Connect2Field with digital pens, a new way to work

July 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

Connect2field has released a technology allowing services and trades business owners to write up a job or invoice on a form with a Digital Pen and have it automagically appear in your Saasu file. It’s impressive to say the least. I’ve used it and I have to say that when you see it you will think it’s from a James Bond movie. It digitises your writing so your transactions are straight into your accounts via the Connect2Field to Saasu connector.

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.

Filed Under: Add-ons, Automation, Efficiency, SaaS

What’s your unsubscribe rate?

February 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

It’s a key measure for emarketers and spammers worldwide, and there’s still some discrepancy around success… and definite failure. 0.2%? 2%? 20%?

But, today I was reading an email and wanted a few more options. No, I didnt need to view it in my browser. I wanted to unsubscribe.

I wasn’t interested by it at all.

The only issue – it was a personal message, and as far as I’m aware, there are no regulations around individual emails and one-click unsubscribe links…

But it got me thinking.

Ad men, designers, marketers and the rest of us spend countless hours ensuring our public campaigns are the right length, our mailing list is up to date, the call to action is clear, and the desired outcome after hitting the send button is known…

But, do we apply the same principle to our personal correspondence?

Why use 400 words, when 120 will do? Why schedule a meeting request, when you can let the recipient come back in their own time?

Anyone who has read REWORK knows the hugely successful 37signals team focus on sharing information when it needs to shared, on a need to know basis. Thus eliminating disruptions to the rest of their team. This is something we strive to do here at Saasu.

They also view meetings as toxic and ‘ASAP’ as poison – but of course not everyone is ready to take this stand, and you do still need to get together, occasionally.

But, how many of the messages we send just sit there unread? Do you need to /cc: those 8 other staff into your next email? And of course, what’s the reason for emailing in the first place?

That’s my fleeting thought for the day. And a heads up – if we’re already communicating this way, and my next message is no more than a few lines… You now know it’s nothing personal.

If you’re curious about shaking up the way you work, I highly recommend a flick through REWORK. It’s not the be all and end all of running a business, but with heavyweights like Seth Godin giving it the thumbs up it certainly offers a fresh perspective on the status quo.

Disclaimer: I think email is a great tool. But it’s not the only tool.

Filed Under: Efficiency, Ideas, Marketing

Love Your LMS

February 3, 2011 By

Yes, I’ve unashamedly borrowed the Litmos tag line for the title of this post. But can you blame me? The Saasu Training Team love the flexibility the system affords.

When we launched the Saasu Accounting Partner Programme we realised the most crucial part of the process (training) was going to be the hardest.

Cue: Litmos LMS

To set the scene: We have staff spread across Australia and New Zealand, each of whom required upskilling, as well as an international customer base. They work on Macs, PCs and an assortment of mobile devices. They operate in different time zones, and maintain their own office hours. There’s no consistency.

Each of these individuals needed to be taught about the latest developments in our product, and have their progress assessed. Handing out awards for online accounting competency is a serious business, and so we needed a platform that let us control everything.

We quickly identified that an online, on-demand LMS (learning management system) was essential.

eLearning is a rapidly expanding industry, and it’s no surprise as it offers incredible flexibility. It’s a concept adopted by businesses of all sizes. From local franchises, to large multi-nationals.

We looked at several options, but nothing we came across seemed up to the job. Then we found Litmos.

Their claim ‘easy to use’ had to stand up to two tests… Easy for the training team to set up, and easy for customers anywhere to use.

As it turns out, it is – and we’ve been impressed with the system for a number of reasons:

- Custom branding (we wanted it to fit our identity)
- Excellent support from the Litmos team themselves
- Adding and assigning courses to users is now a 2 second job
- Notifications on assessments are automatic

But the best thing about Litmos, is that it isn’t a one-off resource. Clients can sign in to review presentations as many times as they like.

We now have a series of courses set up in our LMS, each one consisting of an informative presentation followed by an assessment. The training team can quickly modify, assign, and assess each of these, and our users can see their progress at a glance. Having a system that not only simplifies the learning process, but also makes keeping track of user activity easier is a real bonus.

