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.

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.

I was going through my e-mail this morning and noticed that I use the “Starred” feature in Gmail to remind me when I promise something to a customer. At Saasu we have started tracking promises using Saasu activities.

I guess as business people we all probably have some room for improvement in fulfilling on promises. Are we tracking our promises well enough? To-do lists capture many of them but what about those fleeting promises that are actually bigger than you think?

You would think all businesses would be great at tracking promises. Especially since most people are very worried about what people think of them and their business. Integrity is probably one of the most important values in a business.

The reason our businesses are less than perfect at keeping and tracking promises is because our businesses a built on people. Those people are only human, they forget, make mistakes, run out of resources to deliver on promises etc. So systems can help with this problem.

At Saasu we track defects, support and feature requests daily. All of which are promises. When we miss promise dates I personally feel it so we are always trying to improve on the system. Sure we could stop promising but that’s just a cop out. Our customers are paying us money to develop, improve and keep ahead.

Create an Activity type called Promises in Saasu.

One way we are doing this is by using Saasu activities to start tracking Promises. You can do this also. Create a Tag called Promise and give it type Activity. Put all your promises into Saasu as Promise Activities. You then have an easy way to list/print/track your promises, due dates and attribute them to the right people.

Anyone got any other ways they track their promises, work or personal?

Pic: Discoodoni on flickr.com

Clone, Connect, Automate – saving time and reducing errors is just the beginning.

One the of great things about SaaS is the ability to opt-in permanently (or on a transaction by transaction) basis to information from a counter-party such as supplier, customer, employee or other legal entity you ‘trade’ with in a broader sense.

We call this automated exchange of information ‘Transaction Cross-Docking’ or TCD, just like the traditional cross-docking of pallets of physical materials in warehouses (more…)

Sources of quality ideas and ways to manage them

Are you starved for new ideas or do you find yourself seeing so many ideas out there that sometimes you feel the information floods over you? Either way, there are idea sources and filtering techniques that can help.

Do you find yourself so time poor that you can’t spend 2 hours reading a high quality book on a new concept or global trend? In 20 minutes with the right material (there is some right here) you can get the same outcome.

Any idea or piece of information can be slotted into three clear realms or stages of knowing that a gentleman called Plato did some groundwork on without the benefit of technology to accelerate his learning:

1. What you know you know
2. What you know you don’t know – or know a little about but not enough to be of much use
3. What you don’t know you don’t know – blind spots to which you are completely oblivious

Opportunity exists in that final point, we would like to share some quality sources with you.

Solving Blind Spots

TED – Supported by BMW. It is the university degree that doesn’t exist yet, snippets of greatness. Leaders in their field give you emotional and passionate slide show and video dumps in 20-30 minute waves. Their life is devoted to ideas and theories. Fascinating describes TED well. These people are consumed by their passion for an area of life or business. You will learn about cutting edge ideas changing our lives and the next generation’s too. For example visual technologies, organic design and other potentially profound concepts that will alter your thinking and maybe reconsider your business model and outlook on your industry or even your life.

Slideshare – You will need to do some surfing but there are some fantastic presentations in this website. One example on brand management is a ‘must read’.

Are you information efficient? Apply a ROI test to your information gathering

How many of your books, magazines, blog reads fall into this last category of filling you blind spots? This is a time saving filter we can all use to decide what we read and don’t. Reading content you know about is still important because occasionally you hit the blind spot needle in the haystack. You do pay a higher price to get it, your time.

Be critical, assess what you read regularly, assess what you attend in terms of conferences and the like. We are very quick in business to apply measurement to assess spending money on projects, advertising and marketing. This applies equally to time, valuable time spent on learning, reading and watching.

The big problem with technology is that it can be so darn good you want to use it all. Making matters worse, it’s cheaper and cheaper so there are less purchase barriers.

Like all consumption, too much technology will give you business lethargy. Wasted time, wasted investment and the scary one – redundant technology (that’s the kind you stopped using almost as soon as you paid for it).

The golden rules of technology investment:

1. Use a few really good technologies to keep it simple.
2. Make sure you make full use of those technologies.
3. Be prepared to change a technology for a better one.

