We were pleased to roll out another release recently with a whole bunch of new features.

The level of positive feedback across all our channels and countries has been excellent, from phone calls, emails, twitter, skype, instant messenger and more.

There have been so many positive comments and it has only been out a few days - have a read below and you will get the idea. Try it and tell your friends!

Sure, there were a few areas that needed a tweak or two, but 90% of reported issues were cosmetic and the vast majority are already fixed and live. This the great thing about SaaS - continuous improvement and community driven quality and ideas. We love it!

Faster. Better. Easier.

That is what we live for - saving you time and helping you do more while simplifying your life. It is being made available to all users immediately. No upgrade hassles, no effort no additional cost. That what I call Good SaaS.

The main areas of improvement are listed below the comments from our fans.

Fans love it

• Congratulations on the new release going live – it looks and feels terrific - Marytn from My CFO
• New version looks great. Huge improvement on the previous one (and that one was pretty good anyway) - Ben from CompSyc
• Love the improved interface, abundance of printing and export options. Accounting that makes sense at last, thank you. I will be migrating several other accounts at the end of the financial year as there is no point in struggling with the obtuse behaviour of MYOB any longer !! - Hew from Coral Sea Superannuation Fund
• Love the new look - Michelle from Lorose
• Overall very good. Think you are doing a great job, well done - Jason from Computer Support Partners (Ryde Franchisee)

The new stuff

• Speed - some of screens in our top 5 have been reduced by 60%
• Look and feel - most screens make better use of real estate and improved readability
• Transact - cleaner, simpler faster transaction screens that work faster and make your keying easier but have more features
• Activities - manage your to dos, meeting minutes, docs and more. Do the same for your team. Show the boss how much you do every day. Rack activities at the project, client, tag and even transaction level (complex quotes are now easy). This was talked about earlier.
• Catch - the quick way of capturing activities in seconds, now you can easily remember those five action items from every phone call.
• Just one click - extended the number of features that are one click away to over 90%
• Reports - better access to loads of reports, lists, views, exporting and more
• Tags - No more inflexible categorisation, use one or a dozen tags across the whole system to file, group, filter, list and more. Probably a world first(?) for online accounting we think.
• Get social - one click access to around 200 million entries in professional and social networks like face book, linked in, my space, bebo, orkut to see info on your prospects, partners and more. This was pre-announced recently
• Get connected - see maps of addresses on Google maps, search from the dashboard using Catch, connect to salesforce.com for advanced CRM, connect to 88miles.net for project timesheetings, connections for more banks, improved security logging, improved security reporting, improved security control for system-to-system connectors.
• Get control - improved role based security to span one or more businesses and subscriptions, franchises and corporate
• Payroll - drop your old payroll provider and get online, email payslips, automated bulk processing and banking

See it scream

See the new features page for more details and screen shots or watch the new quick tour video.

By the way, it looks sensational on the Mac, and screams on Safari and firefox on Mac OSX, Windows XP and Vista. The best thing? This just the beginning

This release is timed to coincide with CeBIT too so make sure you come on down and see the greatest technology and business show in the southern hemisphere. Our stand and a little of our presentation will be featuring the new release.

Internet failures (also known as digital brown out) can happen anywhere. The recent and very topical Bankstown cable break incident is a good reminder to keep your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) up to date. This was a Sydney event affecting 5,000 people ore more but obviously can happen anywhere.

One of our much admired customers, Working Solo’s Leah Maclean* posted on the event and made some good points so we thought it was time we let you know our thoughts on the topic.

What can you do when the Net goes down?

There are a surprisingly large number of ways to deal with the Net being down. It’s interesting how humans quickly find efficient solutions to problems that face them in business. Being a SaaS company, web connectivity is very important. If the net does go down it isn’t totally crippling, it’s just inconvenient because there are lots of options to deal with it these days.

If local wired internet access fails in your business try these steps -

1. Go wireless, most businesses have a USB wireless internet dongle or a WiFi internet account for sales purposes anyway
2. Go to the cafe, most businesses have a cafe nearby that offers their own (or sponsored) WiFi access or an internet cafe as per those used by the backpacker community
3. Go home, most people have cable internet at home now or if not at home then a close family member
4. Go to a partner, most businesses have close trading counter-parties that they deal with who wouldn’t mind you using a desk for a day
5. Go to a serviced office, spend a few dollars and get access at a bureau or a few weeks at a serviced office, they are surprising inexpensive
6. Go to your IT provider and ask them to lend you a desk and a net connection or recommend somewhere

Your fault or theirs? Thank goodness for SaaS

The above list translates to many alternatives as a result of having your data with a high quality SaaS provider because it is usually the subscriber (i.e. you) that has the problem. Sometimes, very rarely it is on the SaaS provider’s end because one of the connections to the NOC (network operations centre/center) fails. This is usually not an issue though because most of the tier one NOC’s have redundant links into them from different directions by different carriers in hardened cable carriers to different Telco’s and then once it gets to the Telco each of them has multi routes to their peer Telco’s too.

