Initially I had agreed to attend as a guest of speaker/panelist John Birse and simply live-tweet the event and meet other attendees.  John’s a fascinating bloke, full of energy and ideas.  He is the CEO and National Division Franchisor for Jim’s Bookkeeping, Director of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers, and a Saasu Partner.

The focus of the conference was to “discuss the technology to enable physical, online and mobile points of sale in both B2C and B2B environments”, of great relevance to Saasu as we are all about automation as previously posted.   I captured some of the event by live-tweeting (you can view the archive of that here)  During the break I was asked  by Kate and speaker/MC Gordon Long (Head of Product, Merchant Solutions at NAB) if I would like to participate on the panel.  A key item for discussion was “economical and user friendly solutions to shift acceptance of technology” so Saasu fit right in that context.

Payments technology is at the heart of automating your business. At Saasu we’re continually updating our add-ons which connect the systems you love using. This month we launched our automated feed to PayPal. Early next year we will launch our add-on for payment gateway eWay to further automate your business.

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.

So what is it that the OneSaas + Saasu model does that is so liberating? We simply remove the operational glass ceiling, or what we call labour gravity, allowing the eBay Trader to spend more time on product and marketing. That’s every business owners dream isn’t it?

To make this happen we require 3 key elements:

1. You need a good integration tool like OneSaas that can connect all the elements.
2. An online accounting engine like Saasu with real inventory (not price lists).
3. Where applicable, your accounting system needs to be drop shipping capable.

Here’s the helicopter view of the workflow. Clients engaging Saasu are welcome to explore detailed workflow for their specific business model. In coming weeks we’ll explore some other business models that involve other Saasu Technology Partner services.

I can see it reducing missed or forgotten billings, a common problem in trades and services business. It will also make you and your organisation look professional. Saasu has a long history in the trades sector and also with Connect2field, and their founder Steve Orenstein so I was pretty thrilled to be given the chance to talk about this efficiency technology for Connect2Field and Saasu and what it can do for our customers.

To use this feature simply choose Automate > Bank Feeds > More > Fast Code View

We spent a lot of time getting this to a minimal amount of keystrokes. It’s incredibly simple and ensures you keep your hands on the keyboard and off the mouse. This is important for speed, accessibility and simplicity. Sometimes systems get too cute with shortcuts that end up being longcuts and heavy amounts of mousing around. That’s not us. Keep it simple.

The internet IS NOT simply about convenience through getting your data available online. Web based email, CRMs and accounting web applications are just the first layer. This is the first level of understanding and observation. It’s the outer most layer of the onion. It’s also an easy way for web application companies to sell the benefits of the web to you the customers. You should however look deeper down and expect more from your web application providers.

The internet has the capacity to add to your business system intelligence and process your workflow in an automatic way. You might not have taken advantage of this yet. If you swallow the red pill so to speak it is a wonderland of triggers and events that we are all creating. Let’s use a real life example to explain this. A trigger might be a customer of a business clicking checkout on your shopping cart that then causes a series of designed workflow events actioned by Saasu such as:

• Capturing the customers contact record and storing it.
• Passing credit card details to a payment gateway.
• Listening to the payment gateway for success.
• Emailing the customer an invoice using a specific email and PDF template.
• Emailing a purchase order to a supplier with instructions to deliver the goods to the business customers address (drop shipping).
• Emailing a shipping slip with an embedded Google Map of the customers address to the delivery driver.

Deeper down in Saasu’s inventory system a lot more is happening automatically.

• Stock volumes are adjusting.
• Serial numbers or other inventory attributes are being allocated against items just sold.
• The value of stock on balance sheet is changing.
• Stock is moving to “Committed” for the Sale and “On Order” for the Purchase.
• Cost of Goods numbers are being updated.

Saasu has a real inventory system, rather than just a price list mechanism that you see many basic web apps now providing. All these events above are occurring in an automated way.

This is one example of workflow automation based on a trigger event. Customers are inventing new models all the time and as we add features the models become more effective and handle more situations.

This doesn’t mean humans aren’t part of the picture. It is a symbiotic relationship now between the controllers (the users) and the the system (triggers, events and data). Most importantly if you have devices or systems not connected to the internet then they can’t contribute effectively without requiring manual work to be done. Manual work and intelligent, automated systems aren’t good friends. Manual work is all about labour gravity which I have covered before. So our responsibility now as business owners and employees is to remove these old technology blocks from our new system. Work on the worst blocks first and things will begin to improve quickly.

Nature is full of examples we can look to for inspiration in our thinking on this topic. Speed and complexity of communication is a major factor in the success of species evolution. Just look at humans, we got wired, our brains and communication capability grew. We used the complexity of language to evolve a highly advanced species. You should help your business do the same. Getting online, getting automation tools and having fewer systems (versus many disparate ones) that talk well together is an analogous situation.

