club accounting - Bivio vs. NOCA - club_cafe

club accounting - Bivio vs. NOCA

Steve Schweitzer on

My club had been using NAIC Club Accounting since '96, and last year we looked at both NOCA and Bivio. We initially ended up going with NOCA based on the fact that it was an NAIC supported product, but we found ourselves very frustrated with several aspects of NOCA. After looking at Bivio again, spending a good deal of time comparing NOCA and Bivio, and deciding we would never want to go back to NCA, we switched to Bivio in January of this year. Here's what we liked about Bivio that we thought was lacking in NOCA:

- AccountSync is awesome: great if you have a lot of transactions, and it cuts down on the data entry mistakes of the past.

- Tax printing is awesome: this is the first year we had our club's tax forms ready early (March 1st), and we didn't have to mail them to each member - online access is available year-round for every year going back to 1999.

- Bivio reports: all NOCA report fields are covered, but more information is displayed in Bivio reports - like full user remarks for each transaction and cash payments listed separately for each member in the account listing. In NOCA, we had to constantly drill-down to see the details of each transaction. Also, most reports export to comma separated files (*.CSV) perfect for Excel.

- File storage: cleaner implementation, folders collapse, TXT/HTML files are viewable online versus downloaded first, support for club site homepage complete with zip file upload management, displays percentage space used/available (this feature was recently added).

- Audit trail: user name is displayed for each data entry or file upload, individual remarks for each member payment in a single transaction - nice when you want to comment only one member or have different comments per member.

- Email addresses: for club, message board, officers, and each member, setup to forward to your primary email with option for a secondary email address.

- XML data: data is totally accessible, nice if you know what you are doing, impossible with NOCA. We used this feature to clean up comments across all of our transactions.

NOCA did have some nice features that Bivio does not have, but we found they were either limited in functional benefit or were not enough to warrant staying with NOCA. Those included:

- Calendar: nice but limited, cannot print/export list of dates, can only view one month at a time, other online equivalents are better.

- Multiple message boards: nice feature if you want to organize discussions on different topics, however message boards/threads cannot be collapsed like they can in Bivio.

- Reports span range: NOCA allows reports to span multiple years, while Bivio limits the range to one year. Transactions listed in reports allow drill-down-to-edit, while in Bivio you have to find the transaction in the account/investment section.

- Personal info: more fields available, section for personal bio, upload a picture.

- NCA data compatibility: Bivio supports importing NCA/NOCA data but cannot export back into the NCA/NOCA proprietary format - probably because it's impossible to guarantee compatibility.

- Permissions: it looks like NOCA has improved their administrative options since our initial comparison, now with multiple permissions available for each member.

- Voting, officer elections, announcements, links: these seemed like nice features, but they no longer appear to be available in NOCA.

Lastly, we have discovered that Bivio support is very responsive to all of our requests, from issues with our initial data import to questions that came out of our audit to enhancement suggestions we made along the way. We have been very happy with our decision thus far.

Steve Schweitzer

Big Rock Investment Club

Marcia De Fren on

Steve -

Thank you so much for your extensive and VERY helpful response to my question. This will really enable us to make an informed decision.

Best,

Marcia De Fren

Wi$e Women Investment Club

West Palm Beach, FL