Our team are only just scratching the surface of the product’s capabilities, and we can’t wait to modify our processes to make use of the advanced features. Check out the Litmos product tour to find out more.

Have you completed one of the Saasu training courses? We’d love to know your thoughts.

Want to sign up for the courses? Lost your sign in details? Get in touch with Support and we’ll set you up.

Or are you a business looking to improve your training experience? We highly recommend getting in touch with Nicole and the Litmos Team.

Filed Under: Efficiency, Ideas

Let’s get together (online)

February 2, 2011 By

There’s been quite some noise in the blogosphere lately about the way we train our users, so we think it’s time to give a run down on the tools we’re finding most helpful.

In this post we’ll look at GoToMeeting, which as those of you who have attended our webinars know is a great way to give sales presentations and run training sessions.

For any business looking to broaden its reach, or increase the efficiency of its sales, support and training staff, online webinars are the best way to quickly and easily run interactive sessions that add so much more value than a standard phone call.

We now have a sales team across Australia and New Zealand who can schedule upwards of 8 meetings a day, where traditional traveling around would allow only 3 or 4. Not only that, but each session they present can have multiple attendees (up to 1000!).

However, our training team use the platform the most out of anyone in the organisation, running courses from both sides of the Tasman. They can even collaborate, presenting together and creating interactive sessions for our users.

The easy planning system makes setting up sessions weeks in advance a breeze, and provides greater flexibility for those attending the courses. Instead of making them schedule their day around us, we are able to offer a range of dates and times so they can progress at their leisure.

Another bonus is that upon registering, the automated email system we’ve set up takes charge, and sends notifications to all attendees of any changes to the session date and time, and well as a convenient reminder so they don’t miss their webinar. It also lets those that missed the presentation know about viewing the recorded version, or switching to another date.

You can see a full list of features here, but the winning points for us in choosing GoToMeeting were:

- Huge savings (financially, and in time spent visiting clients in remote locations)
- International reach, to potential clients around the world
- Portable (anyone can join, from anywhere. Even on their iPad!)
- VOIP and Conference Call options
- Multiple presenters in sessions, and interactive Chat and Q&A options
- Optional session recording for those that missed the webinar

If you want to read more about these benefits, a couple of months ago an article surfaced in The Australian, in which Marc discussed how GoToMeeting has been saving our team time and enhancing our sales and training processes.

What many of us didn’t realise was that a few weeks earlier he’d been pulled aside by the GoToMeeting team themselves, and asked to give his thoughts on their product. He mentioned this in passing, but it was quickly forgotten… As it turns out, they had the cameras rolling.

After trawling the web we’ve managed to unearth the video, and so thought we’d share it with you.

Are you already using GoToMeeting, or an alternative? If so, let us know. We’re always keen to pick up tips from other users to improve the experience Saasu offers!

In our next post we’ll look at the Litmos LMS, which as well as being produced by an enthusiastic team, has been our solution to training and assessing users from all over the globe. But, for now jump over to our webinar info page and sign up for one of the sessions if you haven’t already done so.

Filed Under: Efficiency, Ideas

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

Transaction Cross Docking (TCD) creates new ecosystems

March 3, 2008 By

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.

Project Dolly

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 [Read more...]

Filed Under: Add-ons, Blog, Efficiency, Online Accounting, SaaS

Idea tsunami

February 27, 2008 By

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.

Filed Under: Blog, Efficiency, Ideas

Three principles of selecting business technology

February 6, 2008 By

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.

BMW Engineering by The Aga
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.

Filed Under: Blog, Efficiency, Ideas

SaaSification Takes Off

November 19, 2007 By

citi.gif

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.

Filed Under: Add-ons, Automation, Blog, CRM, Efficiency, SaaS

Keep Improving The Worst Part

November 16, 2007 By

worst-part.jpg

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?

Filed Under: Blog, Efficiency, Ideas
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