Amazon Bricks and Mortar

December 7, 2009 By

Times is reporting that Amazon is going to open a bricks and mortar book shop.

I’ve long thought that if I were Google, Amazon or any company that has very powerful brand or product base you should have retail presence. Stores build brand, create a feeling of solidity for E-tailers and most importantly are an effective alternative to traditional media marketing spend.

This all comes back to customers buying and experience rather than just a product. Apple proved the theory and many will now follow the strategy.

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing

Asia’s Rise

December 2, 2009 By

Asia shouldn’t be underestimated, it is growing so quickly that it will rival the power balance the West holds in this very generation. In this revealing video from TED India Hans Rosling depicts Asia’s Rise.

There is clearly a rise of infographics going on in the web. Just like meta data gives us information about data (data about data), infographics enhance what would otherwise be very vanilla looking graphs. Infographics appeal to humans because we are visual creatures.

In his video’s on GapMinder or TED you can see other examples of how Hans adds a new dimension of time to create dynamic infographics. The result is that he can get the data across in ways that static words and numbers can’t.

Filed Under: Blog, Data

Creating customer attention

November 13, 2009 By

In Alvin Toffler’s world of information overload, our businesses have a constant struggle with diminishing attention offered by customers. To tackle this the creation of a per customer communications profile can help. The metaphor is a pre-nuptial. It specifies how your relationship will exist between your business and your customers. How you create this communications profile can vary from a social unwritten contract like a retailer has with their customer or it might be more explicit like a form your customer fills in to specify when and what correspondence they want to receive from your business.

Every piece of communication you send to your customer demands their time. There is an equation that roughly says the more you demand then the less attention the customer will probably give your demands. If you annoy them too much, they stop listening and reading. So logically you can attribute a cost to each piece of communication. This attention economy is all about treating this attention like a commodity. Every single email, letter or phone call is an exchange of value. If you are selling something and not giving anything then you are spending a large piece of the attention dollar the customer affords you. If you give education then it is lower. If you solve a problem or save their time then you will probably be adding to the attention piggy bank you have with that customer. They will want more.

So you can design this relationship so both you get more attention and the customer gets more value. If you can monitor customer behavior and reaction so as to understand how they would like to relate to your business rather than how much, then you can grow the attention piggy bank. The customer will give you more time because you have created a bespoke or targeted approach to their communication needs, to solving their problems or giving them the actual information they want rather than fire the 12 gauge information shot gun at them. The catch is that this costs time or else money to automate it.

There are many approaches to move to a communications profile model and some very interesting business models are springing up to help businesses achieve this. Companies like Datarati are dealing with medium enterprise in this area using bleeding edge technologies like Marketo. It’s a data driven approach that at the end of the day will have a robustness above the implied or gut feel approach that most business owners currently rely on. Other simple things that can be done by small business are forms that asks customers what they want from your business when they become a customer. Many inexpensive email systems now have features built in to give you insight into customer behaviour so you can provide them with just what they want and when they want it without even asking them.

This is all about the customer deciding rather than the business. Put the customer first, then the business and sales will follow. Listen and watch their behaviour or ask them what they want rather then serve up an overload of communications and information.

All business will be done this way in the future so it really is just about how fast you get there.

Photo by See-ming Lee

Filed Under: Blog, Customer, Data, Marketing

Themes in Accounting

September 23, 2009 By

Themes are about Saasu’s Community

Saasu has a long history of developing a mix of community ideas into our products. At the same time we like to apply some of our own ideas as an innovator where we see the opportunity. After all, we are a research and development company.

Introducing CrowdTheme™

Soon you will see stage one of Saasu’s CrowdTheme™.

CrowdTheme™ will support themes for your invoices and statements. You simply apply a theme to each template you have in Saasu (or create and submit your own). What’s more exciting is that this allows you to build a raft of workflow documents such as remittances, packing slips, purchase orders and print labels to name a few. Really it’s only limited to your imagination.

CrowdTheme™ will also be used to cover themes for Reports and Customer Self Service screens in a future release.

We will write about CrowdTheme™ in detail at our Product Blog in coming days.

Innovation background

At the moment Saasu crowd sources ideas from our blog, websites and application into our development candidate list. One such popular request was multiple templates for invoices. Many of our customers wanted to send invoices and quotes using more than one brand for their business. Slight changes between invoices and quotes for specific circumstances are another reason.

In essence the request we receive are what our customers want to do rather than how they want to do it. So this is where Saasu comes in with the innovation twist. We work out ways to solve the problem but at the same time create innovative approach that we think will add a whole new layer of benefit. We have to do this as it’s in our company mantra to create extremes in price relative to competitors while also creating extreme benefits.

