my club would have to disband after 24 years. As treasurer, I could not figure things out alone.
To my mind, the most important functions are the computation of units and the federal and state tax reporting. Synching to the broker is a great reminder and helps not to miss things, but I can do that myself with the brokerage reports.
My suggestions are these and I believe my members would support these:
Raise the price for basic service at least double.
Charge an extra fee for doing state taxes. Not every club has state reporting and why should those clubs who do not have a state reporting requirement support those of us who do.
Run your numbers and see if those increases make Bivio a viable business.
At last resort, sell Bivio to another accounting firm doing online taxes which guarantees that they will continue the current service.
I have contacted my Congressman to tell him about the onerous tax reporting added with the 2017 tax reform. I am asking him to see what he can do about exempting investment clubs from this requirement. I suggest you all do the same. Perhaps we can simplify things for us and for Bivio going forward.
Please give us all a heads up if this irreplaceable service is being discontinued. I shudder to hear that news.
Rob as long time treasurer until dissolution I loved bivio, the user friendliness of the interface, the easy to understand reports, this forum. But I cannot see a way clear to a non profit status, agreeing w all points already stated. I also cannot foresee a path where I can persuade my club members (I am not treasurer of my new club) to switch from my Iclub (where I had been persuading them to do so) for a "similar" product (when I air quote similar I mean superior in my eyes but similar in theirs) which does the same service but for twice the price. I chose bivio for three clubs I was involved in as Treasurer so I get the value and specialness on so many levels, but I do not think I could persuade 8 frugal women to pay more. Reality bites!!
A board of 12 people making it work a la REI... can't see it.
Finally, as much as it pains me to write this, perhaps another options is to explore talks w my club for an acquisition/merger.
Between some brokerages not accepting new investment club partnerships and bivio's situation as described, I fear for the continued existence of small investment clubs as an education and investing vehicle.
I am also in agreement with the opinions below. I agree Bivio is underpriced and if Bivio raises the annual fee, our club would pay them.
I was our club treasurer for over 25 years. Before Bivio, I kept our accounting data on Excel spreadsheets which worked fairly well but taxes were a different story. Manually completing federal taxes and taxes for 2 states was a HUGE effort until Bivio came along. Taxes are much easier with your software.
We're good with a price increase and stay the same company you are today.
I share Dr. Dave's thoughts about moving to a NFP model and pricing based on AUM.
bivio is vital to investment club operations and without its service I'm certain our club would fold. I would not want the cost of the service to price a new club from forming or cause our partnership to disband. I don't know what an "equitable" AUM fee structure would look like but our accounting fees are our only major expense. "Equitable" requires that bivio be financially viable and secure to continue providing its services and support, that its staff be paid the professional wages they deserve, and that the principals receive a return on their investment and efforts.
I am unconvinced that making Bivio into a non-profit would actually solve the stated problem. Rather it might hasten the end of Bivio. It seems clear to me that Bivio is much appreciated by the users as-is. For sure.
It might be a good path to think about the many ways to monetize 1600 investment clubs each with a daily update from their brokers.
Among other ideas; how about for a fee, allowing customers to see what the top clubs are holding & their trades. Clubs that would rather remain anonymous could opt to keep their names private. This sort of data could become a never-ending source of marketable services.
Another idea: Perhaps there could be Bivio price tiers based on AUM, or number of members, or based on % returns, or some combination of that.
Knowing what I know now, I would not agree to be treasurer of any investment club without Bivio. If Bivio discontinues, I will fold our club rather than try to do what Bivio does for us. On the flip side consider that small clubs already pay a higher cost per member for Bivio. Bivio is obviously a very valuable service, but small clubs, or clubs with less $ in play can only pay so much before getting priced out.
I'm personally OK with printing & filing paper taxes rather than e-filing, but that could be another possible revenue producing add-on service.
Bivio has been a wonderful help to our club - it has made my job as treasurer appear easy to my members. The one additional item that would be very helpful is e-filing of taxes (federal and state). It has
become increasingly difficult to do paper filing with the increase in the number of pages to print and the difficulty making sure stuff gets to the IRS. I'd rather pay Bivio more than paying fedex or USPS to ensure paper delivery.