A good SaaS provider has meshing resilience. This meshing prevents any single (or multiple even) breaks impacting the total service. We wrote about our amazing strengths in this area recently.

As Transaction Cross Docking (TCD) becomes more common place (because it makes so much sense) this stuff is crucial because it will be global distributed connected communities of millions not just thousands that are impacted.

All this compares well to the old world where you had stuff on your local server and a power or Telco outage to your premises meant no business no email and moving your server the old way - with a forklift!

* Working Solo’s Leah Maclean works with small business to grow their confidence and their success. Leah is a design and technology advisor to clever business women who want to do more and know more in the online world.

The saasu blog is now in the top 0.32% of all blogs on the planet.

Our site is in the top 1.84% by traffic globally.

We have also popped into the first page on Google globally for some search terms.

In return, please accept our humble ‘video link gift’ below in addition to our earlier free CeBIT tickets.

Google strategy insights

It’s definitely worth watching this little gem. A unique bit of insight about how the gurus at Google are thinking on business strategy, product and customers. It came out some time ago but it’s still completely relevant for nearly all business owners today. It’s not just a tech thing.

It’s a video of Seth Godin speaking to a bunch of Google insiders on some strategic topics close to our heart. Seth is one of our favourite bloggers. We have written about his other important work previously.

Thanks again for your support. You are helping us build a truly global product that makes lives better. We can always do better though, so help us by giving feedback on what you want us to do.

CeBIT is THE International Trade Show for Information Technology, Telecommunications, Software and Services. In other words, if you want to geek-out or get a real competitive advantage for your business you will love it.

Last year was good

Last year Saasu won the one and only highly prized ‘excellence in innovation platinum award’ for our flagship product NetAccounts. We were going to insert lots of other blatant boasting and superlatives here but thought that was probably more than you can take already.

This year will be even better

This year there will be something like 750 exhibitors from 20+ countries.

This year we will be speaking at the conference in the Transaction 2.0 section, chairing a session and of course exhibiting.

Best of all, as part of the Saasu foundation work we do, Saasu will be the sole green sponsor for the event, we are making the venue carbon neutral for the event for EVERY EXHIBITOR just so we can say we did our bit. Gold standard of course.

Special Bonus (or two)

As a special bonus you can register free as a friend of Saasu just quote code SAASUCA08 and you will get in free which is a fairly substantial saving off the normal door price of $40.

If you visit us at the show you will receive an extra month on your subscription for new and current customers! We will be asking all our visitors two questions - what do they like most about saasu today and what would they like to see in our coming releases?

You will also be able to see our latest release demonstrated and talk to the experts about your needs, wants, desires and passions in the field of financial management success.

Finding Saasu at CeBIT

So do drop by stand S45, on the main aisle right next to our mates from salesforce.com (in case you have been living in a cave and hadn’t already heard, saasu integrates instantly with salesforce).

We are smack bang in the middle of the main business-software/e-finance/CRM section which takes up most of halls 4 and 5.

Want to know more?

We thought you might so here is a taste of what you will see, watch the videos or read some more
from the CeBIT marketers -

CeBIT Australia 2008 is the largest and most important business-to-business technology event in the region. Join 35,000 business professionals at CeBIT Australia this year to understand, analyse, sample and select the right technology solutions for your business’s future success.

Finding the right solutions has never been easier, CeBIT Australia is organised into 30 show floor categories – ranging from CRM, VoIP, e-Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation, Web Applications to Open Source – making it the number one stop for business professionals seeking the competitive advantage.

* 150 FREE show-floor Seminars
* International Keynote Speakers
* Business Networking
* Interactive Panel Sessions
* 6 High-Level Conferences
* 750+ Solution Providers
* 5000+ Technology Experts
* 30 Show Floor Categories

Visiting CeBIT Australia 2008 will teach you how to make your ICT investment work for you

* Get more out of your website
* Unleash the power 2.0
* Retain your top talent
* Discover online trading
* Slash your communications costs
* See next-gen CRM systems
* Learn about Green IT

And much, much more… most importantly you will arm yourself with knowledge that will give you the power to take your business to next level!