Use A Few Really Good Technologies To Keep It Simple

What is the turning point where buying technology stops generating productivity gains. I’d argue it is a lot sooner than you think. Complexity costs money and distractions cost money. What is a really good technology:

Good Engineering and Design

The automotive industry has proven this time and again. Engineer and design well and the market will be all over your business to buy your goods and services. People will pay disproportionate amounts of money versus the practical gains. Does Hyundai really underperform a BMW when taking you from A to B. No, but the BMW driver is willing to pay for the design and engineering difference that gives them sheer driving pleasure. You can have 3 or 4 Hyundai’s for the same money. The point being it is disproportionate assessment of value by the consumer. People don’t buy on price, it’s a 2nd or 3rd order consideration.

Photo by The Aga

Automation Creates Time Where It Didn’t Exist

I always say to people,

Experiences and time are limited in life, money isn’t.

The number one thing you all want more of in your life and seem powerless to get it is time. Automation using technology buys time. Dishwashers, Email Campaign engines, Cars (automate walking) and Finance Engines like Saasu.com) are just a few obvious ones

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Is Not The Goal – Terminal Effect On Equity Value Is More Important

Good technology has a low total cost of ownership. What rubbish! Care about your terminal effect. It may cost you ‘x’ to buy, train, support, implement but this is not the terminal effect on the value of your business. This terminal value is the present value of all effects on your business over time if you discount them back to today. You don’t have to do the maths, just understand the concept and your mind will think differently. This can mean extremely obscure effects like not dual keying a contact from a business card into your accounting and CRM system. This one task might save a sales person 10 minutes a day being 2,000 minutes a year. That’s just one person. When I say total I mean total, you need to look at the knock-on effects the technology causes, the productivity gains and costs associated. Go way beyond software sales peoples TCO rubbish.

Make full Use Of Those Technologies

At some point you need to stop adding technology to you business process, stick to what you have got and concentrate on getting stuff done, better, faster and cheaper using what you have. For a practical way to do this just get a piece of paper and a pencil. Write a list in order of the work flow, production line or whatever is appropriate. Pick a couple of things in that list that cause you problems, delays, losses and then get a second bit of paper and write a list (in order) of what you need to invest/do to fix them. Keep work on the worst parts of your technology solutions and you will end up producing a Nintendo Wii or an Apple iPod product like result.

Be Prepared To Change A Technology For A Better One

Sometimes you need to make the time investment and move to a newer technology that will pay you a return over time just like any good investment. If you suffer from procrastination or short-term thinking you probably don’t do this one very well. The reality is it takes an upfront investment in time and money. Its the ant’s preparation versus the grasshopper’s complacency.

This isn’t rocket science, it’s quite the opposite, you buy the rocket scientists that will help you create time where it didn’t exist and build quality into your product or service in a continually improving way.

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

1. Citibank goes Salesforce.com

The turning point has arrived for the move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a global business trend with Citigroup dropping Microsoft, SAP and Oracle for 30,000 staff in order to switch to Salesforce.com as their CRM. Read more on Reuters.

The world’s largest bank is not alone. Citibank joins a handful of other major companies with over 20,000 staff using Salesforce.com including Japan Post which has 60,000 users on Salesforce.com according to the press release.

Salesforce.com claim to be the world’s largest on-demand (SaaS) customer relationship management system. By our estimates they are on track to beat US$800m revenue over the next year.

2. Someone big goes Google Docs

Just as interesting is a rumour just in from Menlo Park USA that Google is about to sign a single corporate account with 30,000 staff to switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs and the corporate version of Gmail (which we think is cool).

If you haven’t seen Google Docs personal edition or the business version called Google Apps for my domain you should, they are excellent productivity tools and enablers for moving from old style software to full SaaS, just like Saasu.com is financial management. The easiest way to start with just a personal email account (you can work up to the other stuff) is called Gmail.

For those who did not see the earlier launch, Saasu.com already integrates instantly with Salesforce.com right now.

It’s funny where you pick up great insights. I was watching a national gardening program and one of the winners of their annual Gardener Of The Year prize was asked by the host how she succeeded in building such an amazing garden. Her answer floored me…

I just keep improving the worst part.

Well it seems obvious now, to the point of making me feeling a bit sheepish. I love this bit of wisdom. It fits the Saasu philosophy of simplifying life so perfectly. Why waste time deciding where to focus, there are so many forks to take.

It is a different approach, there could be inefficiencies. When landscapers build gardens they get the volume discount on time and effort. For example, if you are landscaping an entire garden at once you’ll need less waste skips and get more efficiency into the big clearing and weeding exercise. You can create inefficiencies through not doing things in bulk. My first business I owned as a teenager was a landscaping business and I learnt this lesson quickly.

