Tags are another recent innovation from the Saasu labs team. Tags are simply one or more words that mean something to you. The shorter the better we find.
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.
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…)
Here’s a purchase we no longer need to enter in our business. We just tick it off during reconciliation each month. You can see how it’s entered and automated from the screen shot. So let’s keep this post short and simple, Saasu style!
Bulk ‘Big Company’ Salary Handling For The Rest Of Us
This blog entry has been two years in preparation, we think we have solved a major issue for most businesses in a very elegant way.
Interested? You should be - we decided to make a system that normally costs tens of thousands of dollars free for all our clients, at least for now.
Paying salaries and time based reward-for-effort in any size business is a time consuming task.
We have this need here at Saasu.com for our own team and pretty much all of our clients face the same issues - it is a long wish list but if you are a business owner I am sure most of the items on it will resonate with you.
We think the most important point is doing all of the things on the list while keeping it simplified for the average business to setup and use in minutes so it pays for itself today not next year in reduced time, hassles, training costs, errors and in so many other ways including a happy team that gets paid correctly and on time.
That is the hardest thing to do, the reason we are blogging about it is we have just released Saasu Advanced Payroll.
Top 12 Payroll Tips - Making The Right Decision
These are our tips - consider them a check list when deciding on your next system -they represent what a good scalable but simplified payroll service must cover at a minimum.
- Standard Payments Should Take No Extra Time - Setting up standard payments each week, fortnight or month, additional staff one an existing scheme or in an existing group should add no extra time to the regular pay run.
- One Off Exception Payments Should Be Easy - Handling all those exceptions from the standard pays with minimal fuss for just the next pay but not other pays
- Entitlement Tracking Should Be Automatic - Tracking and accumulating holiday leave entitlements and other entitlements depending on where/when/how they are working
- Time Based Pay - Tracking time and paying employees based on time worked as well as invoicing based on time
- Groups (Also Called Batches or Runs) - Minimising effort for similar categories of employees by grouping them together for processing by type or location or grade or something else
- Payslips & Tax - Distributing payslips or salary confirmation sheets to individual employees who are often geographically dispersed - email is best for payslips. At end of year the production of taxation certificates (also called group certificates in many countries) is also essential
- Banking - Getting the instructions to the bank with the right employee account details (often at other banks) - an automated bulk transaction file is best.
- Approvals & Controls - Making sure it all happens without errors - so you need some sort of draft approval process
- Fast - Making sure it all happens in a timely way so the money hits employee accounts when they need or expect it - must be highly automated
- Zones - Handling the vast variety of different conditions and calculations around the world in different jurisdictions (we call them zones) - must be configurable (we are just supporting Australia for now but other countries will be rolled out progressively based on demand).
- Integrated - No duplicate information - it must share records with existing HR or employee tracking systems and timesheets and expense handling systems.
- Self Service - Your team must be learn the system themselves without paying for training and be able to enter their own time or see their own payslips - online via the web when ever they want
We didn’t add ‘Make sure it is software-as-a-service not old-style-on-premise-software’ because it goes without saying 
The Best Bit
- Get It Now - You can have efficient payroll in your business in just minutes with Saasu Advanced Payroll
- Free - We are providing this service free to existing business subscribers and new clients who join before Christmas on our standard business plan - just tell us and we will turn it on for your business.
- Already Proven - we have already processed thousand of salaries this way (paying tens of millions of dollars) and it has been a very smooth experience.
- It Is Unique - There are a few other services like this out there but we believe there are no others at this price point and none as simple to use.
Update From Service Team - After One Week Of Free Offer…
Advanced Payroll Is A VERY Popular New Feature, we have had a rush from clients looking for access and using it in their business. Thanks. It is nice to know people like our stuff!
Just to repeat -as a reward for existing business clients (and new business clients who join before Xmas) we are offering this new module free.
The offer of free access will run until at least March 2008, thereafter advanced payroll will be part of a higher subscription plan (probably called business plus although we are still deciding plans and their names).
Pricing has not been determined but we expect the difference won’t be very large at all, it will depend amongst other things on the service/support costs we incur for an average client using the new module.
This price setting is part of a complete plan review to introduce lower plans with reduced price and functionality for entry level and higher plans for corporates - all of which is part our ongoing efforts to deliver great value software as a service to simplify your business life.
By using plans we can stage complexity (and hence simplify use for you) according to the scale of your business.
Payroll entries made via standard payroll and advanced payroll will be accessible for all payroll users (business or business plus if you will). So if you decide not to use advanced payroll later that is fine, you can still see all payroll the in the same consistent way, you just can not process them in bulk.
And of course we always ensure you are protected with the saasu.com satisfaction guarantee.
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!
The release done this week opens up a bunch of new features in the contact management area that makes it more useful including grouping multiple contacts under one organisation and tracking multiple addresses.
Probably even more interesting is that larger firms which already use the salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) can now integrate directly with Saasu. For the rapidly approaching one million users of salesforce.com this is great news too because they get to use the best value online accounting and business management SaaS on the planet!
Your sales team and accounting team will never argue about which version of which client’s details to send the invoice to ever again.
Our web service is REST or XML/RPC like. All supported calls, resources and usage samples can be found in the API area.
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.
Apr 14
Peter
2 Comments
Automation, Efficiency, Innovation, Product, Web Finance Engine
