What is Cloud Computing

November 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Cloud Analyst Ben Kepes along with Saasu’s Cloud Provider, Rackspace, have put together an excellent short video explanation of Cloud Computing.

It is brilliantly simple. It can be difficult for accountants to explain the concept of cloud computing to their clients and conversely for business owners to explain it to their accountant if they aren’t yet cloud savvy. So the video could be used as a good reference video for Accounting Practice websites. Well done Ben.

The analogy is that the Cloud is like a Utility (Side note: the U in Saasu stands for Utility). This is the best simple analogy to make. There are academic nuances around why it’s different but for the purposes of education over semantics we’ll put that aside in this post. Learn about the differences here.

Filed Under: Tech

Mini Release: November 2011

November 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We have completed another update to Saasu. Included are some changes listed below. We were also under the hood working on some highly requested features you have asked for via feedback.saasu.com. You will see these arrive in December and January. Last nights changes include:

Inventory Item History Report
The Inventory Item History Report now has additional information and filters that will help you better understand your margins, average costs and cost of goods numbers. It includes:

  • reporting of average cost
  • reporting of margins
  • gross profit margin for your entire sales
  • the ability to export to spreadsheet/CSV
  • the ability to filter by transaction type

Merchant Fees
Saasu has improved the handling of reconciling against fee items. If you have not nominated an account to record Merchant Fees against, Saasu will prompt you to do so in your bank account setup.

Fast Coding
The new Pending Transactions feature in Bank Feeds we released two weeks ago has been well received. Your Fast Coding screen in Bank Feeds now also displays pending transactions as read-only (greyed out). If Bank Rules are set up and applied to your transactions, Pending Transactions are excluded from this.

Filed Under: Data, Inventory, Release, Saasu News

Pending Transactions

November 9, 2011 By 2 Comments

In this latest release of Saasu we are handling Pending transactions in our Automated Bank Feeds differently. We used to display Pending transactions and let you reconcile them. If the data changed significantly we had a rule built into Saasu to un-reconcile the transaction automatically. This would ensure you re-reconcile the transaction to confirm it is correct.

With hindsight we have found allowing our customers to reconcile Pending transactions to be more problematic than helpful. Accordingly, in our release last week we changed Pending transactions to be Read-only until Yodlee, our bank feed provider, updates them as finalised.

You can elect to view (but not reconcile) Pending transactions as an option on each Bank Feed you use in Saasu. By default this feature is OFF. You can turn this ON by going to View > Bank Account > Click on the Bank Account name to open it in edit mode > Tick the option Include Pending Transactions > Save the screen.

Filed Under: Data, Saasu News

Release: November 2011

November 2, 2011 By 18 Comments

Our Labs team have been working very hard to bring this month’s release to you. It contains major enhancements to Saasu and we are thrilled to be able to share them here.

PayPal Automated Data Feeds
Connect your PayPal business account and transactions will flow straight into Saasu. We’ve also catered for the handling of merchant fees to save you time – Saasu accounts for the fees behind the scenes to an expense account.

Automated Bank Feeds for all Banks Globally
We’ve switched on all banks globally from our feed provider giving you a much broader choice of banks.  We’ve also built in a message to display when attempting to connect to a bank requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA).  We are working on supporting MFA in a future release.

Fee Handling for Automated Bank Feeds
Support for merchant fees in payments to bank accounts is now handled in Saasu.
Saasu Bank Feeds Fee Handling
You can now easily update a transaction directly in the feed to account for a merchant fee and Saasu will account for it behind the scenes to an expense account.

“Pending” Transactions in the Automated Bank Feed
We’ve received plenty of feedback on displaying pending transactions before they have been finalised. In this latest Saasu release the pending transaction behaviour has changed completely.

You can elect to receive pending transactions as an option on the back account (View -> Bank Accounts) but by default this is OFF. Also, due to the highly unstable nature of pending transactions and issues with reconciling against them, they are now displayed in ‘Read-Only’ mode and cannot be edited. They can only be edited once they are confirmed/posted. We have made them read only to ensure the data integrity.

