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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 and distribution hubs when they are being transhipped from one location to another via a middle point. It was and remains very efficient but it is still constrained by being physical. Our TCD is virtual and so much faster and more powerful.

Think of it like the ground breaking work done with cloning dolly the sheep plus a lot more because is is virtual, global and instantly accessible.

It extends on some very old concepts such as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) that have been used in (mainly closed or industry specific) trading networks for many many years. The automotive industry has been a heavy user of these principles since the seventies but it required lots of upfront investment and ongoing investment in technology infrastructure and teams. Lesser known but more influential has been the use of these technologies in trading for global capital markets such as in a world leading Australian based company I used to run.

This is not a new area for SaaS either. Saasu has been quietly working on it for about 15 months and the range of opportunities is huge. Some of our competitors have recently worked this out too so hopefully the market will learn faster about the benefits.

Cloning

At the simplest level, you receive a sales invoice from your supplier and click one button to post it in your records too. This is a step up from most alternatives because it saves re-keying effort and error risk. We call this cloning – ‘one click duplication’.

Connecting

At the same time as you clone, you may optionally choose to connect the two (distinct copies) of the (same) transaction permanently. Why? To ensure you are kept informed of changes on the originator’s end (supplier in this example). This is step up from cloning because it adds the value of change management. You may be notified of changes by the supplier and keep a record of those changes against the transaction. We call this linking ‘one click connection’.

You may also ask why two copies, why not always have one that is permanently linked? The answer is simple, this is one transaction but there are (at least) two parties to it, each are separate legal entities required to have their own records.

Automating

The next step in efficiency is optionally agreeing to do this (clone and connect with various options) for all transactions from that counter-party (e.g. supplier) automatically in future. Possibly also add-in an additional level of security for managing repudiation risk, public/private keys work well here. We call it ‘one click automation’.

Manage

Over time you can imagine these relationships with counterparties could get complex to track and manage efficiently. You need to ensure you have the right tools in place to ensure the longer term cost does not exceed the savings. More importantly, this new meta data on your ecosystem might be able to add value to your business more strategically – like benchmarking suppliers and customers.

Clone. Connect. Automate. Manage.

The great thing about SaaS transaction cross-docking is the low cost of realising those benefits, no big upfront investment or ongoing costs.

It creates a mini-ecosystem for your business just as auto makers (and trading system technology providers in capital markets) have been doing for years. This ecosystem gets extra efficiencies and retention benefits that those outside the ecosystem won’t get.

Here at Saasu we are working on all this and some even more sophisticated versions we think apply benefits to a few dozen industries. Not just as an isolated feature here or there but as a strategic multi-year multi-industry multi-release initiative that will deliver substantial business benefits in the short and long term.

A new level of competing. Bring it on!

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.

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.

You probably wonder why we don’t send many emails to you from Saasu. Well this is why.

We don’t want to be a stone in your shoe unless we have something very valuable to give you or very important to tell you. You should only get emails for important things like major new features that save you time or the immediate responses our service team gives to your queries.

Stopping Bacn

1. Stop! Why are you putting yourself on those email lists? Will it improve your business, your life and save you time? If so great go right ahead … Otherwise, fry that Bacn!
2. Give your permission to quality correspondence sources and ditch the rest. I rely on RSS reader services to avoid filling my email inbox with too much email Bacn except the emails that save me money or time with their magic.
3. Apply continual improvement to your in-box. Ditch ‘underperforming’ Bacn (shall we call it fatty or short on good protein?) email and add new better leaner Bacn email. (Heh bloggers, same goes for your RSS feeds).
4. Don’t be ashamed to stop Bacn from you dearest friends. Those funny jokes, feel good emails and power-points that can be viral bombs cost you time (which equals dollars). Send them a ‘please remove’ email. Just preface your request to be removed of their list with your honesty, “I have too much email so I’m cutting back to critical business communication” or my favourite scare tactic “I don’t want you to be at fault if I get a power-point from you that takes down the companies network”. That will usually stop them sending it to all your other friends who have well branded company email addresses.
5. Start valuing your time higher and you will be far more careful giving people permission to do anything to you at all including Bacn email.