I’ve just mentioned fewer systems. Fewer systems is a strategy nature uses to reduce interdependence or dependence risk. An example of the the later can be found in cockroaches who have evolved a single system mechanism. One reason they are so successful is because they have internal organs that produce seven different vitamins and lots of complex amino acids that they need so that they don’t have to rely on food quality to get them. They reduce their dependence risk on nutritious food sources.

When businesses get connected online they can actually start to self organise and grow at faster rates. Essentially an off-line business simply isn’t a part of this primordial web soup of activity and thus it can’t evolve. Contrary to this an online business can’t help but be prodded, communicated with, added to, seen by others and thus grow and evolve. The potential ceiling for the businesses momentum and growth prospects is lower. Businesses in this new online world can grow in orders of magnitude rather than the typical single or double digit growth rates.

Lessons from nature are worth listening to.

Photo by raneko

We’re excited to announce that the Saasu iPhone App is now live in the iTunes App Store.  You can also search the iTunes App store for “Saasu”.

This early release application is free for all Saasu subscribers, it’s our first version and just the start of something great.  You are able to manage professional invoicing, expenses, inventory and contact management from within the iPhone app.  

Key areas included in this initial version are:

• Contact management.
• Sales, Purchases and Quotes.
• Combo Items (bundles/packs/kits) and Items management.
• Your data will be available to view offline.
• Whenever you have an internet connection (Wireless/WiFi or mobile broadband) you can create transactions and contacts.
• Data is encrypted during transfer to your mobile device and to Saasu’s servers.

Things we are wanting to add in future updates include:

• Offline transactions
• Saasu contact synch with iPhone contacts.
• Attach receipt images on the go.
• Push notifications that report new leads, sales and payments.

Saasu decided to build what is called a Native Application (an ‘App’) that you download because of the attractive offline capability. Mobile web applications will have their place but much of the customer experience will be lost and we don’t want to compromise on that.

We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions. It’s the first cut so get your ideas in and we’ll work through them.

The benefit of the OneSaas service is that it also links to many other web applications that you may already use in your business.

OneSaas integrates the main functionality of Saasu from Contacts, Invoices, Items, Accounts, Bank Accounts to Tax Codes. Connecting to Saasu is done through a simple wizard process.

We’ve been using OneSaas to manage our contact records synchronisation between system Saasu operations use including Google Enterprise, Campaign Monitor and Marketo. Traditionally we had been spent hours moving lists around and updating records and instead replaced this with a small payment each month to automate these activities. You all know we love automation

OneSaas was founded by fellow colleague and friend, Corneliu I. Tusnea.

Are you fighting gravity on a daily basis? Many businesses have components which require labour and thus labour must scale to grow the business. Other businesses scale without labour or very little labour.

Nothing new here. A simple analysis would say this is classic services, versus productised business but it goes deeper than that. Essentially services can be commoditised through automation. As humans we just haven’t figured out how to do that in many situations.

So this post is really about growing large and avoiding tracking sideways in your business. We know this stuff works. We have seen businesses go from 100k to 1million turnover in a year by employing techniques we have taught business owners. These are nearly always operational problems we solve rather than traditional accounting ones.

Another way to look at this labour gravity issue is to discern the difference between hourly labour versus commoditised labour. If your business does hourly-based tasks you are subject to labour gravity. You would be much better off breaking your tasks down into commoditised components and then from there cost them and review them for automation candidates. Even changing your billing model to have fixed pricing or tiered pricing that relates more to the task you perform and less to the hours worked.

In product-based businesses the gravity is technical and centred around supply-based issues which scale much better. These limitations can be engineered out.

So when I speak to business owners who are data entering transactions from their eBay or Trademe system into their accounting system I can see the labour gravity taking effect. More recently I heard about a business that was merging reports from their payroll, inventory and invoicing systems to produce a report they needed. It’s easy to see the same thing happening at the management level in business.

Fortunately these businesses end up finding us and we can fix that but you can see they are subject to massive amounts of labour gravity. Sometimes these people resist in fear of making their role less relevant. This is where people divide into two types. Those that embrace it and reinvent themselves and those that fight it in an attempt to maintain the status quo to serve a self interest gain they get out of doing the work that machines can do. This is so wrong because the reinvention of oneself to do higher end tasks generates more income for society, higher billing rates, more interesting work. It’s the difference between evolution and maintenance. Evolve or die.

Hidden treasures exist in this approach. If you think about what the world looks like fully automated all you will see is art, passion, self expression, family time, love etc. The list goes on, it’s all those things that are at the essence of happiness and not in the realm of the mundane. Automation is a pursuit dedicated to causing happiness that liberates people from automaton existences.