See you @ CeBIT Australia,
20 – 22 May 2008
Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre,
Darling Harbour

Tags are a uniquely Internet centric way of labelling and filing information in multiple ways and multiple places. Tags have been around for many years on sites such as digg and del.icio.us but we think we are the first to bring them to financial management.

Tags can be found in the tag cloud, just one click will mark something (e.g. a customer) with the tag. You can also just type the tag in, if the system doesn’t know about that tag yet it will add it for you automatically and start tracking usage for you. The tag cloud appears on most add/edit screens plus of course on lists as a filter option.

Tags may be applied to any information, such as -

• contacts (e.g. customer, supplier, prospect, partner)
• activities (e.g. Project X, unassigned, critical path,
• transactions (e.g. urgent, delayed, Project X, Portfolio Q)
• employees (e.g. Project X, Skill Y, Location C)
• inventory items (e.g. Hot Seller, Warehouse A)
• investment items (e.g. Defensive, Review Due, Location C)

The power of tags lies in a the way they can be combined in infinite ways, e.g. how much did we spend on urgent expenses for project x last month? Include this tag, exclude those tags. You can start to see how powerful they are.

Key Benefits are -

• Tags can go on anything (for now we have enabled ten of our most popular add/edit screens, more to come)
• You can track how many things have that tag on them (in the tag list on the bottom of the main menu)
• Tags are super flexible, they can be combined in an unlimited number of ways
• Tags cross over everything, e.g. for a project you can tag Customers, Suppliers, Resources (Staff), Activities, expenses, income and more)

Here are some guidelines on the ways we think you should use tags -

• Keep them short, one or two words are best. Too many tags means the tag cloud can clutter up your screen (it automatically adjusts to prevent this but hey then you have to go digging in ‘more tags’)
• Use them for the important stuff, the 20% of projects that make the most difference to you, too many tags means more clutter and you are not focussing on the big picture
• Just because they are easy to add doesn’t mean you should, focus on the big initiatives that are important to you
• Ask yourself, are tags the best way to track this? In some cases they are good for problems that don’t have more structured procedures or solutions yet. For example tags work well for job tracking but is that the best way for your business in the long term? What will your data look like after you have months of jobs in there? Perhaps just track open work?
• Use tags for living data, i.e. stuff that is ‘in play’ and active such as orders due to ship or projects/jobs currently being worked on. You can also use tags for lots of other things such as traditional reporting but that is not their main benefit.
• Stay ahead of tag use in your team, agreed tag naming standards and stick to them, if you have a meeting agreeing to start a new project, setup the tag immediately and flag it as ‘popular’ so it always appears on the tag cloud that ensures it gets used, similarly if you decide to phase something out make it ‘inactive’ so it no longer appears in the tag cloud for Saasu users in your team.

Tags are available in our new release due soon, so try the preview or read more about tags.

In the contact screen you will see new icons you can click to check out your contact in various social networks covering over 200 million people already.

I’ll concentrate on LinkedIn today since it is the most professional centric network. Professional and Social Networking really is a far too simplistic simplistic way of describing LinkedIn.

Here are some observations we’ve made in recent times. We would love comment on these points as we believe this has ramifications for product development in Saasu applications. A lot of them relate to the fact your research can be anonymous but connections are permissioned.

If you need to know more about permission, start with Seth Godin because he wrote about it early and well. Permission marketing is changing the world.

Keep track of people you know and like

The simple and best reason to use LinkedIn. You know where people are as they move from one job or city to another. It can be everything from an online business intelligence assistant to an international (or local) research tool to an online CV/resume or yet another contact database. Best of all is it doesn’t stop there, you see who knows who.

Research accelerates the ‘getting to know you’ process for new contacts

LinkedIn closes the knowledge gap you have about candidates, employees, prospects, partners, suppliers and customers. This enhances the legitimacy of the contact. It accelerates you along the getting to know you curve. It can help move you a bit further ahead at your first face to face meeting because you already know more things you have in common, locations, employers, clubs, education, sport and more.

Get personal by de-institutionalising contacts

For a long time companies have not wanted to share ownership of customer and prospect relationships with their employees. These relationships have been owned by the company. LinkedIn allows employees (especially professionals with an eye to having their own business eventually) to de-institutionalise their contacts, taking back some of the dollar value from their employees balance sheet back to their own. A two edged sword of course. Transparency is the biggest winner.

Stay fresh reduce your contact half life

Keeping loose contact fresh is quite difficult. When systematised in a social network the expectation of freshness of permission is enhanced. When you hear from someone through LinkedIn your little shoulder devil says “this person is ok, because you permissioned them”. That same communication via phone would sometimes have the shoulder devil saying “Who is this person? How did they get my number?”. Permissioning extends credibility of contact.