Prior to using Bivio our club used multiple spreadsheets to do our accounting. It was set up years before using Lotus 123 by one member who was a CPA. I took over from him and used his system for about two
years. It worked but it took about 4 hours a month to maintain the records. I am also a CPA with over 40 years of experience. I LOVE BIVIO! I agree that it is worth much more than is currently being charged. If the price goes up I will still recommend that
Bivio is the right thing for our club.
I agree with John that Bivio is indispensable to our club and the fees are too low. Doubling the price would still make it viable for us and provide cushion to those managing it. I have some of the same concerns
over distributed management mentioned earlier.
Please keep up the service; we rely on you all!
Regards,
Robin
Diamonds & Dividends
Helen Keller was once asked if there was anything that could have been worse than losing her sight. Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."
Bob... I never gave thought to bivio's corporate finances and clearly, there's not enough revenue to support the expanding service requirements. But I don;t see how becoming a NFP would solve the revenue
problem. I can't imagine that donations would come pouring in to support a service that essentially enables for profit partnerships to manage their operations. My thought is that the revenue model needs to change and that the annual subscription price needs
to at least double. It doesn't matter to me whether bivio is a NFP or privately owned. What I care about is that the accounting software meets our partner's needs and generates our annual tax filings. I think the service is worth much more than the current
cost. bivio's software replaces countless hours of our manual labor and accounting and tax expertise for each member club. Our partnership is entirely dependent on your software and would fold without it. Our partnership is indebted to bivio and its service;
I think its subscription cost is underpriced. These thoughts don't address your question, but bottom line for me is I need bivio's service and I fear that geographically distributed management would place the service in jeopardy and not solve the fundamental
issue of insufficient revenue.
John Munn
On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 6:51 PM Robert Nagler <nagler@bivio.biz> wrote:
Hi All,
Bivio is a small, owner-operated company. Paul and I would like to move to a model where the community would be more involved in running Bivio. We are big advocates of open source software for this reason.
Much of the software behind bivio.com is already open source.
So, we are soliciting your feedback about turning Bivio into a not-for-profit corporation, that is, a charitable, members run organization (501c6).
Why
When we started Bivio back in 1998, we thought of it as a way of democratizing finance. That Bivio would be at the crossroads of investing and community.
By the summer of 2001, we realized that this vision was more of a dream, unfortunately. The reality is that Paul and I have had to work other jobs since 2001. We spun off some of our technology as a software
consultancy, Bivio Software, Inc., which continues to operate. Since 2013, we have been helping out at RadiaSoft LLC. This has worked pretty well up until recently.
Tax software is getting excessively complex. You all will have noticed this on last year's tax returns. In addition, email, broker interfaces, and the software industry in general have gotten more complex.
Most of our time is spent fixing things behind the scenes, just to keep bivio.com running.
Becky & Joanne have been a great help, and before them, Laurie was a godsend. They are doing a fantastic job supporting our loyal customers.
Bivio is a community of 1,600 investment clubs with a revenue of $340,000 in 2021. This is not enough money to operate a tax and accounting software service. We pay our support people, accounting team, data
providers, etc. Paul and I discount our services so we can keep Bivio running, that is, Bivio is actually running as a not-for-profit.
Therefore, we think the ethical thing to do is to make Bivio a real non-profit run by the community for the community. This would give us a corporate structure to allow us to apply for grants, hold member
events, and to accept tax-deductible donations.
Plan
The plan is simple. Non-Profit Bivio would be modeled after Recreational Equipment Inc (REI), which is a non-profit where all members get a say
in how it operates.
We are big fans of open source software, and much of bivio.com uses open source (see our GitHub repositories).
As a part of moving to a non-profit, we would make all our accounting software open source.
We also love The Great Game of Business, and we run our company quite openly now. As a non-profit, we would run with
our books completely open to the public.
A not-for-profit is not owned by anybody. There would be a charter, which would describe how the company would operate, in perpetuity. Paul and I would relinquish all financial interest in Bivio Inc. Our existing
board has agreed to this idea.
The not-for-profit would be run by you, the Bivio community. We would love to see a diverse group like the REI board of directors running
the company.
The board would also look for people to help run bivio.com. There are many people who have a lot of different skills who might want to contribute to bivio.com's
operations. There are many software engineers in our community. Some would like to help.
Bivio would continue to charge a fee. Customers would not have to be members. However, just like REI, we would offer members a dividend from any excess fees collected.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback. You can email them support@bivio.com or reply publicly to the Club Cafe.
We are very excited to consider this next step in Bivio's evolution. We can't wait to hear what you think!