You may be wondering why I am being firm on this, it’s because I’m passionate about this and I want you to “get sum”. You’ll love automation, the more you engage it the more you will be liberated by it and and the sooner you will realise the truth… You are what you haven’t automated.

We are very excited by Automated Bank Feeds as they cement Saasu as a market leader in the online accounting industry having all the fundamental components of Workflow, Payroll, Inventory and Point-of-Sale.

Saasu has decided not to charge extra for bank feeds.  We believe in creating extreme value for clients by continually offering more at a lower price.  We will also provide unlimited bank account connections within your Saasu file.

What are Automated Bank Feeds?

In essence they elimate data entry. Your bank and credit card transactions feed into Saasu automatically. You can easily create transactions in Saasu from this data (using the + icon). You can also reconcile these transactions against existing transactions in Saasu by accepting the matches we find using our clever matching engine.

Connected in 5 minutes!

1. Go to Automate > Bank Feeds.
2. Select the Bank Account you want to connect.
3. Click “Connect to Bank Feed” and fill in your bank credentials. More…

We would love you to let us know what you think. Enjoy!

We have set ourselves high quality assurance and usability benchmarks and in our self assessment we don’t think we are there yet. We have thousands of very keen customers wanting access so this isn’t something we want to do but it is the right thing to do.

So we decided to be the ant and not the grasshopper. We’ll spend a few more weeks getting it just right and in January when everyone is back fresh from a break you’ll see the new Saasu.

Our competitors have taken a bank feed approach whose idea came from a company I have a lot of respect for called Banklink. It’s an excellent method for Micro Business data creation and coding. It has a major catch though which it’s usefulness as a company grows and needs real time billings (often inventory based) and capture of payables for cashflow monitoring. Our approach is a leap ahead.

What is this difference? We believe Bank Feeds are only one piece of the picture we need as businesses have many real time sources of data that are more useful than bank data (which is a day or more old). As an example eBay and Trade Me traders have inventory based transaction and drop shipping automation requirements. We can manage most of their automation requirements by pulling data feeds directly from these systems. We were the first to launch a Trade Me connector only last week. We are talking about the basics here like sending a detailed invoice in realtime, not creating it a day or two later from a bank feed which only has limited information. That said, bank feeds are great for Micro Business and we will be announcing a Micro Business product available from your Saasu Accountant with bank feeds.

Data Feeds is how we are looking at this space. Bank feeds are a subset of Data feeds.

Merchant gateway transactions, ecommerce website data, transaction feeds from PayPal and shopping sites like eBay and Trade Me are very useful streams of real time data. It’s a much bigger picture we are addressing. Some will be direct connections built by us and some will be via data brokers like OneSaaS, Boomi, Yodlee and others which we won’t disclose just yet (I let the cat out of the bag too early once before).

People often ask us why we left building bank feeds for so long. Well the answer is simple. Sometimes in business it’s better to let others go first. Particularly if you have an approach you don’t want to them to know about. The second reason is we were more focused on Small Business, who haven’t been demanding the bank feed feature as much, it is typically a Micro Business or Sole Trader type feature request. Small businesses tend to create invoices and send them rather than create them from a bank feed. They also enter purchases they haven’t paid so they can get a feeling for their future cash position rather than finding out how much cash they have after they pay their bills. Bank feeds don’t give them a future cash position.

So now we are about to close out another point of difference and provide an offering for Micro and Small businesses. Most importantly at the right price. We have built Saasu methodically and efficiently over 10 years so that the price is right for clients.

We will be issuing a formal press release soon providing complete details including pricing. If you registered to be a beta tester you will be sent an email when your file is ready to try out the new preview release. We hope you enjoy it.

Well that day has come where the bots rock and biz will boom as a result. For all you savvy e-tailers out there who use Trade Me, OneSaaS has been hard at work integrating Saasu’s online accounting application and Trade Me’s shopping website. Trade Me released their API last week so it has been a quick turnaround. Hat tip also goes to the team at Acclipse who provided access to some clients with Trade Me accounts for testing.

Removing the burden of data entry is the driver for this connector, the tenth from OneSaas. This integration automatically transfers transactions and buyer information into Saasu online accounting which effectively removes the data entry headache that used to exist where transactions needed to be data entered into an accounting system to kick off the workflow and get inventory levels up to date. Order flow and accounting is becoming increasingly automatic.

• Press release: Saasu to Trade Me Integration
• The Next Web: Saasu gives sellers on Trade Me an early Christmas present

Image by Torley

SaaS contains a lot of sugar and spice. It turns CapEx into OpEx. It gives you capacity to burst workflow and users. It enables work from home for parents. Small business owners can take that holiday, do the online accounting payrun from afar and keep up to date. It’s liberating technology. If you aren’t a believer ask yourself why every major software company around the world is busily trying to reinvent themselves. They are busy getting their pilots license so they can fly into the cloud.

