U.S. Update News May 2001
Unless you have made arrangements to purchase your diskettes, please return your “April disks” ONLY AFTER you have successfully installed the May 2001 Update. May disks are your backup in case you should have problems installing the April edition.
1. Internet Monthly Updates
Switch over to obtaining monthly updates by Internet. Not only will you eliminate the expense and hassle of returning disks, you will save $50 per year in subscription fees.
Before you switch to updates by Internet we require that you complete a special addendum to the license agreement called the “Internet Update Endorsement”. Once you have returned that to us we will send you the “Internet Master Disk”. You will need that to be able to process the “MONTHLY.CMP” file that you will be downloading each month.
If you want to switch over to Internet monthly updates, please call our office at (800) 798-3488. Our staff will send you the Internet Update Endorsement. Please read it, particularly the part which has you agreeing that you have successfully downloaded and processed our “mid- month updates”. If you haven’t done that before, you can call the office and we’ll be happy to talk you through the procedure.
2. Disk Purchase Program
The other way to avoid returning the disks and the disk box each month is to pre-purchase them for $21 per year ($1.75 per month). If you do you can keep them for future reference, throw them away or return them for a credit (once each year) when you are invoiced for the next year. The $21 costs you less than mailing back disks each month.
Now that our monthly updates though the Internet are working quite well, we prefer that our subscribers use that method of obtaining updates. Once again, prices for Internet subscriptions are not changing and we do not expect them to change in the near future. The new prices will be as follows:
| Agency Use | Updates by Disk | Updates by Internet |
| One Year Subscription | $379 ($349 prior to 2002) | $299 |
| Two Year Subscription | $659 ($599 prior to 2002) | $499 |
| Personal Use | Updates by Disk | Updates by Internet |
| One Year Subscription | $279 ($249 prior to 2002) | $199 |
| Two Year Subscription | $459 ($399 prior to 2002) | $299 |
| Compulife Lite ** | Updates by Disk | Updates by Internet |
| One Year Subscription | $139 (was $99) | $99 |
** NOTE re: Lite subscriptions
Sometime this summer Lite monthly updates will be made available through the Internet. Once Compulife makes Lite updates available through the Internet, the price for Lite updates by disk will increase to the above mentioned $139 per year. The $40 additional fee, versus the $90 additional fee for the regular and personal use system, reflects the fact that Lite software is shipped by regular mail as opposed to Priority Post.
Once Compulife’s Lite subscriptions are available through the Internet, the above prices for Lite will take immediate affect. Those with a current Lite subscription will continue to receive disks at the old prices. There will be no change in service or price until the Lite subscription renews.
Having said that, we suggest you act now, before the deadline as it is our experience that most people forget there is a deadline and then want Compulife to extend it. In this case, that will not be done.
Here is an example of the top-up opportunity:
If your personal use subscription is paid to May 31, 2002, and you act now you can add one more year for $249 or two more years for $399. If you didn’t act by December 15th then you will receive your normal invoice in April 2002 for the new price of $279. You could elect at that time to pay a total of two years for $459.
If you receive that new invoice, at the higher price, don’t forget that you can still elect at that time to switch over to Internet monthly updates and save $80 per year. The price for a personal use Internet subscription remains only $199.
1. Customized Lites For Internet – You Can Add Windows software
Those buying Lite for their brokers, and planning to deliver it to their brokers by Internet have Compulife’s permission to add the Windows software at NO ADDITIONAL charge.
To accomplish this you take the GOWIN.EXE file from your main \COMPLIFE folder, add it to the Lite folder that contains your brokers’ copy of lite, then use “WINZIP” or another popular compression program to compress the whole package for shipment to those brokers sub-licensed to use the Compulife Lite system.
2. Compulife’s Internet Engine includes 20 Lites
Those subscribers who purchase Compulife’s Internet comparison engine are offered with 20 copies of Compulife Lite at no additional charge. The initial price of the engine is $1,995 plus $1,495 per year. Compare that to $89 times 20, which is $1,780, and there is a second way to look at this attractive deal. If you purchase 20 Lites from Compulife, you might as well buy the Internet engine because it will save you money after the first year.
3. Customized web comparison pages for your brokers – NO CHARGE
If you have purchased the Compulife Internet engine, and your broker is purchasing a copy of Compulife, either directly or through you, you can provide you broker with access to the Compulife internet engine for NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. What this means is that your broker can have a customized web page for his clients and prospects, which permits him to assert his own identity and provide his own personalized on-line comparison service.
Compulife has recently enhanced the Internet comparison engine to permit multiple USERS to be maintained on a single web site. This means that each Internet user relies upon the same rate data files that you update yourself. In other words, when you update your copy of the Internet program, you are updating all your brokers version at the very same time. Even so, each of your own brokers will have their own customized lists of companies and products, while all sharing the same common rate tables. Maximum flexibility with minimum service work required.
April was a very heavy month for product changes and a number of subscribers called to complain that we did not have new Banner or First-Penn Life rates. The fact was they were already available at our mid-month website. The number of calls confirms that too few of our subscribers are aware of this valuable service which is provided at no charge.
We therefore again underline the importance of using the mid-month update service. Companies are changing rates faster and faster all the time and so monthly updates are increasingly becoming stale shortly after they are issued.
Regardless of how you are obtaining your monthly updates, you need to carefully monitor our mid-month update service at www.compulife.com. This is a free service.
We recommend that you check in at least once a week to see if there have been important changes. Each change made to the database during the month is itemized, documented and dated in the Mid-month update news.
April was a heavy month for rate changes in both the U.S. and Canada and so we did not complete converting the entire U.S. database as hoped. We will continue that work during May and we are hoping for a June 1st completion. Once again, as companies/products have been completed, they are being introduced into the database and updated at the mid-month update site.
The new Windows version was completed just before the monthly update and we have not had adequate time to fully test it. We did make it available at our mid-month update site on April 20th, and the new version will be made available at the first mid-month update for May. You can get it there. When it is more fully tested, we will put it into general release for June.
The reason for the delay was that our programmers found it easier to combine the company category changes together with the work being done on the new combined category feature. We expect the combined category feature to be introduced into the Windows software before the DOS software.
Non-Smoker
Preferred Smoker
Smoker
The upcoming change that we are working on will greatly simplify the whole business. Instead of our system displaying all of those different product entries for the same product, we will only display one. The system will determine that the additional product entries are part of the same product group or “product family”. The additional listing will be hidden except to the program.
When you enter your client information and press F2 to display the product, the system will automatically search for the lowest rate that meets your client entry information for that product family. If the client has been entered as Preferred Plus Non-Smoker, then the very best Preferred Plus non-smoker will be displayed.
If the company has more than one Preferred Plus category, the only way to display the second, more expensive Preferred Plus product will be to press the letter R which is the option for Rate Category.
In the previous versions of the DOS program the “R” key switched between preferred and regular rates. The function has been expanded to display a list of all available categories in that product entry, and that list now displays the company category description.
Further, in the newest Windows program we have also added a “Rate Category” button in the header. We suspect that most subscribers didn’t even know a rate category option existed (it’s listed in the “Options” selection at the top). The new button makes it a little harder to miss.
Once again, the GOWIN.EXE Windows program provided with the May monthly update does not have these features. You can obtain those features by going to our www.compulife.com website, and use the mid-month update service.
For those doing monthly updates by Internet, we have a third website standing at ready with the monthly updates ready. If you cannot obtain your monthly update from either compulife.com or compulife.cc, call our office at (800) 567-8376 and we’ll tell you where the third site is.
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