About Saasu

Table of Contents

  1. Who
  2. What
  3. Our People
  4. Community
  5. Philanthropy
  6. History
  7. What is SaaS?

Who

Saasu online accounting software company with over 10,000 customers from around the world. With millions of transactions each year worth billions of dollars we are a market leader in the Asia Pacific Software as a Service accounting industry. Saas stands for Software-as-a-Service and u is for utility.

What

Saasu is a comprehensive online accounting software system for managing business financials. Saasu has capabilities in sales, purchasing, inventory, payroll, e-commerce, CRM, point of sale, document and workflow management. Saasu’s strong online accounting API enables connection to hundreds of web applications, software products, payment services and banks. Saasu supports many countries and tax zones all from your web browser as either a free or paid subscription.

We have the infrastructure and all the software and services. You pay a small fee to have access to it. We have been one of the leaders in SaaS online accounting for 10 years.

Saasu makes sophisticated online accounting software that’s easy and rewarding.

Our Saasu Mantra is to save advisors and businesses time. Our vision is to make managing financials (and related business information) a rewarding experience for our customers. We think about simplifying through design all day every day.

Our People

Community

When you choose Saasu you become part of and have access to not just products but an entire ecosystem of services, knowledge, skills and resources. The best way to stay in touch is to sign up for our Ideas and our Product blog feeds. Perhaps read about or even register for the specific communities that interest you -

Philanthropy

Saasu doesn’t have a foundation. Our thinking in the philanthropic area is that the world doesn’t need another foundation it’s needs less charity admin and more direct assistance to fewer charities. We are interested in (a) protecting and improving the earth (b) reducing inequality and (c) improving quality of life.

We like the idea of helping people to help themselves. We also like the idea of maximising the results of our contributions where the money is used more than just once. This also means letting charities doing the work and us concentrating on making money to help that. For now the most web visible contributions we are making can be seen on our page on kiva.org which is a great service anyone can donate to that helps residents of developing countries borrow money to start a business. The loan is usually completely repaid(!) and kiva.org then recycles it to someone else in need.

We love the work Kiva.org is doing and encourage our clients, partners and friends to support them.

History

Early concepts were developed in 1998-99 for a ‘purely online accounting software system’ and a company formally incorporated in 2000 by Marc Lehmann (ex Bankers Trust and Deutsche Bank) and Grant Young (Telstra, WWF, eMedia). Jusa Chin joined Saasu in January 2003 and in 2004 became our Head Developer. We had a name change from NETaccounts to Saasu.com in 2007. In mid 2007 Peter J Cooper joined as an investor and was appointed CEO for a year. On 1 July 2008 Marc Lehmann resumed as CEO. In both 2007 and 2008 Saasu was awarded Excellence in Innovation and Business Awards from CeBIT.

What is SaaS?

SaaS is the hosting of software applications and accessed using the internet via your web browser.
It is a shared (multi-tenant) service to many users in much the same way that electricity is sold. The computer software is usually developed by and the infrastructure managed by the service provider (which is Saasu in this case).

SaaS offerings can be accessed from any PC, Mac or Linux machine connected to the internet using a web browser. In effect you are accessing the software we developed on our servers (by using your web browser) instead of installing software on your PC. This allows us to buy much more expensive and powerful technology and recover our investment over time in very small payments from many users. You get a lot more value for your subscription without the upfront investment (because we have already made that investment on your behalf).

There is also a comprehensive explanation of SaaS on Wikipedia.

Here’s some compelling arguments for choosing a “SaaS” utility over old style “Software”:

  • Secure – your data is managed in highly secure data centres versus old style accounting software which tends to be on a laptop, desktop or office server.
  • Ease of deployment – Software installation isn’t required.
  • Lower cost deployment – Usually no capital outlay.
  • Access – Anywhere, anytime, multi-browser and multi-user capability. Mac, PC or Linux friendly.
  • Flexible licensing – User pays model of a small monthly fee, no large up front costs.
  • It’s fast, run reports in seconds
  • Concurrent access to a single database globally
  • Support costs are usually lower due to technical issues with software install and upgrade not needing to be covered by the software provider.
  • No version clashing. Old vs newer versions of the same software.
  • No sync or copy problems. Everyone is working on the same data, there is not risk of old or wrong versions of files being used and no need for copying them around.
  • Licenses issued can be used on an computer, not locked to one PC.
  • No network required for multi-user.
  • Auto-backups daily.
  • Auto-upgrades each release. Better application life-cycle management.
  • Because an application is ‘live’ it can do a lot more automated tasks than software can. When your PC is off your software can’t do much for you.
  • No need to email files home to work on them. Everything is available in your browser