Choose an online accounting system based on credentials. Being a traditional software company is far from an appropriate credential to do cloud based applications well. Do you want to back an old dog trying to learn new tricks? Choose SaaS providers who are profitable, there are many. Most important of all is to look at their breed. Do they have a history of free tax updates? Do they let you export your data? Do you get stung for high support costs? Many new SaaS providers along with the old software companies fail on this. What’s their motive? Barriers to exit? What are their ethical genetics like in light of this?

Look for SaaS companies that will let you fly like you’re in an A380, that has the scale and all the mod cons and features you expect in this new age. One that you can trust.

Photo by VSZ

• You can setup Automated Statements for each type of billing you do.
• You can have an Automated Statement run applied to specific contacts Contact or just attach Contact Groups you may already use in Automates Sales and Billings.
• You have the ability to create CSS/HTML designs to apply to your Templates for Statements. We call these designs Themes.

Let the engine do the work

The Automated Statement Engine does the work for you. Payment reminders, monthly statements, loans/finance tracking, subscription billing, renewal requests and facilitating debtors collection are just a few ways you can use it.

You set the rules

Send Statements to non-zero balance contacts. Even add a few days/weeks grace if you want to cut them some slack. Control the period that the statement relates to – week, fortnight, month or quarter. You can also send a Contact a Statement as a means to highlight your customers activity in much the same way banks, telco’s and utilities send statements.

Calling all ideas!

If in the coming weeks you have found a nifty use of this feature then let us know and we’ll post it in our Product Blog and link back to the genius who thought it up!

We hope you like it!

Twitter Founder, Jack Dorsey, has his new payments system called Square which is now out in the public domain. It looks great but begs the question when will we be able to drop the credit cards all together for payments? We have devices and they can be set to pin access only. We have apps on those devices which also can be secured so in essence the Credit Card is superfluous in the next decade in my opinion. I think what he has done is brilliant. The no credit card approach will win in the end, and hopefully it’s a good guy like Jack.

Yodlee is an interesting company who specialises in supplying bank data feeds (permissioned read-only) to companies like Saasu. In short our customers will be able to give us approval to feed their bank data into Saasu.

Yodlee support over 9,000 banks and credit card companies. If Saasu attempted to connect to the volume of banks that we need to directly using our own resources then the price we would have to sell subscriptions at would be higher. We are realistic about what small and micro business want to pay for their accounting service so if this feature can be enabled cheaply then we will provide it.

Recently Yodlee had ANZ bank connected so it’s only a matter of time before other non US banks fall under Yodlee’s wing. Saasu will start providing bank feeds as soon as the service can be offered at the right price for small and micro businesses. In the mean time it takes about 3 minutes to transfer a CSV file from your bank and load it into Saasu. It’s very simple once you have have had a go at it once.

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.

Typically eBay traders, e-commerce shops and other businesses who don’t hold inventory on hand or who have their suppliers deliver direct will find this very useful. Essentially, when you enter a Sale you can choose a ‘Do more’ option called ‘Save and Drop Ship’.

Saasu drop shipping for small business is quite unique due to our inventory capability which extends to assembly/build style inventory and API support.

What happens?

Once you click Save and drop ship Saasu automatically loads a new purchase with the order information for your default supplier set as the Contact. It also loads the ‘ship to’ address you chose in your Sale along with a bunch of other important bits of related transaction information. All you need do is ‘Save and Email’ the purchase as a one step confirmation. This saves on data entry, reduces the chance of input error (during translation from Sale to Purchase) and helps to ensure each sale has a matching purchase to obtain better confidence in fulfillment.

We plan to expand this feature out further so let us know what you think, send in your ideas.

Big thanks to Klaeton who’s a Platinum Ebay Power Seller for all his help. His company, Australian Direct rocks it out using Saasu around the world – literally as a muso working & performing in Germany.

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 that they appear less ‘real’, you can’t replace people. The upside is substantial in some industries. You can do many things that you can’t do with professional talent. For example support multiple languages and cultures within the same language with one ‘actor’, even try different text to test effectiveness. An area that we are sure will catch on.

The good providers even allow you to use their talent library of people from around the world as well as text to speech or even load your own sound file in WAV format or phone in if you don’t have a microphone use the telephone and pin number to record it.

This will be an interesting area to watch as the ability to tailor appearance such as hair type, eyes, skin tone and clothing merges with other technologies such as the hologram the Prince of Wales used recently to attend an overseas conference and present.

Prince Charles was criticised for his huge air travel carbon footprint recently so he solved it with a video recording that was converted to a hologram. It is only a matter of time before the 3d avatar meets the holgram and allows his to acheive the same result with a simple email. Perhaps with simple markups to recognise emotion.

Y-gen and late X-gen are most likely to be the demographics who will readily accept them. After all they look distictly like the characters you see running around in Second Life and the The Sims.