Bank Feeds Release Delay

December 7, 2010 By

We were planning to release the first round of access to Saasu’s new bank feeds feature last night but we have decided to delay until January after new years.

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.

Filed Under: Automation, Data

Bank Feeds Preview

October 15, 2010 By

We are about to release our bank feeds preview next week. I’ll be in New Zealand with Acclipse on a roadshow to give the industry a good look at our approach. I’m very excited about it as we are doing something quite special and ahead of the curve.

bank feed sneek peek

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.

Filed Under: API, Automation, Connectors, Data

Trade Me data feed

October 7, 2010 By

Wouldn’t it be cool if someone had a robot that could put all my Trade Me transactions into an accounting system automatically?

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.

Image by Torley

Filed Under: API, Automation

The Cloud is Saas-y

June 9, 2010 By

If you are a CIO, CFO, Advisor or Business Owner then SaaS has become an increasingly compelling choice over software. Online accounting is on the shopping list rather than the future wishlist. The questions are increasingly about how to change rather than is it secure. Not adopting SaaS has switched from being viewed as “risk averse” behaviour to one of “please explain why we are spending a fortune on software licenses”. Ask yourself “can I outperform the Cloud and SaaS providers on security if I take that risk on myself in house and manage and host my own software and data?”

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

Filed Under: Automation, Ideas

Automated Statements Engine

March 9, 2010 By

Saasu’s new Automated Statements feature released last night is about helping you look professional, saving time and bringing forward cashflow. You can now send statements automatically via email.

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!

Filed Under: Automation, Templates

Twitter founders new baby is born and it’s called Square.

December 2, 2009 By

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.

Filed Under: Automation, Platforms

Bank Feeds Update

March 27, 2009 By

Bank feeds are coming to Saasu but not just yet. We strategically delayed late last November after learning that Yodlee, a bank feed provider, was starting to add banks that we needed connections to. This could save us a lot of time and money, something which translates into a lower cost Saasu online accounting service for our customers.

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.

Filed Under: Automation, Connectors

Generate Your Accounts

February 20, 2009 By

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.

Filed Under: Accounting, Add-ons, Automation, Blog, Efficiency, Ideas, Online Accounting

Drop Shipping

February 11, 2009 By

If your business sells widgets and then immediately orders them from your suppliers then you will like our new drop ship feature.

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.

Filed Under: Automation, Inventory

Small business SaaS – avatars that train and sell

February 1, 2008 By

Saasu James Avatars

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 [Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, Blog, Ideas, Marketing, SaaS, Selling, Tech
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »