What struck me most was the range of accounting professionals and the roles they undertake.  The profession is so diverse – there were financial controllers for large corporates/government/education, partners and associates from accounting practices, students of accounting and business information systems and entrepreneurs with an accounting background building their own startups and interested in the opportunity cloud computing presents.

After some brief presentations from online accounting solutions providers we undertook a panel discussion and took questions from the audience.  Here’s a view from the panel:

The audience asked great questions, including:

What degree of customisation is available in your software?

The ability to use custom fields exists in some screens to track specific information.   Invoice templates can be fully customised to suit your own businesses’ look and feel.  The Webservices API provides the most customisation by allowing other software and web applications to interact with Saasu just as humans by creating, deleting, reading and updating transactions.

What is it like for clients of an accounting firm to make the transition to cloud accounting?

It was great to meet in person Saasu Gold Partner Colin Chandler from Mulraneys who responded to this question. Colin talked about the “paradigm shift” change in the way that accountants manage their client’s business using cloud accounting. Colin found that he hasn’t had to convince his clients to make the transition: once they see the benefits of ubiquitous access, collaboration and the move toward a more value-added relationship with their accountant, they were happy to make the change and experienced the benefits immediately.

Can you restrict access to users?

User Roles in Saasu allow you to control exactly what you want your employees, bookkeepers, advisors or clients to see in your accounting file.

Can I access my data after I leave the service?

If you need to leave Saasu we offer export formats for your data. Saasu then archives your data for 7 years. If you decide to come back to Saasu we require a minimum payment of 3 months subscription value to re-activate your file.

Overall a great event and the accounting industry are very enthusiastic about the opportunities of cloud computing.

What my Mum taught me – Robyn Lehmann used to say to me as a youngster, “Marc, just make sure you give great service, make sure they are happy and don’t worry, you’ll be wealthy in more ways than just money.”

I saw my mum turn simple businesses into amazing ones so obviously I took that advice on board after seeing it in practice. I also took on her example as an approach we call Service as a Sales Channel. It’s not really an expense, she knew this way before all the MBA’s in the worlds top universities figured this out.

A business that just designs itself for it’s own sake at the expense of customers will suffer the loss of Service as a Sales channel. A good example is how many technology companies these days don’t have a phone support offering. The catch is that when you “don’t give the love”, as we call it, you will have to “give the cash” to the advertising companies. This will mean charging your clients more for the product.

Seduction in Lieu of Service – So what’s the point of this? You’ll have to start marketing and schmoozing at levels that justify the price differences and missing personal service. A form of seduction in lieu service. Saasu is different. We are clearly in an alternate service and value category.

The Future of Accounting – To begin with it can’t just be about “Practices”. It involves business owners. They are the client, the reason for the existence of the accounting industry. As an accountant you service and bill them as efficiently as possible; you want to give them upfront or pay as you go pricing certainty if you can. You want to communicate with them before they call you. You want to be party to the business owner’s success. So this means there is always a balancing act around practice efficiency, the number of technologies you support and the businesses systems efficiency. Complacently falling for incumbency or beauty is often lethal for your client business owners productivity.

An efficient practice outcome for managing a business client can cause an inefficient outcome for the business owner. Conversely a business run exactly how the business owner wants it run may not suit your practice’s business model. You may have to deal with systems you don’t understand or support.

Getting real. Future Practices – Future Practices would look at the net efficiency/cost gains of both stakeholders. They would recommend a system to their client based on the total outcome for the client and themselves. The real situation is that both business and practice have internal efficiencies. A system may serve the practice well but serve the business owner poorly.

We see these decisions made every day. A practice is aligned to a certain software vendor, their processes are best optimsed to that software vendor. This is natural: you iteratively move toward best practice for your firm within the constraints of the systems you adopt and support. Clients are then channeled into that system.

The Problem – There is a major catch with this model. The “single vendor practice” I call them. The regard for client business efficiency is missing. Future firms will have a technology adoption curve that balances the number of systems they support with the efficiency of their firm and their client’s business. They are unlikely to evangelise a single product at the expense of business owners. They are likely to support three or four solutions. A toolbox with one tool will never trump one with many.

An example – We recently had a client who had been put onto a competitor product. This client approached us upset by the situation. His accounting firm was an evangelist for a particular platform and wasn’t prepared to provide our solution. The client wasn’t having their needs met by the accountant’s preferred system to the point where he was prepared to leave the accountant.

What went wrong – In this case it was easy to see. The accountant was completely focused on the practice. Possibly they were prepared to filter this client off their list. Possibly they felt that they would have to charge the client more for using a non-standardised approach to doing the tax remittances and returns. Many factors could be at play but the reality is that they didn’t want to deal with the client wanting to use Saasu.