“Quick Start”
We now have an easy 3-step setup for new subscribers.
Quick Start
This is a much more intuitive approach for new users, helping them navigate through the initial setup process for their files.

New Dashboard
The new dashboard allows for easy addition or removal of “dashboard widgets” by dragging and dropping the widgets into place.

This is part of our move towards a more customisable approach to the Saasu application.  For example you can now have a separate cashflow widget for each bank account.

Enhanced Bank Reconciliation Report
The report now supports the “clearance date” field in payments. This allows you to run the bank reconciliation report to generate historical reconciiations.

Update to Bank Feeds Screens
We’ve simplified the design of the inbox to make it more intuitive to use.

Filed Under: Release, Saasu News

PayPal Automated Feeds

November 1, 2011 By 8 Comments

PayPalIn tonight’s update, Saasu will provide automated PayPal data feeds. This has been one of our more popular feature requests this year and we’re thrilled to be able to provide it.

Direct connection to PayPal

We’ve built this as a direct feed. This means Saasu communicates directly with PayPal to get your data twice a day. It’s easy to setup in a few minutes. All you need is a business PayPal account, as personal accounts don’t have API access. PayPal offers free upgrade for Personal to Business accounts.

Fee handling

You can easily account for fees associated with your PayPal transactions. For example: a $97.80 amount received in your PayPal automated feed may relate to a $100.00 original Sale. You can now easily update this transaction to account for the fee by editing $97.80 to be $100.00 in the feed. Saasu will automatically account for the $2.20 PayPal fee.

Multi-currency is supported

The automated feed will also handle most common situations for multi-currency files such as those paying foreign currency amounts for goods or for billing people in foreign currencies and accepting payments via PayPal.

Filed Under: API, Connectors, Release, Saasu News

Outage

October 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

NOTE: We’ve moved this info from our system notices page to our blog. In future we will report via the blog as customers have told us it is easier to get live updates. We agree and we sincerely apologise for the outage and the inconvenience we know it causes you.

28 Oct 2011 02:31 GMT
OUTAGE: Saasu is offline for an unknown reason, we are looking into it.

28 Oct 2011 02:55 GMT
UPDATE: Saasu is online. We will advise as to cause of the issue when available.

28 Oct 2011 03:52 GMT
UPDATE: Saasu is offline. We are experiencing problems with our hosting service. Saasu should be available within the next 20 minutes. Our managed service provider is looking into the issue.

28 Oct 2011 05:50 GMT
UPDATE: Saasu is online. We will advise as to cause of the issue when available.

02 Nov 2011 08:00 GMT
REPORT: Saasu’s managed hosting provider was in the process of provisioning extra infrastructure to allow Saasu to expand and provide greater capacity and redundancy for its customer base. During this provisioning process which is usually totally non intrusive, a hardware/infrastructure failure in the VM infrastructure caused the Saasu server instances to go offline. The instances were restored shortly thereafter however integrity checks were performed for a majority of the downtime to ensure that data integrity was retained for Saasu customers before bringing the system fully online.

Filed Under: Notices

Creating emotional connection to customers

October 24, 2011 By 2 Comments

I was at Web Directions conference in Sydney recently and thought I’d share my notes from the speakers I most enjoyed as a series of blog posts over coming weeks.

Design your business, don’t just plan it.

It’s a design-centric conference however the content is very relevant to most business models and how you design your product and service experience for your customers. At the end of the day if you haven’t designed your business, your business planning may be way off the mark. Planning without design causes misallocation of resources. You may not take into account the personas or archetypes you sell to.

Stephen Anderson

Here’s the first by Stephen Anderson who consults on designing fun into businesses and your customers online experience of it. Stephen’s book is called Seductive Interaction Design. He starts by using the example of a teacher whose customers are an audience of students. A teacher himself previously, Stephen observed that there are 3 Types of Teachers. There are those that:

1. Apply themselves by just doing the minimum job and think it’s all a bit boring – they don’t create anything inspiring to make you learn. [Marc: You could see this as the most basic, passionless level that products or services could be designed to].

2. Sugar coat with cute rewards for work. They might add fun elements such as smiley stamps. It is what designers now call gamification, it can help improve a product’s appeal but you can get it wrong. [Marc: Frequent Flyers are an early example of this].

