Switching from AVImark to a cloud PIMS
AVImark has run clinics for decades on a server in the back room. Here is what its owner's own documents say about the system and your data, what a managed move looks like day by day, and what changes on the first morning without the server.
Facts checked on the vendors' own pages, September 3, 2026 · written by the Bittsi team · sources at the end
- Your server, backups and Windows updates are handled and you have no appetite for change this year.
- You depend on a local integration or custom report that no cloud system has offered to rebuild.
- Your team is fully trained and turnover is low, so the click cost is invisible to you.
- You want the server, the backups and the after-hours IT calls gone, and the whole clinic in one browser system: records, hospital floor, anesthesia, dental, inventory, payments, messaging and the pet-owner app.
- You want the migration done for you and verified row by row, live in 14 days, with staff trained by role.
- You want to leave the way you came: month to month, your data exported free whenever you ask.
One system. Nothing to integrate.
Everything below is built into Bittsi and priced on one page. Enter it once and it is everywhere it needs to be: the charge posts and inventory moves the moment a treatment is logged. The only integrations are the ones only a lab or a card network can provide: IDEXX, Antech and Bittsi Pay.
Records and charting
Structured SOAP with templates and dictation; vitals and weight trends; vaccines and certificates; prescriptions, refills and labels; consent forms; the invoice drafts itself from the note.
Also: How the visit flows →Hospital floor
A status board with TV mode and shift handoff; live treatment sheets with due times, owners, protocols and fluid alerts; Crash Card dosing by weight with a CPR recorder.
Anesthesia and dental
Vitals charted every five minutes from the monitor with the drug timeline beside them; Triadan dental charts that bill the procedures when completed.
Also: Dental chart →Inventory and purchasing
Batch-level tracking with automatic FIFO, recall trace in about 30 seconds, purchase orders grouped by supplier, cycle counts and COGS per line.
Money
Estimates that convert in one click, Bittsi Pay inside the invoice, next-business-day funding reconciled to invoices, QuickBooks and Xero export.
Clients
Two-way SMS, MMS and email in one thread per patient, reminder cadences that stop on confirmation, and the clinic-branded Companion app.
Also: Companion app →Reporting
Financial, appointment and inventory dashboards that refresh as charges post; shareable links, scheduled PDFs and exports.
AI in the record
Scribe writes the note and the draft invoice from the conversation; Sage briefs every appointment, flags interactions and lab trends, and reconciles close-out.
Also: Sage →What AVImark's own documents say
Not our opinion of the product. What its owner publishes, with the source next to each point.
Who owns it, and where they are going
Covetrus, taken private by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and TPG in October 2022 at about $4 billion of enterprise value. A merger with MWI Animal Health, announced in February 2026, awaits regulatory approval and is not expected to close in Cencora's fiscal 2026. Covetrus's own cloud product, Pulse, launched in 2022 and reported more than 3,000 practices a year later. No end-of-life notice for AVImark has been published and we do not claim one; but a vendor's new investment tells you where its next decade of features will land.[1][2][7]
What you are maintaining
A server in the main hospital that, for multi-location use, "must be on a Windows Server Edition", set up by "a qualified technician, experienced in terminal services". The recommended-settings sheet asks for Microsoft Word 2021, 2019 or 2016 for documents, notes that Office 365 "does have known issues with Avimark" and that "Libre and Open Office no longer works properly", and says not to install Office on the database server.[5][6]
What the data terms say
Covetrus's Data Vault backup terms state that at cancellation the customer's access to data stored by the service may be permanently terminated. Your local database is yours to export; the hosted backup is not something to rely on after you leave.[4]
Why clinics move
The reasons we hear are the same every time: the server, the click count, remote access, and the modern gaps: no documentation AI, no clinical assistant, no built-in payments, no pet-owner app. None of those is a criticism of a system designed in a different decade; it is a description of what a clinic needs now.
Side by side, from the published record
Every AVImark cell carries a source number. “Not published” means the vendor does not say on the pages we checked; ask them, and get it in writing.