Degree’s of separation permissioning

Linked in creates a new type of commercial relationship legitimacy. Invited recipients will tend to accept being network beneficiaries themselves. The established connection has value, an unrealised dollar value. It costs us anywhere from $0.10 to $100 to get a permissioned contact in most businesses so connections in social tools are real permissioned assets. Let’s be honest about this, it’s just good business. Participants in the LinkedIn community can monetise their connections via sales and marketing activities. This is the conversion of unrealised value into realised value because a certain percentage of those interactions result in sale and thus revenue. You are converting your virtual inventory of permissioned contacts into your revenue line. The beauty being that virtual inventory can be resold to, it doesn’t require a cost of goods sold entry to re-aquire another permissioned contact. Don’t think of it just as product sales. It could be a better career, some venture capital, a new partner, and of course selling your product.

Channel Degradation - BACN

If you plan to use LinkedIn for sales bear in mind that there is a direct relationship between frequency and value of the permissioned contact set you have. Your behaviour could become known as a commercial version of spam called BACN. Equally, as more participants use the medium for sales and marketing activities the value of the connections will diminish. You only have to look at the C2C social networks to see how this can happen. Permissioned spammers (BACN) looking for love from your wallet wears thin real quick.

New ways of looking at non-so-new information

Check out the company profile pages on any major company on LinkedIn. You can see who is who and any changes. Recently LinkedIn moved to formalise companies and organisations in their network for the benefit of data rigour, their members and themselves. It was a good move, it cleans up the problem where many users add they workplace to their profile resulting in 100’s of version of that work place where picking it from a list would be better. In short companies and organisations are now centrally managed. A great benefit of this is that the tracking of organisations over their lifecycle will be very accurate versus some of the rubbish you get from old style directory providers Yellowpages and Whitepages.

The link above is kindly provided by Cebit, we are presenting soon at Cebit 2008 and we won the coveted platinum excellence in innovation award there last year.

We commented recently and accurately in this blog on the earth shattering impact of the iPhone web access demonstrated with hard numbers, so this endorsement by Gartner is no surprise to the team here at saasu but it is a huge green light for businesses all around the world, not just the big end of town.

This is another reason saasu made the right decision getting the current release of saasu working on the apple itouch (ipod that looks like iphone but without the phone). See the saasu netaccounts on iphone demo video a happy saasu customer made even before we announced it.

It is also why the new release of saasu includes integration with google maps and hundreds of millions of people’s profiles on the big Professional and Social Networking (PSN) sites. More on that tomorrow.

The whole world is getting more saas-y, not just the big end of town. Now you can run your multi country business on your iphone with the SaaS Ecosystem including Saasu.

For an industry segment that used to be geek central, most of our new sales are now from non-tech firms and non-tech people in those firms.

On a lighter note we now also have a potential theme movie for the Saas industry - Saas Girl or similar in name at least - is about to be released, watch the saasy girl trailer.

We are also working on a marketing idea for saas girl and saas guy but more on that later, anticipation is half the fun.

In 35 years of Accounting I have never come across a programme that is so simple yet comprehensive… I started with one client using Saasu.com Netaccounts and now have 25 clients having their paper work prepared every month… I have also put into place a system which will be starting this month with the potential to do many hundreds more clients. I have no hesitation in recommending Saasu.com Netaccounts and it is the ONLY programme that I use for book keeping.

Owner, Regional Bookkeeping Business
Mar 08

You can understand why we were so pleased. The full letter is below with explanatory notes for our international customers our comments are in [brackets].

18 Mar 2008

Dear Marc,

I am taking this opportunity to do a testimonial for your company and your staff and I apologise for the delay but I have been so busy with all the new business that I have been getting.

Firstly let me say that in 35 years of Accounting I have never come across a programme that is so simple yet comprehensive as Saasu Netaccounts.

I have been practising as an Accountant for over 30 years and have completed in excess of 50,000 returns from Individual to Company returns in that time.

Several years ago I decided to concentrate on Book Keeping work as I had more and more clients present who were in a mess and many who could have failed in their business because of outstanding Tax Returns.

I accidentally found your programme on the net whilst searching for a pure book keeping system as opposed to the “one fits all businesses” as most businesses tended to buy.

I found many businesses with a computer being used by their teenager with the accounting package still in its shrink wrap package up to 4 years after being purchased.