And for the other end of the cable/fibre…

If you are a business trying to seek your client’s or prospect’s permission to email you MUST give your reader something of value. I don’t mean nice to read email or an email newsletter. I mean give them tangible value:

1. Ideas that are more akin to intellectual property with value.
2. Money in the form of hard cash, free gear and decent discounts. If its less than 10% don’t bother.
3. Unpublished or very recent information (not regurgitated content).
4. Important product and service news you really need to tell your customers (the test here is will they be annoyed if you don’t tell them).

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.

The work environment and how we work in it is one of the biggest sustainability factors we will face. However, it is second only to the impact we have at a global level by selling an environmentally sustainable product such as the Saasu web finance engine.

If Saasu prevents thousands of old style software licenses from being sold then we can facilitate behavioural change in the workplace that has a positive impact on the environment. Scanning instead of photocopying, emailing instead of mailing and signing in to the website instead of manufacturing CD’s and paper help manuals. The list goes on and on. This has a potential impact of saving thousands of trees, reducing energy consumption and many other ecological knock-ons.

Indirectly teaching thousands of people to do their work in a different way through SaaS technology helps humans achieve sustainable business practices and save money doing it!

Do you want a paper based help manual or a living tree as your legacy?

It’s your choice when you decide how and what you buy. That is the power of those who can and want to help by carrying and using a “green wallet” as we call it here at Saasu.

Aspects to be explored include; Ethical, sustainable, visually appealing, human habitable, brand building, a great vibe.

Our Eco List

Efficient use of resources

• Scan it, don’t copy it – Create procedures which lead to scanning being the preferred option but still allow for copying. Let’s be realistic.
• Less paper – but not paperless. Again, let’s be realistic:
  • 100% recycled and not heavily bleached – Look into the production cycle for the paper if you can.
  • Review you printer and their sources – We currently source from Whirlwind Print
  • Keep marketing collateral to a page or two at the most – Re-design layouts by collapsing the content into simple, tightly designed material.
• No paper help manuals – paper presentations or otherwise are not offered to customers or prospects unless specifically requested.

Effective use of technology

• Subscribe to online services (SaaS) – Don’t buy boxed software! It has loads of paper manuals, cardboard dividers, plastic wrap. Producing it costs the environment a small carbon fortune.
  We love SaaS and don’t have to make any “green” apologies for it:
  • Accounting – Saasu.com (plug)
  • Spreadys, Presos and Docs – Google Apps
  • Email – Gmail
  • Email Sending – Campaign Monitor
  • Service Tracking – Trac
  • Stock Photo’s – iStockPhoto.com
• IP phones (VoIP) using existing internet infrastructure – Save installing and maintaining additional phone lines and services. We believe that if we aren’t using surplus capacity net energy cost could actually be higher with VoIP so think carefully about this one. We like the Philips VoIP 321
• Fax to PC – Prevent the need to buy Fax machines and reduces phone line burdens. We use Mbox
• Voice mail to PC – prevent the need to buy Voice mail telco infrastructure.
• Downloads in lieu of paper – bank, credit card and some supplier paper statements are no longer necessary.

Saasu Green Web Finance Engine

• Email invoices – increases cash flow velocity which improves economic efficiency. Reduces mail and paper burden.
• Direct bank payments – less paperwork, easy to PDF or save as a file (saves scanning and printing).
• Email payslips – save mail (fuel/capital), paper and preparation labour
• Online time sheeting – saves faxes, paper and labour duplication.
• Single data source efficiency – Duplication costs the environment. Having a single data source can create efficiencies in communication, report printing, backups, and other aspects.