Not wanting to let an opportunity go we decided it was time to use a themes approach we have wanted to put into Saasu that goes back to when we started blogging in 2003.

It was also a result of identifying that there is a vast complexity of international reporting and documentation requirements in accounting. We always felt that in the end only crowd sourcing themes and templates solves this issue. New document themes can be quickly added by the whole community and shared in a social service model and then applied to individual Saasu templates. This reduces the development cost and thus the cost of our communities Saasu subscription. More features for less cost = win win for all.

What’s this mean for the future of accounting?

We believe that Web3.0 is now starting to form it’s foundations. Companies like Saasu will increasingly allow users to design web applications by their use or by their own design (or a combination of these approaches). Themes are one mechanism that allow this. They will start to extend beyond Content Management Systems.

We also believe the web is becoming more and more organic as it gets a life of it’s own above it’s many tiny masters, the people who use it and the people who build on it.

Filed Under: Blog, Ideas, Online Accounting, Tech

Giant Perspective on Energy

August 27, 2009 By

One of the most important things we can do as a human species is take a step back or change our perspective when we look at a problem. In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, Robin William’s character, has his students stand on their desks in order to change their perspective.

This advert for the RWE found on Vimeo is another example of how the problems seem quite small but also the solutions are here and quite do-able when looked at from the giants perspective.

How could you change your perspective when looking at your business?

Filed Under: Blog, Ecosystem, Ideas, Marketing

What does your web content look like?

August 25, 2009 By

Ever wondered what your content profile looks like? Word clouds can help highlight keywords and other language patterns in your content. Wordle a nifty website lets you generate fun word clouds by simply cutting content from a document or website and pasting it into a window that then generates a word cloud.

I generated the following cloud from Saasu’s About page on our website to see what the content looked like. Visit the full size image on Wordle. Hat tip to the Stubborn Mule where I first read about this bit of fun.

saasu-word-cloud-425.png

Saasu.com/about Word cloud by Wordle

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Tech

Seeking Tips to Get Online?

July 13, 2009 By

Service Seeking is a Saasu customer who’s business is getting businesses competing head to head to try and win work from a buyer. Service Seeking produced a Start Up Online series of videos. Saasu was included in one of the videos – thanks Jeremy and Oliver for the mention!

Saasu use a couple of the tools mentioned in the video (below) which is the third in the series. It was nice to see we think alike. One tool is tech related but the others can be applied to most business models.

Got a video about what technology or services you use in your business? Let us know.

Filed Under: Blog, Customer, Ecosystem, Ideas, Tech

Web 3.0 Data Generation

July 9, 2009 By

Ever wondered what Web3.0 is shaping up to be? There are two things generally agreed in the technology industry. It’s not clear and it’s complex.

The following presentation on this topic is from my talk at CeBIT Webciety this year. The topic was What web Web3.0 will look like. This is all about the "Data" and the "Data Generation". Concepts such as the Semantic Web, Data-on-Data and more recently the Datarati have evolved in recent years to deal with the concepts.

If you are interested in the data area and how to use your business data to influence your business then Will Scully-Power’s blog is a great read. Previously of MarkSydney (part of the M&C Saatchi Group) he is seeding a new business in the data space.

We generally upload our presentations to Slideshare. See ~ Saasu | Marc Lehmann | Peter Cooper

Web3.0 Data Generation
View more presentations from Marc Lehmann.
Filed Under: Add-ons, Blog, Data, Ecosystem, Ideas, SaaS, Tech

Webciety 2009

May 11, 2009 By

webciety2009.jpgOn Friday before Silicon Beach drinks I had a catchup with the other Webciety companies that will be at CeBIT Sydney over the next 3 days along with Saasu.

The Webciety pavilion focuses on web-based society. It features SaaS web applications like Saasu, mobile web, wikis, web communities, blogs, microblogs and other interactive Internet services which are making our lives increasingly digital and ever easier.

Webciety is a major success born out of CeBIT in Germany. All the Webciety participants are speaking at some point over the 3 days at the Webciety Pavilion. See the webciety speaking program for details. I’m speaking at 11:00am on Thursday the 14th on the topic of:

What will Web3.0 look like?
Web3.0 is in early stages, but the picture isn’t clear. Web3.0 is bigger than the sum of it’s parts and accordingly we have trouble seeing what it is.

Filed Under: Blog, SaaS, Saasu News

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
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