I often get asked how a business can minimise the time spent (and thus money) “doing” their accounts.

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.

Another new Software as a Service (SaaS) idea that might work for some of our business customers is Avatars.

Avatars are a digital representation of people. You find them all over the internet these days, in virtual worlds and increasingly in commercial use for customer support.

A more recent innovation however is the use of these Avatars to sell your products. In pre-sales not post-sales, as it is a very different area because people are less tolerant of poor quality voice or images.

We set one up recently to welcome new visitors to saasu. If you have any feedback let us know. It’s easy to get one for your own site.

The downside of course is (more…)

See Video on YouTube.com

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.

(more…)

Two major global developments in the SaaS (Software as a Service) world show the blue sky is really here today. (more…)

Practical Time Saving Tips

Quite often people ask how we use Saasu in our own business. That’s a big question so I won’t try an answer it all in this post so I’ll start with a couple of time saving tips we use.

We have hundreds of small dollar value online bills to pay in the Saasu business. Everything from domain names to application subscriptions like Google Apps. In short stacks of credit card transactions paid by directors and staff. How do we handle this efficiently:

One Touch Philosophy

When you receive an email bill for a payment you just made by credit card save it as a .PDF, .EML, .TXT or other file and immediately create the purchase transaction and attach this document to it. Go straight back to your email account when done and file/archive the email. Done, gone and dealt with.

The costs of not doing it this way are:

• You re-read the email bill another two or three times before you enter it.
• You lose the email bill in your already burgeoning email jungle.
• You risk deleting/archiving the email bill not having booked the expense and thus you miss the tax deduction or reimbursement.
• As the email bill gets older your memory fades and you contract a disease called “I can’t remember why I paid this?”
• It just gets lost in the ether - that place where things go when they aren’t as important as day to day survival

If you don’t book your own expenses just forward the email to your accounts person and have them follow the one touch process.

Another approach which works nicely is to import your credit card file (use the bank or credit card company’s export file e.g. Virgin uses the same format as Westpac) and simply clear the personal expenses using the “Delete Selected” button while you are in the “List of Uncategorised Imported Transactions” screen. You have to trust your credit card issuer and your suppliers to use this method. This Book-it-Danno approach doesn’t have much accounting rigor but it can save stacks of time. I’ll leave that pay-off dilemma with you

Tip: Always put the suppliers invoice/bill number in your transaction. It makes it so much easier to find later and reconcile the suppliers account. You would be amazed how often you can accidentally pay for things twice (or they charge you twice). This will help highlight these occurrences.

Automating Regular Boring Stuff

Setup an automated purchase for constant amounts [Use:Main Menu>Setup>Recurring Transactions>Purchases]. As an example create a recurring purchase for $49 that you pay by direct debit to your Telco provider on the 15th of each month for your internet connection.

Always do a reconciliation during your accounting cycle period-end when you use automation to ensure payments have actually occurred. You never know when an expired credit card could result in failed payments as an example. Also, doing reconciliation’s might be annoying but it’s easier to tick something off than data enter the same things 12 times a year!

We keep reminding ourselves that customer service is our best marketing channel we have. Saasu acquires a lot of new business via word of mouth. We make every effort to ensure we don’t get caught in the enterpise level traps of customer service. We attempt to generate a customer service ‘automaton’ approach where we map how the customer wants to interact with us (user story) then we set an automated process in place for dealing with answering questions, logging feedback or bugs and providing the medium of communication they want without forcing them in a direction they don’t like.

Service is a sales channel

A key failure point of many enterprises is to put a price on customer service as an “expense”. This is denying its ability to be one of your best sales channels. It amazes me that companies spend millions of dollars on sales teams while they let the side down on the service side. We know that if you look after the customer they simply tells lots of people about the amazing experience.

Service is a chance for humans to help other humans

Denying your staff the opportunity to really help people because it costs money to do so is a real crime. I mean this in a emotional way. Humans like to help other humans. If you don’t build that within the service culture of your organisation you aren’t creating a giving, compassionate attitude toward customer needs. These values shouldn’t just reside in the realm of relationships at personal, family and community level, they should pervade the business community also.

Service must be Authentic

Much anger and frustration towards larger telco’s and banks exists in the community because of this issue. A lot of banks produce nice looking adds to try and make you like them but fail at customer service. There is no authenticity present around the relationship.

Service needs to be a human approach supported by technology

We have resisted moving to having a computer answering the phone. We expect some day we will split our phone numbers into support, accounts and sales to help manage the incoming calls which are building daily, however we will always strive to have Human involvement in communication. Our view is that if you want to force people to talk to a machine then they would probably be happy to use the net instead. They use the phone because they want human help, the customisation it offers and the speed of interaction. Wasting 5 minutes surfing a phone menu system only to be put on hold really kills your customers perception of your organisation.

Service includes managing customer requests for features and product

We always document customer requests for features and notify them when they have been built. Why? Many enterprises pay huge money so survey customer needs and experience. Customers, even prospective ones will give you this information for free if you simply help them to give it to you via different channels to supply the information. Talking to a human on the phone, a feedback form, a new feature/product email all acquire voluntary feedback.

Good service is often as simple as answering the question asked

We answer the vast majority of email support questions within a couple of hours but we don’t always answer support questions the same day. We tend to open the email or answer the call by following a simple approach of logging what questions were asked and simply working through each with either (a) answers or (b) an action we plan to take to get an answer. I get frustrated a little when we can’t answer the question but sometimes we don’t have the information to answer them or the legal authority to do so (tax questions). Access to the right person who knows the answer isn’t always possible. That said, we are about to implement a new process involving 3rd parties to allow users to treat us as a one stop shop which should improve this.

Online banking systems provide template technology that allows you to store a list of payments that you make on a regular basis (e.g. payroll or payment to suppliers). Each time you need to make payment you load the template, amend any amounts to be paid and process the payments with a few clicks.

You can use templates to quickly process:

• cost of sales items such as materials, inventory, services
• contractors
• employee pays
• Internet connection fees
• mobile phone, telephone and facsimile charges
• yellow pages directory listing
• insurance premiums
• couriers
• stationary account
• postage account
• etc…

You can set-up templates to have majority of your payments processed in one online banking transaction.

It may be possible to pay all or most of your bills at once, depending on your business size and whether or not your suppliers accept Direct Crediting to their bank account. If you are able to use a feature often called ‘pay others’ or ‘pay third parties’ in your Internet banking system then you should be able to do this. It is very rare these days that a vendor will only accept a cheque or cash, so it is possible that the majority of your payment processing could be achieved in one online template transaction.

There may be other positive flow-on effects.

More predictable cashflow, not having to wait on vendors to bank the cheques you write them are examples pf how using templates can help you in ways other than saving time. Many of the Internet banking systems have a particularly handy feature that allows you to print out your list of payments on one sheet of paper, which is great if you don’t like too much paper about the office.

There are costs too.

Like all technology there is the investment of your time upfront to understand the system, however, that cost should pay be repaid quickly. Template charges may also apply.