SOHO’s and Telecommuting

• Long term sea change – SaaS improves businesses connectivity to the city.
• Lower transport consumption – SaaS enables work from home online.
• Virtual Services – Saasu enables disabled bookkeepers to work without travel, web developers, secretaries and accountants can provide virtual services. They can service customer from their SOHO and reduce travel consumption and infrastructure requirements.
• Centralised Infrastructure – In organisations like Saasu we need to look at the trade off that exists between additional infrastructure costs required for staff to work from home versus centralised infrastructure in an office. For example every home office needs a printer but the office can have everyone share one. Also the shared heating and lighting can create a net gain. Heating 100 employees in an office is cheaper than heating 100 separate houses or even the occupied rooms in those houses. These are the negatives that are sometimes forgotten in the Telecommuting equation. In short it isn’t clear without proper analysis on a business by business basis. Even then you need to analyse your logistics, procurement and sales impacts based on the SOHO worker versus the in-office worker.
• Centralising people around an intermodel public transport – this is clearly a plus of CBD locations which tend to have everyone use public transport. Our old location wasn’t as convenient so there was more drive to work employees.
• Office versus SOHO productivity has an environmental impact – consider productivity trade offs of working from home versus a central office location. For example if you lose 10% productivity across each employee then you have to look at the cost of this from a financial and an environmental perspective. A 20% loss in customer sales? Expending more resource to make up the shortfall in productivity? Lost sales of your green product or service – an environmental opportunity cost? What’s the net result? It’s never as simple as saying I helped the environment by working from home. 1st degree analysis is nearly always wrong in observing these environmental impact situations.
• Discourage Driving – Not providing car spaces helps, make employees pay if they want a car space.
• Office Bikes – Quick, cheap, and helps your staff get fit. Supply helmets!

Saasu’s Green Investments

• Banking Green – We lend our cash surplus to the worlds greenest bank Westpac Bank
• Green Investment – Saasu is an investor in the soon to be launched Carbon Offset broker/arranger Iceus

Maximise natural light in your office

• Remove walls and use glass – Glass is expensive to produce in terms of energy but the life span savings are significant when it comes to decreasing the artificial light burden and reducing future waste by building with recyclable materials.
• Light colour pallet advantage – Paint white walls and ceilings or in very light colours. Using colour for feature walls only means less pigments/dies are used and it intensifies the available natural light.
• Reflective surfaces can help intensify natural light – Glass, aluminium and stainless steel surfaces are some examples.
• Presence sensitive lights in lift areas – They’re off until someone comes out of the lift.

Scrubbing our air

• Plants – preferably edible ones like chilli’s, herbs and the like that we can put in our Laksa’s!
• Access to air – our balcony, employees can get some chill time in Hyde Park on their laptops.
• Ozone – Using the photocopier less will mean less stinking ozone particles.
• No smoking – Definitely a no even in outdoor public areas.

Making sure you have a Green Wallet

• Know your footprint and know what it costs to clean it – We are calculating footprint in consideration of buying carbon credits with proceeds from subscriptions to offset energy used by our servers for the life of the subscription.
• Green buying – Use portals like the soon to be released Iceus (plug) to track our footprint and buy green consumables
• Recycled buying – recycled papers, print cartridges.
• Glass and aluminium for in house drinks – In house drinks should all be bought in aluminium or glass preferably as they have the highest probability of being recycled.
• Communal Media consumables – Magazines, newspaper and journals to be kept in common areas. Decline free publications where online version exists.

Kitchen and bathrooms

• Washable towels – instead of paper kitchen towels.
• Speciality or heritage dish – have a weekly or monthly turn by each person in you team make their speciality or heritage dish. It saves you consuming takeaway containers (saves time and money – food production in bulk). Helps you get in touch with what they eat, who they are. Food is an important part of community. Kas, one of our coders makes an awesome chicken curry with sambal (fried onion and chilli). Rips ya lips off!
• No plastic utensils – no plastic cups, bags, cutlery.
• Comfortable breakout area – time away from the screens is an essential mind refresh.
• Get photos of where you drains go – photos of North Head and Bondi where our local outfalls are can be placed directly above the kitchen sink so no-one is tempted to drain anything that shouldn’t be.
• No instant boil devices – keeping water hot for convenience is a luxury unless you have a very high turnover kitchen. It also wastes electricity overnight so if you need to use this method put it on a timer.
• Kitchen sink drain trap – sounds obvious but they only seem to be in houses I’ve noticed.
• Green cleaning products – make sure our detergents and cleaning liquids are eco-friendly. Orange oil spray is a great one I personally love.

