Service Review: Bivio for Investment Partnership and Investment Clubs

I started a small investment partnership with some family and friends a couple of years ago. We were geographically diverse and would hold no traditional face-to-face meetings. One of the biggest challenges for me was to find a venue that was easy to use to allow communication and sharing ideas. Accounting for the partnership was also a concern. I stumbled across www.bivio.com and all of these concerns were addressed. We just signed on for our third year and simply love the service.

For $99 a year, we record keeping, accounting and tax preparation-including automatic importing of transactions directly from our brokerage account. The challenge for accounting for an investment partnership is keeping track of each partner's stake in the partnership. Since stock prices fluctuate, deposits credited on different days will result in a different ownership share. We elected to not require specified transaction dates, so transactions are made at any point during the month. Bivio is synced with our brokerage account and identifies transactions. All we have to do is select which partner to credit the deposit and Bivio will calculate how many share units and update the partner's equity account accordingly.

For investment income, Bivio imports it all from our brokerage: dividends, interest, even more complicated income on our foreign stock holdings and tracks it automatically. Stock trades are also imported and capital gains tracked on a long and short term basis.

Tax preparation is as simple as a designated partner answering a couple of questions to generate a .PDF K-9 to be printed and filed for both the partnership and the individual. All of the earnings and losses are appropriately attributed to each partner based on his/her ownership state in the partnership.

Bivio has a powerful reports section that allows you to track your investment performance on a stock-by-stock basis or the IRR of the partnership as a whole. You can also review investment performance on a partner-by-partner basis. You can compare your performance side by side with a variety of benchmark indices to get an idea as to how the partnership is faring. In addition, you can generate income statements and balance sheets.

Administration is simple. You designate which partners are also officers and designate permissions such as handling transactions, tax preparation, updating partners' personal information, and so forth. All other partners have access to view all of the performance reports. You can even grant prospective members a "guest" status to view certain parts of the site to help in their decision making.

As I said, we are an internet-based partnership-we've never had a formal meeting. Bivio provides terrific communication tools to help us all keep in touch. The message board is very basis, but still functional. You can upload documents to share with members. You are also given an email address for individual members and mail lists for all members and officers only. Keeping in touch, even though we are spread out across the nation, is simple.

In conclusion, if you're considering forming an investment partnership, stock club, or whatever you choose to call it, the $99 annual investment with Bivio will simplify all of your communication, record keeping, and tax preparation tasks.