I believe NAIC no longer supports v1.04 - if that is the program that still
resides on your hard drive. I myself ran parallel for most of 2002. I
finally dropped NAIC as I became totally frustrated with the new NAIC web
based product. I did track every transaction on both systems for over six
months to insure that equity returns and member valuations were in fact the
same. I had no issues at all.

Also, I found out by making several calls that NAIC pulled a nasty trick by
changing the format of their files so that will not export into Bivio. I
found this "Mac' philosophy to be rather counterproductive for all
investors.


My only concern with Bivio is the issue of the web sight going down or even
disappearing completely.
To have the clubs entire history sitting on a web sight seems risky.

Anyone else share this concern? How can a club protect 'virtual' data?

J Mostek








-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Thomas [mailto:jimt@bivio.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 2:13 AM
To: club_cafe@bivio.com
Subject: club_cafe: NCA v1.04 and Bivio


Will I run into any problems if I continue to use NAIC Club
Accounting v1.04 to do data entry
into 2003 and then upload this data to bivio to do reports?
If that's OK, is there some reason
I can't continue doing this basically forever?

I understand that it would be important that I *not* use the
"Distribute" option from NCA's
Utilities menu (and that with bivio the old concept of
making an end-of-year distribution of
units is gone anyway).

I also understand that tax related reports from NCA won't
conform to current tax law (so I
would get those from bivio). However, it seems to me that
NCA's other (not tax reports
related), such as the Valuation Statement and Member's
Status Report would still be accurate.

Am I missing something?
-Jim Thomas

Garbagecop writes:
> If I were you, I'd worry about Bivio's updates not coinciding with the old
> NAIC program. Better safe than sorry! I'd make the switch.

We will continue to support NCA 1.04 imports for the foreseeable
future. It's not a problem, because NCA 1.04 is a subset of what
bivio supports, and the NAIC has dropped support for it. Just be sure
to use bivio for your tax reporting. You have no choice now, anyway. :)

We recommend you switch to bivio for data entry, too. There are a
number of well-known bugs in NCA 1.04 that we attempt to work around,
but sometimes NCA (both versions :-) corrupts your data so badly we
have to work around it manually. That's a support issue that we'd
like to avoid for cost reasons, obviously.

As always, we'll do what it takes to retain your business.

Thank you for using bivio,
Rob

Jim,

Are you running 1.04 because you are familar with it, or because you don't
trust Bivio yet? I had a hard time parting with NAIC's product, too, but
I've had NO problems with Bivio. The reports are fine and I believe they
allow XML back-ups.

If I were you, I'd worry about Bivio's updates not coinciding with the old
NAIC program. Better safe than sorry! I'd make the switch.

Lynn Ostrem, Minneapolis
garbagecop@foxinternet.net

> Are you running 1.04 because you are familar with it, or because you don't
> trust Bivio yet? I had a hard time parting with NAIC's product, too, but
> I've had NO problems with Bivio. The reports are fine and I believe they
> allow XML back-ups.

The only thing really holding me back from depending
completely on bivio is that there is no "UnDo" command. If
I or my *new* asst. treasurer inadvertently do something
unintentional (delete a transaction, edit a transaction,
etc., etc.) there is no easy way to put things back the way
they were without a call to bivio customer support.

We have backup and archiving proceedures in place for our
NCA v1.04 data (without using the NCA Backup or Export
commands) so it's easy to "restore" the data to a prior
known state. If there were a way for me to import an XML
backup of bivio data myself (without calling customer
support) I'd drop NCA v1.04 pretty quickly.

One other minor reason for keeping NCA v1.04 is that I
import that data into Excel to do performance benchmarking
calculations. I imagine I could also do that from the bivio
XML data, but it would take some work. (This is a major
reason I'm not interested in the current NCA or NOCA
product. The encrypted database prevents me from using my
own data in this way.)

-Jim Thomas

A record of all entries made with undo would certainly be
valuable. In the mean time, perhaps we should make it
easier for you to import XML back - although we are always
happy to do this for you. Just email us the file.

On using Excel, are you aware of the "spreadsheet" button on
nearly every bivio page? You can download the same
table/list data in Excel-compatible format that way. Do you
use this feature?

Best,
--Ion

> On using Excel, are you aware of the "spreadsheet" button on
> nearly every bivio page? You can download the same
> table/list data in Excel-compatible format that way. Do you
> use this feature?

Yes, I've found this feature very useful.

However, what I import into Excel from NCA v1.04 is a
complete history of all club transactions (cash and
securities) and stock valuations. If there is a way to get
that information from bivio in Excel format as a single
download I've missed it.

-Jim Thomas

Jim Thomas writes:
> However, what I import into Excel from NCA v1.04 is a
> complete history of all club transactions (cash and
> securities) and stock valuations. If there is a way to get
> that information from bivio in Excel format as a single
> download I've missed it.

Almost. You can download the Transaction Ledger year by year. You
only need to download the current year if the prior years don't
change. I guess that doesn't handle your issue.

The XML export is your best bet for backup purposes, however. We get
so few (i.e. 0) requests for restores, that we never bothered to add
an automatic import. Perhaps its a chicken and egg problem.

Sorry for the deficiences.

Thanks for using bivio (anyway :-),
Rob