What could have happened – The accountant could have engaged the client in a manner that was centric to the client need. Why did the client feel Saasu was so important to them? Was it workflow reasons? Was it more than an accounting system to them?

Beyond Accounting is Process – The business owners life is a process driven one. The reality in this situation, and many I see like it, is that process and workflow is now a major part of accounting system requirements. The business owners life is a mixture of manual and automated workflow processes. The world has changed, it’s multi-channel, multi-system, procedural, and services have been commoditised into their components.

What I find separates out great accountants is their ability to see a businesses accounting system as a business workflow system. They see through their clients eyes that the systems they need and use serve workflow, converting manual into automated workflow. It’s not just about tax and reporting. These things are important, but are only one part of the picture. Time is sunk in workflow, it is the constraint, the operational glass ceiling on business growth.

Operational glass ceiling – At Saasu we refer to the workflow and processing burden as an operational glass ceiling. Good accounting systems are designed to solve issues in this area just as much, if not more so, than the requirements of the accounting practice. This creates an interesting opportunity for companies like Saasu.

We are business centric but are now becoming more accountant centric. We have built features that helps with some workflow nasties. Our recent automated fee handling upgrade for PayPal is an example. Workflow and automation tools in a business can be the be the causal element behind rapid business growth. 100′s and often 1000′s of hours in workload can be saved over a year whilst it may only impact an accounting practice’s efficiency by minutes or hours at year end.

Order of magnitude – I think the scale here is what get’s missed. If we get real about this a business owner can often save entire salaries by adopting systems that attempt to achieve what Saasuians call “Automation Maximisation”. I’ve seen businesses adopt Saasu and reduce admin and operational functions by several full time hires. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now their accountant’s bill may increase if they aren’t a supporter or familiar with Saasu. It will have the converse effect if the accounting firm is Saasu savvy. In either case though the order of magnitude results in the business owner being much happier with their accounting firm for the big dollars saved. The accountant’s bill becomes a semantic issue with such value add behind it instead of a highlighted payable. I believe when accountants achieve this goal for their client the gods of karma, the gods of good luck, will repay in kind.

Don’t underestimate it, business owner word of mouth is pervasive. It’s why we have managed to stay ahead of much better funded competitors without spending anything on advertising. Thousands of new clients from “word of mouth” and “word of web”. p.s. we charge less for Saasu because we aren’t spending the big dollars on advertising.

Automation Maximisation – We have another saying at Saasu. You are what you haven’t automated. We talk about it all the time. What task or feature will next best remove that operational glass ceiling. It makes life hard because we get feature requests for things that won’t remove much at all, but the requester thinks is really important. So we do struggle with this.

As an example we auto-email statements really well. It’s caused receivables ageing to improve for our customers. Now we are working on a new Statement format, a “Statement of outstanding invoices”. We are also working on bulk printing statements. These are the two next biggest time savers in this area of Saasu.

Win-win There are practice systems coming onto the market that also manage your tax returns, can manage your practice website and run your firm. Acclipse iFirm is one such solution. Mike Chisholm the CEO of Acclipse is a believer in supporting multiple platforms. I agree with his view and it’s one of the main reasons we enjoy each others partnership in business. Conveniently Mike is embedding Saasu and Banklink inside his iFirm platform.

So the slam dunk is that you can have systems that work really well for clients but also create efficiency for your practice. The business owner and the accounting firm both win.

I love a TV show called the Good Wife. It’s a story about a lawyer who always tries to do the right thing. I am an open type of person as some of you know so I do refer to these client loving accountants who put their business owners first, The Good Accountants. If you are one come join us!

Good Accountants – All the good accountants I know are driven to put the best solutions and products into their clients. This will create profitable results for the business owner and help you keep the client long term. I don’t believe a firm is a sustainable business model that expenses practice efficiency to the business owner’s account. They pick a portfolio of technologies they will support and this creates a win-win situation. They do this because they believe in the solution they have designed for their client and not because they feel the need to pander to any particular software company. It’s your business, don’t be owned by anyone.

It’s your business – Design your business or practice the way you want it. Ignore all the fear, uncertainty and deception software companies lay on each other. Adopt the platforms and technologies you like based on good due diligence. Accountants should take the time to be business owner centric in thinking about and recommending systems to businesses. If that system is not Saasu then that’s ok, I don’t want a poor result for the business owner. I want them to win at life. If Saasu isn’t in that picture that’s ok. We’ll win the race because we believe that by servicing your clients interests we will be repaid by you for upholding those ideals.