So do the potential advantages outweigh the disadvantages in your business?

I think you have to list them and evaluate. As an example in our web application business:

• It would have us concentrate on one thing at a time.
• It would lower communication burden.
• Including lowering interruptions. See my post called Business Interruptus
• As a result the documentation and email levels might drop.
• Mapping dependencies and impacts on other parts of the business would be simpler.
• If we were looking for one thing to improve/add we would be much more picky about it.
• It would mean shorter periods between releases.
• The management time expense could drop if you believe multiple parallel projects suck management time. I certainly do!

What would this approach do for your business, your product, your daily time allocation for work or family?

Bacn is simply spam you asked for. It’s the dozens of emails you get that you would like to get (sometimes) but they still annoy you and more importantly they chew up your precious time.
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Productivity is king, I have noticed I am most productive when isolated with controlled connectivity. Let me explain. By controlled connectivity I’m referring to having control in who connects to me and when. In this situation people can’t get me immediately on a land line, mobile, Skype or Instant Messenger but they can send me e-mails, leave voice mails or a message with our receptionist. This means I can work on that one thing I really need to get done.

Labs developers in our business have to get in a ‘zone’. I’m guilty of exploring ideas with our labs developers, which interrupts them out of their zone. This definitely has benefits for the business because we can get a quick, highly qualified feedback on IP allowing management to get new information that helps us decide whether to drop the idea or keep exploring it further. But what’s the hidden cost?

Where I used to work in an investment bank trading floor it was interruption extremes. Multiple phone lines going, sales people asking for prices, brokers shouting down open voice lines. Zero zone time. Coupled with other peoples conversations, laughter, TV’s blaring CNN or Bloomberg it all made for a testy space to think. You couldn’t write VB spreadsheet macro until after hours when it was quieter. You couldn’t think up interesting structured products or trading ideas during work hours. I used to do that late at night or 2am in the morning in front of the PC. That was my zone time.

I’m more and more convinced that some of the answers to solving this issue are in controlling the environment by having rules of interruption. Secondly, looking at it case by case. Asking ourselves who disrupts and why. Is it lack of training? Is it something they do to distract themselves? Is it to impress?

Great ideas in life come to you when you are thinking in chess mode. 3 steps ahead isn’t easy when you have a barrage of people and device interruption.

Dealing with interruptions

Self interruption – the shoulder devil

Let’s start with the least admitted but most common – You! Yes it’s you, that little voice in your head that says “go and get a coffee” or “no don’t do this task its boring, do something fun” or my favourite “that can wait until tomorrow”. This little shoulder devil is your worst interrupter of all. He will take you away from that task at hand that you had diligently decided was important. Probably a task that you scheduled and planned to do. Recognise this interrupter and give him the “Shh! Shh! Shh!”. (Picture Doctor Evil (Austin Powers) giving his son Scott the. Shh! Shh! Shh!)

Get questions into a forum or queue

This allows the answerer to answer in their own time. It allows other people to answer the questions which helps with turnaround time for the questioner. It allows prioritisation by a project manager, team leader or the like.

Improve information availability

How easily can someone find an answer to something in your organisation? For example if someone has a broken printer can they find the warranty themselves or do they need to ask someone? If a new sales person has a question about their client that goes back to when their boss used to look after them can they get notes on his conversations? Do you have access to original voice mails or emails for those conversations and negotiations? Systems answer these question, people don’t need to. The more available something is the less chance there is someone will need to interrupt you. We attach warranties, licenses, brochures or even voice mails and contracts against their related transactions in Saasu.

Search first, ask questions later

Create a culture where people “search first and ask question later” or try their own research path before disrupting people. Train them to assess the cost benefit of research versus asking. It’s quite simple really. If you spend 5 minutes and can’t even find a clue then maybe you should interrupt or log a support inquiry and move onto something else in the meantime.

You can scale interruption to your benefit

When you right down an answer to a question you can reproduce it a million times. When you speak it it’s lost forever. Procedure manuals and corporate intranets might seem a bit like a waste of time for smaller businesses but that attitude is most likely coming from a place of “sales is more important than anything” or “building my widgets comes first”. The reality is that most of us can type at least half as fast as we speak. Accordingly an answer to a question can be written on the fly. Simply adopt the policy that if the question is likely to be asked again that you answer it in writing instead of voice. Copy and paste to you intranet, wiki, faq, procedures manual or help system. This solves the problem for future people asking the same question and is a ready supply of training content for your organisation. Make sure this system is searchable.