Eco friendly Office Equipment

• Energy Efficiency – consider energy used by computers bought. Reduce consumption rate by buying memory and not upgrading quite as often. Better to have one big 24inch screen than a couple of smaller screens. Net energy consumption should be lower (in theory). Review electric goods energy consumption before purchase.
• Scanners instead of printers – keeping with our SaaS philosophy of no-paperwork.
• Old Computer Recycling – computers are only entering their second life when they become second hand. Check out one of our customer who redistributes PC’s to offshore.
• Avoid Batteries – Our new Macs and PC’s are mouses still with their tails! Wireless mouses require batteries which is a higher cost on the environment.
• Devices on Standby – many don’t need to be such as shredders, permanent hot water boilers and photocopy machines. If you need it a lot your paper practices aren’t great, your scanner is what should be on standby!

Sustainable Office furnishings

• Glass Top Desks – Reduce wastage and asset depreciation dollars. Achieve longer lifespan and total cost of ownership. Glass dates less than other materials and can be re buffed to revamp it. Even though it has high energy consumption in production when you look at it from a life cost perspective it is quite good.
• Furniture Mobility – everything is on castor’s to allow for ease of movement and office redesign without knocking down and replacing walls.
• Minimise Ducting – wall or wireless internet connections and low cable PC/Mac options.

Recycling

• Obvious Candidates – Paper, glass and aluminium cans
• Recycling Food Waste – An in office worm farm (Digital Eskimo’s suggestion – cool idea guys!). Remember don’t feed them meat, worms are vegetarians.
• Mixed Recyclables Bin – For broken PC’s, old mobiles, printer cartridges and batteries as examples. Have a procedure for clearing the decks of these things once a month.
• Non-current PC’s – give them to Surplus Remarketers and they will ensure they are sold or recycled to reduce landfill. We love this companies idea.
• No under desk bins – they tend to collect mixed rubbish from lazy people!

Eco-behaviour

• Empower you staff to come up with green ideas – Give your staff a gift, or an early mark for coming up with an idea that adds sustainability to your office.
• Green Corporate Gifts – Emails instead of cards, corporate worm wee (idea from Digital Eskimo), donate to charity in lieu of gifts.
• Green Conference Locations – Choose conference locations based on the venues environmental track record.
• Beat Your Green Chest – Tell our peers and customers about our sustainable office practices so they catch the sustainable bug.
• Banned Products List – Make sure that you have a banned products list.

Sustainable is not possible without a sound Mind and body

• Mental sustainability – Place to have an evening staff or client drink (I like the closing scene in Boston Legal).
• I See Green – Proven to be calming and have good associations. Green plants, flowers or in our case a nice outlook onto the Sydney CBD’s Hyde Park should do the trick.
• Pet fish in the Office – They are soothing but get some native fish – Rainbows, Barramundi or Australian perch and no foreign species water plants.
• Contagious but not too sick to work – It’s easy to work from home when still a little sick or contagious when you operate a SaaS based business infrastructure.
• Create a Micro Sea Change – Stress leave can be reduced if you can offer up work from home when people are getting tense in the office environment. It’s better to say. Look spend a week working from home than to say spend a week not working.