| Topic | Bittsi | AVImark |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting and access | ||
| Where it runs | Cloud-native, built for the browser from the first line of code; any device, including phones; no server, no install, no nightly batch | Local server in the practice; cloud access via add-ons[3] |
| Backups and updates | Handled; nothing to schedule or restore locally | Your responsibility, plus a hosted backup product whose access ends at cancellation[4] |
| Documents | Intake and consent forms, note templates and discharge instructions in the browser; post-visit summaries and dental charts filed to the record as PDFs | Microsoft Word 2021, 2019 or 2016 recommended; Office 365 has known issues; Libre and OpenOffice no longer work properly; Document Writer included since 22.10[6] |
| Price and contract | ||
| Published price | Published, from $249 a month: Foundation $249 with one veterinarian included and $99 per additional veterinarian; Standard $379, or $249 with Bittsi Pay as the primary processor, $129 per additional veterinarian. Unlimited staff users on both. The pricing calculator is the bill, not an estimate | Not published; quote-based[3] |
| Term | Month to month; annual billing saves 10% and can be cancelled at renewal | Not published |
| Setup and migration fees | No setup fee. One fixed migration quote before you sign, included with annual billing; a sandbox loaded with your own records before you commit | Not published |
| Support | One named lead from signature through go-live, then a real person who replies, usually within one business day; engineers answer when a question needs one; demos are hosted by a working DVM | Phone line published, 877-838-9273; hours not published on the pages we could reach[6] |
| Your data | ||
| Getting it out | Your data is yours, always: exported free, in standard formats, whenever you ask; no hostage clause, written into the agreement | The local database can be exported; the hosted Data Vault terms end access at cancellation[4] |
| What moves to Bittsi | A named migration lead, one person from signature to go-live: clients, patients, visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances moved, verified row by row against the old system, and you get the report | Clients, patients, visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances are read from the AVImark database and mapped field by field |
| What changes on day one | ||
| Documentation | Sage reads the whole chart: an overnight brief for every appointment, lab trends across panels, medication safety checks, close-out reconciliation of what was documented against what was billed, answers with citations. Scribe writes the SOAP note and the draft invoice from the exam-room conversation. Nothing is sent, billed, prescribed or signed without a clinician | Typed notes |
| Payments | Bittsi Pay inside the invoice: tap, dip, swipe, Apple Pay and Google Pay on the terminal; interchange-plus with the network cost and our margin on separate statement lines; next-business-day funding reconciled to invoices; refunds in-line; QuickBooks and Xero export; PCI-DSS Level 1 processor | Separate terminal and reconciliation |
| Clients | Built in: two-way SMS, MMS and branded email in one thread per patient; reminder cadences at 30, 7 and 1 days and day-of that stop when someone confirms; post-visit summaries and post-op check-ins drafted from the chart; mass campaigns; and the clinic-branded Companion app for pet owners | Reminders by add-on; no app |
| Dental and anesthesia | Treatment sheets, anesthesia sheets and Triadan dental charting built in and included in Standard: completing a dental chart bills the procedures and sets the next dental reminder | Paper or add-on |
Bittsi prices from bittsi.com/pricing. Bold text marks the stronger side of a row where there is one.
What AVImark does well
- The largest self-reported installed base in the last published industry survey, more than 10,000 US practices in 2021, so most staff you hire will already know it.
- A locally installed system keeps working when the internet does not.
- Real multi-location capability through its Site feature, with a bi-directional IDEXX VetLab Station integration at the main hospital.
- Candid technical documentation: the Site guide and the recommended-settings sheet say plainly what the system needs and what it cannot do.
- Document Writer has been included since version 22.10, and a parent with more than 100,000 customers and a cloud successor, Covetrus Pulse.
- Decades of practice history in a format that migration teams, ours included, know how to read.
What a switch actually looks like
The same plan for every clinic that moves to Bittsi, with a date and an owner on each step. It is written into the Switch Guarantee.
- 01Before you sign: one fixed quote and a sandboxWe size the migration from your current system and load a sandbox with your own records. You click around your real patients, not a demo clinic.
- 02Days 1 to 3: exportYour data comes out of the old system while it keeps running. Nothing changes for the front desk.
- 03Days 3 to 8: mapping and importClients, patients, visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances, mapped field by field. Anything that cannot be mapped cleanly is archived read-only and labelled.
- 04Days 8 to 10: verificationEvery record checked against the source, row by row. You get the report.
- 05Days 10 to 13: training by roleShort sessions for the front desk, technicians and doctors on the parts they touch, not an all-day shutdown.
- 06Day 14: go-liveOn a lighter day, with your launch lead on call. The old system stays readable for reference until you retire it.
Questions clinics ask about AVImark and Bittsi
Can all my AVImark history move?
Clients, patients, full visit history, prescriptions, reminders and balances move and are verified row by row against the source. Anything AVImark cannot export cleanly is archived read-only in Bittsi, clearly labelled, so nothing is lost even when it cannot be mapped.
How long does it take?
About 14 days from kickoff to go-live for a typical clinic: export and mapping in the first week, verification and role-based training in the second, then a supported go-live on a lighter day.
Do we keep seeing patients during the switch?
Yes. AVImark stays available for reference until cutover, training runs in short role-based sessions, and the go-live is scheduled around your calendar.
What does the migration cost?
One fixed quote before you sign, based on your database size. It is included with annual billing and always included for founding clinics. There is no hourly billing.
Can we run AVImark and Bittsi side by side for a while?
Yes, and most clinics do for a few weeks. AVImark stays read-only for reference on the old server while Bittsi holds the live record. Nothing new is entered in AVImark after go-live, so there is one source of truth from day one.
What happens to the server?
It becomes a backup you keep for as long as your state's record-retention rule requires, and then a paperweight. Bittsi holds the live record and exports it free whenever you ask.
Sources
Every AVImark statement above points to one of these. If a vendor page changes, tell us and we will change the row: info@bittsi.com.
- [1]Covetrus to be acquired by CD&R and TPG, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, 2022.
- [2]Cencora Form 8-K, exhibit 99.1, Cencora, via SEC EDGAR, 2026.
- [3]Who's who in veterinary practice management software, Today's Veterinary Business, 2021.
- [4]AVImark Data Vault terms and conditions, v7.2019, Covetrus, 2019.
- [5]AVImark Site guide, v2023 rev. 3, Covetrus, 2023.
- [6]AVImark recommended settings 2024, Covetrus, 2024.
- [7]Covetrus celebrates one year of Pulse, Covetrus, via PR Newswire, 2023.
AVImark and the other product names on this page are trademarks of their owners, used only to identify their products. Bittsi is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Vendor facts were read on the vendors' own pages on September 3, 2026 and can change; if you are the vendor and something is out of date, email info@bittsi.com and we will check it and correct the page within two business days.
See your own data in Bittsi before you decide.
One fixed migration quote, a sandbox loaded with your records, and a 30-minute walk through your real patients. No slides.