One business had never lodged a BAS [Australian sales tax return is called a Business Activity Statement] and only contacted me on recommendation from a friend after the ATO [Australian Tax Office] issued a “lodge or else” type notice with very little time to comply.

Saasu.com Netaccounts enables me to get the shoebox or semi-trailer of papers and enter them into a situation where the BAS can be prepared accurately and the figures then given to the Accountant for the other Accounting work including the BAS to be completed.

I started with one client using Saasu.com Netaccounts and now have 25 clients having their paper work prepared every month.

I have also put into place a system which will be starting this month with the potential to do many hundreds more clients.

This would have been impossible using any other system.

The support staff and Marc Lehmann in particular have always been available to help and have also been prepared to change things in the system if suggested and worthwhile.

I have some clients who just require the basic book keeping to get information to their accountant for Tax Returns through to those that need information for Payroll preparation and other reports for their financiers and banks.

Some of my clients are very basic skilled on computers but the ease of access makes record keeping simple for them and access to reports also very easy.

I have clients in Wollongong, Sydney and Newcastle and have no trouble communicating with them how to retrieve reports or information.

I very rarely have to see my clients face to face which means much less travelling and no lost work time for them.

I have no hesitation in recommending Saasu.com Netaccounts and it is the ONLY programme that I use for book keeping.

Yours sincerely

Tony Cunningham,
Nationwide Bookkeeping

If you are in business that uses serious amounts of tech on a day to day basis then Barcamp Sydney is a great way to learn from (and even contribute back into) the IT industry.

Barcamp Sydney is a free event for you thanks to the event sponsors. The idea is that you can present for 15 minutes on a relevant topic and also listen to the dozens of presenters over two days. There are some really interesting topics lined up on social media, social capital, web services, coding, community and entrepreneurship. This is just a sample that will occur across 3 or 4 presentation rooms. Pick and choose your interests. I will be there as a presenter on the topic of Productivity 2.0 in business.

Saasu is also a sponsor of the carbon offsets required to make it a sustainable event via our Saasu Foundation

Date: 5th and 6th April 2008
Time: 9:00 am - 5:30pm
Venue: Roundhouse at UNSW on Anzac Pde, Kensington, Sydney.

About Barcamp | Sign up for Barcamp Sydney 3

Saasu Activities - An IDEAS Framework

In the new release of Saasu (see preview) we have Activities. Activities are all kinds of things; Meetings, Notes, Milestones etc. One Activity types is an Idea. We included this feature for our own use and because we felt other business probably have the same problems as we have in dealing with lots of ideas for improvement, change, new markets and the like.

This feature can help your organisation capture ideas from your employees and advisors who have access to your file. Once your management structure has reviewed the Idea convert it into another Activity type called a Procedure. Your could print or publish your procedures and you have your procedures manual. You can build up your set of business procedures organically over time rather than dedicating fixed resources. Create rigour in your business execution, create some control in the change process. Simply being a little more systematic and could save complexity being added to your business through Ideas which aren’t approved or tested before being actioned.

An Idea in Saasu could be a single sentence or an entire proposal. The key is that you all have access to it in a controlled environment. Someone owns the idea in Saasu and it can be added to todo lists. have date deadlines applied and more.

Saasu IDEAS framework

There are many ways you could use the tool we are providing but here’s one example where we have created.

An idea has a life-cycle just like sales, business models, markets and products -

1. IDEA - it starts as just that ‘an idea’, your thinking around opportunities, efficient process, intellectual property and the like.
2. DOCUMENT - get the idea down. A brief version or the detail as a brief, white papers, business plan or whatever you feel is appropriate for your documentation phase.
3. EVALUATE - all ideas need scrutiny, if you never put them up for scrutiny they don’t exist (except in your head). Allocate your Idea to a new Owner who will make the call or review it for discussion.
4. APPLY - all ideas that pass the tests of evaluation need to be applied to real life situations that they were thought up for. Convert the Activity type from an Idea to a Procedure in Saasu
5. SYSTEMATIC - Ideas can be re-worked moving back and fourth through the cycle.

The evaluation step is key. Ensure the right person is controlling what passes, what goes back on the shelf and what’s removed. This person should have a keep it simple mentality. They should be wise and knowledgeable enough to evaluate the ramifications and the advantages of applying ideas to the business. It could be a committee, a board of directors or a CEO. You will need to work this out for your specific industry and organisational structure.

Engineer your business better by going back and documenting existing processes and put them through Saasu IDEA. Removing any deadwood you find and improving existing ideas to create efficiency and advantages.

In summary, start filtering your ideas with the rigour of a framework and ensure the right ideas are added to your business.