Eco-Culture

• Ethical Attitudes – They will usually lead to environmentally sustainable ones.
• Balanced Lifestyle – Encourage a work and home life balance. See The Calm Space for inspiration.
• Green Culture – Constantly thinking and doing green.
• Exercise culture – This will tend to divert people into healthier eating and general lifestyle choices which have so many parallels with sustainability
• Culture of Re-use – Writing on the back of used paper, re-using boxes for storage, re-using manila folders etc. Non confidential printed paper can be used at home for the kids to draw on. See the post I wrote on WWF’s FutureMakers.com website

Office Life

• Use that Hot Server Air – duct hot air from server rooms into main premises during winter to reduce heating load
• Air conditioning as a last resort – I admit in our office that we have limited control as we occupy one floor of the building
• Who’s turning the lights off – when you go home does the last person turn them off?
• Power Save Mode – Turn on the power save feature on your computers

Sustaining sustainability – leveraging and improving sustainability

• Environmental Officer – Make sure you appoint an environmental officer
• Triple Bottom Line – Track and record your footprint, get rated and improve from your baseline.

Learn and Contribute to the Global Green Knowledge Base

Keep researching new ideas, use your blog, share your ideas, create conversations which will generate IP that will help the environment for all. Try these websites to get yourself in the mood;

• Future Makers
• Synapse Chronicles
• Inhabitant
• EcoGeek.com
• WWF

Credit to Grant Young who has always been an environmental inspiration to our company.

Quite often people ask how we use Saasu in our own business. That’s a big question so I won’t try an answer it all in this post so I’ll start with a couple of time saving tips we use.

We have hundreds of small dollar value online bills to pay in the Saasu business. Everything from domain names to application subscriptions like Google Apps. In short stacks of credit card transactions paid by directors and staff. How do we handle this efficiently:

One Touch Philosophy

When you receive an email bill for a payment you just made by credit card save it as a .PDF, .EML, .TXT or other file and immediately create the purchase transaction and attach this document to it. Go straight back to your email account when done and file/archive the email. Done, gone and dealt with.

The costs of not doing it this way are:

• You re-read the email bill another two or three times before you enter it.
• You lose the email bill in your already burgeoning email jungle.
• You risk deleting/archiving the email bill not having booked the expense and thus you miss the tax deduction or reimbursement.
• As the email bill gets older your memory fades and you contract a disease called “I can’t remember why I paid this?”
• It just gets lost in the ether – that place where things go when they aren’t as important as day to day survival

If you don’t book your own expenses just forward the email to your accounts person and have them follow the one touch process.

Another approach which works nicely is to import your credit card file (use the bank or credit card company’s export file e.g. Virgin uses the same format as Westpac) and simply clear the personal expenses using the “Delete Selected” button while you are in the “List of Uncategorised Imported Transactions” screen. You have to trust your credit card issuer and your suppliers to use this method. This Book-it-Danno approach doesn’t have much accounting rigor but it can save stacks of time. I’ll leave that pay-off dilemma with you

Tip: Always put the suppliers invoice/bill number in your transaction. It makes it so much easier to find later and reconcile the suppliers account. You would be amazed how often you can accidentally pay for things twice (or they charge you twice). This will help highlight these occurrences.

Automating Regular Boring Stuff

Setup an automated purchase for constant amounts [Use:Main Menu>Setup>Recurring Transactions>Purchases]. As an example create a recurring purchase for $49 that you pay by direct debit to your Telco provider on the 15th of each month for your internet connection.

Always do a reconciliation during your accounting cycle period-end when you use automation to ensure payments have actually occurred. You never know when an expired credit card could result in failed payments as an example. Also, doing reconciliation’s might be annoying but it’s easier to tick something off than data enter the same things 12 times a year!

To recover your computer after a crash, virus, failed upgrade or other reason you should only need to perform very basic tasks. However, this is only the case when you are under the care of SaaS (online applications). The primary tasks are to re-install your browser and Adobe reader.

Meanwhile software users will need to be reinstall programs one CD at a time (if you can find the CD’s). You may need to find your out of date backups to recover lost data files (if you remembered to do your backups). You may need to re-engineer information (reinvent what your desktop and document files used to look like). You’ll almost definitely need to have a quiet little cry into your hands (or smash the screen). Worst of all face your fellow staff if you were slack and didn’t do the backups like everyone told you to.