Capture lots of info upfront BUT do it efficiently

I’ve lost count of how many times someone has asked me an accounting question for info that could easily have been gotten if the information had been available to them online. This was obviously a major reason we built Saasu as an online system and more recently the reason we are building in Employee Self Service (ESS). Actively build ways for people to solve the problems. By doing this you are coincidently getting more resource as interruption falls in your organisation.

Boomerang interruption

You throw a promise in the air only to have it come back and hit you in the back of the head. You say you’ll do something and you don’t so a person later interrupts you to call you on your promise (and probably at an inconvenient time for you). Not phoning customers or suppliers back has the same effect. They ring you and guess what, it’s probably not at a great time but being a service oriented business you have to drop it and help them.

The multi-tasker

The multi-tasker can have too much on the go at once that it becomes very inefficient causing self interruption. This person will really notice the difference when they are forced to work on one thing due to a circumstance. This happens to me when I take my kids swimming. I only have my Blackberry an accordingly I half an hour of uninterrupted email answering and archiving. I get more email done in this half hour than I do all day in the office.

Device interruption

Devices are just like people but just more persistent. People know sometimes to leave you alone when you have the “grumpies” on your face. However your phone couldn’t care less. It will buzz until you through it across the room. Limiting how devices interrupt you is my number one tip. It may have a slight accessibility cost but the net output you pickup helps more people and more powerfully, in a leveraged kind of way. It’s simply better, try it.

Turn interruptions into a serial stream instead of a parallel onslaught

A good example is a big todo list. Often you’ll have things people have asked you to do, little interruptions during the day can end up creating a big to do list for you. We’ll get straight with the interrupter. Tell them you’ll get back to them but I’m not sure when (I put them on my do later list which doesn’t have a time line).

Multi-tasking leave no room for interruption

If your a good multi-tasker you can get a lot done. The problem is that multi-tasking in itself is a skill. You are doing several things at once, it requires mental and physical agility. The question is can you take the interrupter throwing you an extra ball to juggle or is five balls your limit? Leave a little room for “overflow workload” as I call it.

Preventing interruption frustration

This one can really make a persons day miserable. If everyone comes to you because you know your u-know-what then you start to feel irritated, used, resentful (that you are continually saving the disrupter) etc. I have seen very good people leave organisations because their success has lead them to be an authority and accordingly they become everyone’s help desk for all their problems. Now that job begins to weary very quickly. Identify staff who like like becoming a victim of this and act fast.

Do hotel’s have the patent on a “Do Not Disturb” sign?

I don’t understand why we don’t use these more. We can do it with Skype and a hotel room but that’s about it. Get one for your office door to give you that hour you need on a mentally critical task. E-mail needs a virtual secretary it in my opinion. A great feature for a e-mail client would be an auto responder that tells you what the average reply time of the recipient is and not to expect an immediate answer. In sales this is a big no no though. There’s nothing stopping you responding with a 20 second email that reads “Thanks Jim. I’m just working on something. Back to you soon.” At least then they know you are busy and you have managed their expectation about getting an answer.

Is it really urgent

Have people learned to ask themselves this question before they interrupt someone who’s obviously in deep thought or occupied with something that would have them better left alone for the moment.

Are they really asking the right person

Are they asking the person who’s nice and helpful or are they asking the person who knows the best answer? This is what creates helpful person syndrome that leads to the helper sometimes, flipping their lid and leaving as everyone piles their problems on them.

Interruption overload

You have so many interruptions and problems of your own that you enter a weird realm of not being bale to prioritize. You focus is so shattered by all the interruption that you can’t think clearly. I imagine it’s a bit like a shell shock. I used to get this in my younger days but the trading floor environment taught me triage techniques which help you get around this. What you do is you stop, better still isolate yourself. an ask this one question 3 times. The repetition clears the mind. “What’s the No1 Priority? What’s the No1 Priority? What’s the No1 Priority?”. It will come to you pretty quickly after this because you have altered you mind trajectory. Just prior to doing this the little voice in you head is asking just as many questions as it’s hearing. This “question noise” in your head is the problem.

Cure for interruption-itis

People who have been interrupted one to many times get this disease. It makes them angry, blame the interrupter and just want to leave their job. The cure is to get a combi-van and go on a surfing holiday!

Got any more? Let us know.