Weighing in at almost half the cost of its nearest competitor, the $16.50 per month ‘Accountants Edition’ version provides access from anywhere in the world to Saasu’s powerful automation tools, extensive reports, and contact management system.

Along with access to these core functions, included in the monthly package are 50 accounts receivable invoices, 50 accounts payable invoices, and 200 reconciled bank statement lines.

In comparison, Xero’s Small pricing plan ($29 a month) offers only 5 Accounts Receivable, 5 Accounts Payable, and 20 reconciled statement lines each month. This price is even more than the Saasu Pro plan ($25 a month) which includes unlimited invoicing and bank reconciliation, as well as a fully integrated inventory and payroll system.

Marc Lehmann, founder and Chief Executive of Saasu, says “We’ve always promoted Saasu as an affordable, scalable system for any business type, and this new release means just that for smaller organisations and sole traders.”

“To limit activity to 5 invoices a month is restricting for some businesses, and to charge as much as Saasu charges for its full-featured product for this limited service is extortion. Saasu is focussed on providing affordable time-saving solutions for businesses and their advisors, and now we’re making a stand against these prices. ”

Marc has long been a strong advocate for the Software as a Service industry, and goes on to explain that “online software shouldn’t just be easier for customers to use, it should be cheaper.”

“Although we take great pride in having the most feature-rich product on the market, we realise not all businesses require such a comprehensive accounting system. We saw no reason why these firms should pay for features they will never use, and instead of limiting usage of all functions across the product, we simply focussed on providing the essential features our smaller clients love.”

Not only does Saasu make managing financials simpler for smaller operators, but for the accountants that work with them too. Allowing real-time collaboration on files from any location, Saasu always displays up-to-date information, eliminating the issue of out-of-sync files.

Mike Chisholm, Chief Executive of Acclipse, said “this option is just what accountants have been asking for. Everyone has small clients who can’t justify paying the costs Xero and MYOB are charging. We partnered with Saasu because we wanted an online accounting solution that offered great value to both businesses and accountants, along with great performance and features. I’m really pleased that so soon after announcing our partnership we’re able to deliver this new version.”

After a series of successful roadshows across Australia and New Zealand, Saasu has been inundated by accountants wanting to incorporate the product into their practice. Of this, Lehmann said “we’re seeing more firms pass through our training programme than we have before. After all, Saasu is about saving both businesses and their advisors time, and it’s great to see our customers getting excited as they realise this.”

Australian accountants can find out more, and become a Saasu Accounting Partner here

New Zealand accountants can find out more, and become a Saasu Accounting Partner here

For more information contact:

Marc Lehmann, Saasu CEO
+61 2 9233 6629 | marc@saasu.com

Mike Chisholm, Acclipse CEO
+64 29 245 7091 | mike.chisholm@acclipse.com.au

ABOUT SAASU

Saasu is an online accounting software company with over 10,000 customers from around the world. With millions of transactions each year worth billions of dollars Saasu is a market leader in the Software as a Service accounting industry in the Asia Pacific area. Saasu is a comprehensive online accounting software system for managing business financials. Saasu has capabilities in sales, purchasing, inventory, payroll, ecommerce, 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. For more information visit the Saasu website at www.saasu.com

ABOUT ACCLIPSE

Acclipse is a leading provider of solutions to thousands of accounting firms in New Zealand and Australia, with expansion into the United Kingdom and India currently underway. Acclipse provides the tools and support to empower the business success of accounting firms. The Acclipse product range for accountants includes full workflow driven practice management, web management, document and email management as well as value-add client accounting (cashflow budgeting and benchmarking). For more information visit the Acclipse website at www.acclipse.com.au

The first step is to get online to create access, convenience and remove tasks that you otherwise have to do such as backups, upgrades and installs.

Secondly, and more importantly, you need to change your thinking to “generating” your accounts. You accounts can be a smooth, automated pipeline of transactions. It doesn’t have to be data entered.

Many businesses I meet still “do” their accounts while they should be generating them. This is about connecting and automating your accounts using a variety of techniques that are NOT limited to bigger businesses. The reality is that there will always be an element of data entry but it can be massively reduced to a small fraction of your work-flow.

There really is only 3 ways of generating your accounts. Most other methods are a variation on these themes or a hybrid of them.

We are interested in our customers saving time so if you have any questions post a comment or get in touch. We are firstly in the business of selling time savings, secondary to that is the accounting software.

REAL TIME – Straight through processing

“Are you serious Saasu? I’m a consulting business, it can’t be automated.”