It hurts but fear not as SaaS is here to help. She’ll care for you like no OS ever did. She wont bug you for upgrades, setup, disk required notifications or Product Keys. She’s a kind understanding mother who’s job is to nurture you and give you time to grow and play like a young child. She does all the nasty stuff behind the scenes for you like backing up, upgrading, installing and making sure you’re wearing the right colours (operating system and browser neutral).

I know the cost of losing the OS only too well. I lost my laptop operating system last year but I was lucky because I’m already under the care of mother SaaS. I had already moved all my photo’s to Flickr.com an online photo warehouse. Other SaaS products I use are Google Apps, Gmail and obviously Saasu. The impact was limited, I was back up and running in hours not days. Had I not been nurtured by my SaaS mother I would have lost a couple of months worth of photos which I probably wouldn’t have backed up at that time (i.e. My wife would hate me!).

Brad Howarth writes a great piece about this topic in his blog.

In a similar vein, Apple 3rd party developers are hitting frustrations dealing with the iPhone OS but SaaS developers building online applications for the iPhone have no such problem. The OS becomes virtually irrelevant in the world of SaaS. Web browser based it’s clearly less restrictive.

If SaaS is like a mum then the browser is your best mate, he’s light and nimble, he’s winning the battle over software, costs nothing and gives you access to all your stuff wherever you are. Feed him with lots of web applications and your best mate will watch your back by saving you time.

Basic review of your transaction listings

As you create transactions they will appear in your transaction list for the date period applicable. The process is usually to Add a new transaction to the List, Save and Close the transaction and then check the transaction for correctness. You cannot check all the detail for transaction but the main items such as Date, Amount and Contact can be verified. This is the most basic and quickest, but least thorough, of checks you can do.

Review of your Transactions by Account report

This is a good report for checking you have used correct tax codes and ensuring you have chosen the correct Account for you transactions. You might scan the report to ensure that (for example) all your sales appearing in an Account for Income: light fittings would have the same tax code. You might also check that there aren’t any stray transactions in this Account that shouldn’t be there.

Use the duplicate function for adding transactions

When you use the Duplicate button on any Add/Edit Transaction screen you are creating an exact copy of the transaction you are viewing with a few fields cleared like the Date for example. This helps produce consistency in your transaction adding over time as you will be using the same Account, Tax Codes and Summary as you are duplicating the information not entering it.

Use Transactions Lists to help in adding transactions

A good example of this is when you have regular periodical payments you make for things such as subscriptions, rent, bank fees that are often the same each month except for the transaction date.

1. Load the Transactions for a Contact and click the plus icon next to the transaction to load a duplicate.
2. Then you can include the date for this new transaction and amend any other differences (eg. Summary..”Jul08 rent” to “Aug08 Rent”) and then save the transaction.

Use the Transaction Lists to help in adding transactions

As in the above example you can create a list of transaction for the previous month (or period). Use the same process to create new transactions for the new month (or period).

Additional

Make sure you have paperwork, invoices, and bank statements to back up you data entry. Just assuming these things will happen each month (or period) doesn’t mean they actually do!

Cash Expenses

We used to have a lot of trivial expenses to capture and manage. Taxi fares, books, biscuits for the office etc. We dropped cash expenses completely by making those costs the responsibility of employees and paying them more for doing this for us. This means we aren’t dealing with lots of little receipts to enter. The employee can simply add them up at tax time with a calculator and claim them through their own tax return as a work expense.The simple fact is it’s easier for an individual to account for their work expenses at tax time than it is for our company.

Buy versus rent/subscribe

We also looked at the accounting cost of buying some products. e.g. buying something that needed to be depreciated instead of just renting it. I believe its easier to make monthly, quarterly or annual payments for something that we can claim 100% of than it is to manage the asset through its effective life from an accounting perspective. It also has obvious benefits to cashflow smoothness and removes upfront capex hits.