3. Seek Mastery as the aim to delight, engage, create passion and debate. It requires great teachers to look deeper and find the joy, the meaning. Customers get this from what are called intrinsic motivators. Stephen suggests you use the 5 whys technique to dig out what the joy is.

Intrinsic Motivators

The intrinsic motivators are challenge, curiosity, control, fantasy, competition, cooperation, recognition, self expression, pattern recognition, ownership and set completion

Stephen recommends using the Kano model to work on this. He regards this as the best model to follow. This model calls for de-lighters to be added. Things that bring joy to your customers. He notes that de-lighters do become expectations eventually. It was good to hear this as this is what we use at Saasu thanks to Grant Young who introduced Kano to me originally. Grant’s company Zumio can work through this model with you for your own business, if you are after one the best ROI investments you’ll ever make.

Filed Under: Strategy

Bizlinc to Saasu

October 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Bizlinc is one of our latest add-ons to Saasu. We’re very excited about it as it solves the issue of 360 degree integration between CRM, Sales, Operations and Accounting. By leveraging the functionality of Bizlinc and connecting this to Saasu, businesses can take full advantage of a cloud-based enterprise solution.  The Bizlinc team have also written a Saasu customer success story.

Bizlinc is a “mini ERP” system which  provides functionality that takes sales and marketing prospects right from initial enquiry/contact through the quoting and sales cycle. Quotes are delivered and if won, Bizlinc manages service and product fulfilment, manufacturing and purchasing as well as invoicing and payments.

Bizlinc is built on the Force.com platform – developed by leading CRM provider Salesforce.com giving Bizlinc users access to the platforms built-in social and mobile functionality, automation processes, reporting, activity management and search.

For example by utilising Chatter, Bizlinc connects users to colleagues, suppliers, customers and transactions that relate to their specific areas of focus.

For more detailed information about how this connector interfaces with Saasu, see our help note.

As part of the launch of this add-on Bizlinc are offering an iPad 2 in this special promotion.

Filed Under: Add-ons, Automation, Partners

Quick Timesheets for Saasu

September 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

Quick Timesheets have built an excellent time management app that works nicely with Saasu invoicing. It’s designed for professional consulting and services businesses who need to track time for client billing purposes. It also handles organisational project teams.

The value proposition is that if it’s easier to capture the time as you work then you can recover billable time that was otherwise lost due to the burden of managing spreadsheets or paper. I concur with this, we see lots of new customers arrive at Saasu who are trades people, bookkeepers, service companies and the like that have been under billing because they don’t track their time.

I first met founder Ian Cummings when he built the successful Travellr.com Q&A website. Ian has built successful consulting and application development businesses in the past and he mentioned to me last year that he always wanted an easy to use software tool that quickly captures time across multiple projects. He said he was going to build one. Well he walks the talk, and here it is…
 

Filed Under: Add-ons, Partners, Tech

Release: September 2011

September 14, 2011 By 12 Comments

You may have noticed that we have been a bit quiet on major features. Well we have some big things brewing and the fruits of our effort will be seen in early October. However, last night’s release was about some significant engineering improvements and some highly requested features.

Not Getting Bank Data Fast Enough? Pending Transactions Now Supported
We have been feeling the frustrations that some of you have had due to the delay in getting finalised bank transactions via the Bank Feed. The reason was a number of banks had both a pending and finalised status of each transaction. The bank feed was only accessing the finalised transactions in order to remove the chance of duplicated transactions. We now have a way that will access the pending transactions in the next bank feed refresh and prevent duplications.

Payrun Matching in Bank Feeds Now Supported
If you use Pay Runs in Saasu and you’re not using our Bulk EFT file for processing payments, and instead paying your employees one at a time, you can now match these bank feeds transactions against your Pay Run.

More Banks Added to Bank Statement Importing
The new bank formats now available for bank statement importing include ME Bank (AU), Select Credit Union (AU), Berrima District Credit Union (AU), Southern Cross Building Society (NZ).

Filed Under: Data, Notices, Payroll, Release, Saasu News
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