Even a consulting businesses where you would think it’s hard to automate you can achieve 60-80% automation of transactional work flow. If you think about it (look at your statements), you pay for the same things over and over. Mobile, phone, internet, rent, electricity, wages etc. Often the frequency is consistent and it may only be the amount that varies. These transactions can all be automated to the point where there is no data entry (constant amount) or a followup edit (change amount). Expenses on credit cards can be captured by importing credit card data and bank statements. You simply clear what isn’t needed and apply account codes to the remainder.

This is the best by far on a cost per transaction capture analysis we’ve done of the variety of methods. We call this “exceptions based accounting”.

Highly transactional business models should automate as much as they can using recurring Sales and Purchases for all your normal recurring revenue and fixed costs. If applicable, connect your point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce website, project management and CRM systems to Saasu via the API or using a Connector. Transactions can occur in real time automatically. Contacts can update across systems. New customers can be created, invoiced, payment processed and emailed paperwork automatically without human cost, resources and risk.

Saasu provides customers with shopping carts, software connectors and payment gateway connections to assist in creating a straight through processing business model.

NEXT DAY – Feeds and Import

This method works well for micro enterprise but starts to fall apart as you grow the business or as your business becomes more technically complex. e.g. inventory, time and project based businesses. It doesn’t scale for complexity or compliance.

Under this method you export you bank statement from online banking and import it into your accounting file. Nearly all accounting systems have this feature including Saasu, Sage and Quickbooks. Systems like Banklink and Xero have taken it a step further by providing a service to do this import step for you on a next business day basis or weekly basis. For micro a enterprise this is about an extra $360 per year above Saasu’s pricing. Bank fees may also be charged by your bank account on a per-transaction basis for data feeds. Feeds aren’t real time but they are convenient and close enough for micro businesses. To a degree you are trusting the bank or card company’s data to be correct.

DELAYED – Data entry

Data entry is by far the most expensive and unfortunately the most common. Data entry should be about exceptions so bookkeeper and accountant skills can be reserved for advice and higher level tasks. A good bookkeeper is the difference between order and disorder, fear and anxiety. Automate as much as possible and have your bookkeeper or admin staff be you assistant CFO to your business rather than spend your dollars on them just doing mundane data-entry that can be done by a computer.

Wouldn’t you love to pay lots of bill at once?

Saasu has released our Direct-to-Bank File (DTB) payment feature. Simply (a) tick all the unpaid purchases you would like to pay in your Saasu Purchase List, (b) create and save your payment and (c) click the icon/link that becomes available to create the direct to Bank File and save it to your desktop.

In the video below the DTB file is Australian and is called an ABA file. Every zone is different so let us know if you would like your zone direct-to-bank format supported. Send us a sample payment file, else the documentation your bank has made available. (Note: don’t send us anything with personal access information).

Save hours of online banking data entry!

The key driver is flexibility and scalability- the ability to work across one or one thousand small businesses easily.

Franchise owners typically don’t want to waste time setting up financial systems that might be incompatible with the umbrella/parent franchisor network. Similarly the umbrella network managers don’t want hundreds of franchisees running their businesses on different systems so collating management information is difficult or nearly impossible.

This is where Saasu has found our sweet spot in Australia and increasingly in New Zealand and other countries.

There are no other systems on the market we are aware of that have the same level of multi-user, multi-business, single login, flexibility as we offer for franchise owners and franchisors to co-operate at different levels and get real-time business information across one or one thousand businesses.

One login can access multiple businesses and the business owner can set varying levels of access for different users. Each business can be configured differently for chart of accounts etc yet still roll up consistently formatted reports for the franchisor in PDFs or spreadsheets to email or even better with online login direct access.

Franchisees should just try it by logging in for the free version and if they like it sign up.

Franchisors should contact us or one of our partners to discuss strategies for migration, co-branding and lots more.

Franchise advisors and lenders (capital providers) can also benefit immensely from the ease with which they can monitor business performance remotely and even benchmark across businesses.

Basic review of your transaction listings

As you create transactions they will appear in your transaction list for the date period applicable. The process is usually to Add a new transaction to the List, Save and Close the transaction and then check the transaction for correctness. You cannot check all the detail for transaction but the main items such as Date, Amount and Contact can be verified. This is the most basic and quickest, but least thorough, of checks you can do.

Review of your Transactions by Account report

This is a good report for checking you have used correct tax codes and ensuring you have chosen the correct Account for you transactions. You might scan the report to ensure that (for example) all your sales appearing in an Account for Income: light fittings would have the same tax code. You might also check that there aren’t any stray transactions in this Account that shouldn’t be there.