Online versus Off-line

Probably the single best insight was actually practising what we preach in our off-line to online argument. We moved everything we could. That saved software spend, server management time and backup costs (employee time). We stopped buying software and started paying for subscriptions. This saved on depreciation management, upgrade costs and all the other ASP benefits we have explained until we are blue in the face. An example of this was that we used to use Broadcast for our email notifications, now we use Campaign Monitor.

We use the Google Apps SaaS e-mail system. This meant we had outsourced backup and virus scan of email and gave as anywhere anytime access. An interesting side effect of this is that now we only need firewall software because all incoming files are scanned at our company servers or at our mail server level. This interestingly means our PC’s run quicker because it’s resources aren’t being wasted scanning endlessly.

Company Credit Cards instead of Employee Cash Expenses

We established company credit cards for online and retail purchases for our business and instructed employees never to use cash.

Bulk Entry

Being “accountant like” because we write accounting software we used to be very pedantic about some of our earlier bookkeeping work. We have changed out of necessity and one example is bulk entering credit card statements rather than as micro transactions. i.e. in Saasu we enter a statement in a single Purchase transaction with multiple line-items. Many of you no doubt already do this but there will be those of you who track this in a Directors Loan account or Owners Equity type of account like we used to do.

Invoice Automation

Saasu automatically generates our invoices. The only manual work here is adjustments. We also automatically generate our recurring purchases where the price is static.

Moving from paid software to open source

We switched to open source for some applications. E.g. instead of buying more Adobe Photoshop licences (which is a great application) we started using Paint.NET for web graphics. This is free and has very similar features. The added benefits being free upgrades and accordingly no accounting work if you never have to buy it.

Automated Payments

We set-up direct debits, we do this a lot now, even with variable expenses because the providers of these services will tend to have the ability to “cap” the spend.
Rent everything you can and generate the transaction automatically. Capex wastes time, money and inhibits the natural evolution of you business as you become constrained by old assets. The world changes too quickly.

There’s more we’ve done but we will work on a support note around this topic over coming months.

• Group Pays for processing payroll – Speed up you payroll processing.
  Less data entry
• Fixed bank fee (annual) – Many banks will offer an annual bank fee as one payment instead of the usual monthly fees
  Less data entry and reconciliation entries
• Fixed bank fee (monthly) – those intra-month fees for ATM and Internet Banking usage can oftne be paid as a fixed monthly fee in some business accounts.
  Less data entry and reconciliation entries
• Pay multiple bills from one vendor all at once – This is possible with vendors who have longer payment terms. If you can get vendors to stretch their terms to 3 months from the usual 7 to 30 days then at least you reduce the payment processing work when you write one cheque, or process one payment, for a set of invoices.
  Less paperwork and data entry. In the USA this is paying on Bill/Statement rather than per Invoice
• Dealing with vendors who insist on onerous paperwork – If you receive an excessive number of documents from a vendor, which may include; statements, invoices, reminders and other forms of vendor communication.
  Consider this time cost they are imposing on your business. Some courier companies bill weekly while others are monthly
• Underestimating the cost of processing a transaction – If processing payment early saves you time, and that time value in dollars outweighs the funding cost of spending your cash early then it may pay to clear the payment paperwork earlier.
  A classic example is very small reseller/commission payments
• Buying multiple services/products from one vendor – If you can obtain a discount for buying more products from one source, receive less paperwork, reduce your payment processing work and obtain more lenient terms then this may work for you. Again there are many flow-on advantages like shorter bank statements and less reconciliation’s work results in time cost savings.
  A classic example is with stationary suppliers. Many businesses deal with 3 or more stationary companies. If this saves you lots of money then excellent! If not why put up with the extra paperwork?
• Generally employee expenses are time expensive – Setting up a Motor Vehicle fuel account may be easier than managing those payments as reimbursements through salary or organising lots of paper receipts every month.
  Some companies pay employees slightly more and have their employees account for and claim minor work expenses through personal tax