Use the duplicate function for adding transactions

When you use the Duplicate button on any Add/Edit Transaction screen you are creating an exact copy of the transaction you are viewing with a few fields cleared like the Date for example. This helps produce consistency in your transaction adding over time as you will be using the same Account, Tax Codes and Summary as you are duplicating the information not entering it.

Use Transactions Lists to help in adding transactions

A good example of this is when you have regular periodical payments you make for things such as subscriptions, rent, bank fees that are often the same each month except for the transaction date.

1. Load the Transactions for a Contact and click the plus icon next to the transaction to load a duplicate.
2. Then you can include the date for this new transaction and amend any other differences (eg. Summary..”Jul08 rent” to “Aug08 Rent”) and then save the transaction.

Use the Transaction Lists to help in adding transactions

As in the above example you can create a list of transaction for the previous month (or period). Use the same process to create new transactions for the new month (or period).

Additional

Make sure you have paperwork, invoices, and bank statements to back up you data entry. Just assuming these things will happen each month (or period) doesn’t mean they actually do!

• Group Pays for processing payroll – Speed up you payroll processing.
  Less data entry
• Fixed bank fee (annual) – Many banks will offer an annual bank fee as one payment instead of the usual monthly fees
  Less data entry and reconciliation entries
• Fixed bank fee (monthly) – those intra-month fees for ATM and Internet Banking usage can oftne be paid as a fixed monthly fee in some business accounts.
  Less data entry and reconciliation entries
• Pay multiple bills from one vendor all at once – This is possible with vendors who have longer payment terms. If you can get vendors to stretch their terms to 3 months from the usual 7 to 30 days then at least you reduce the payment processing work when you write one cheque, or process one payment, for a set of invoices.
  Less paperwork and data entry. In the USA this is paying on Bill/Statement rather than per Invoice
• Dealing with vendors who insist on onerous paperwork – If you receive an excessive number of documents from a vendor, which may include; statements, invoices, reminders and other forms of vendor communication.
  Consider this time cost they are imposing on your business. Some courier companies bill weekly while others are monthly
• Underestimating the cost of processing a transaction – If processing payment early saves you time, and that time value in dollars outweighs the funding cost of spending your cash early then it may pay to clear the payment paperwork earlier.
  A classic example is very small reseller/commission payments
• Buying multiple services/products from one vendor – If you can obtain a discount for buying more products from one source, receive less paperwork, reduce your payment processing work and obtain more lenient terms then this may work for you. Again there are many flow-on advantages like shorter bank statements and less reconciliation’s work results in time cost savings.
  A classic example is with stationary suppliers. Many businesses deal with 3 or more stationary companies. If this saves you lots of money then excellent! If not why put up with the extra paperwork?
• Generally employee expenses are time expensive – Setting up a Motor Vehicle fuel account may be easier than managing those payments as reimbursements through salary or organising lots of paper receipts every month.
  Some companies pay employees slightly more and have their employees account for and claim minor work expenses through personal tax

With any business system or procedure it’s a case of what works best for your specific needs. Who are the experts at processing and doing accounts efficiently? Accountants must be on this list. They are not just there for tax advice.

We have a listed a few pro’s and con’s that you might like to consider.

Why does this work?

• Get all your cheques prepared and then signed in one session by the cheque writer or cheque signatory.
• Allows you to use Internet banking templates to process multiple payments on that day.
• It may help to manage you cashflow in a more predictable way. e.g. If you know that the 5th of each month is payment processing day and you have $X dollars to make your payments then cashflow becomes more predictable.
• Doing a task 20 times in one sitting is nearly always more efficient than doing 1 task over 20 sittings.
• When you do everything on one day, filing is a lot easier.
• Your vendors and customers will find your organisation more predictable and professional.
• Your work colleagues and employees will know that its the ‘accounts’ day. You can deal with it on that day rather than interrupting work.
• If you have a bookkeeper or a bookkeeping company to do this work, it will nearly always be cheaper to have them in for one full day, rather than have them in spasmodically over time.
• Your Profit and Loss and Cash Flow reports (and others), may end up cleaner and clearer.

When doesn’t it work?

• When the gaps between ‘accounting days’ are set too far apart your management information may get out of date, your vendors may get impatient and you might hate the idea of spending a whole day just doing ‘accounts’. Select a frequency that suits your business model from a holistic perspective.
• When your customer insists on invoices immediately or very regularly. Note that there are legislated requirements for invoices to be issued within a certain time after services have been provided.
• When vendors insist on getting cash on delivery
• When you forget to pay a vendor then they have to wait until your next ‘accounts day’. This can really upset vendors. Then they might charge you more. Ouch!