Many customers and partners have asked for simple pricing. So we listened.

We have wanted to free up the restrictions on how many users you add so you help us spread the word. We also want to enable you to have the advisors, bookkeepers and employees and other people you need to help you run your business without having to upgrade each time.

• You no-longer pay for users. Just select how many business files you want.
• You can keep adding users as long as you don’t go too crazy (see fair play).

What’s not in these plans?

Enterprise customers have the higher levels of storage, transaction volumes, and features such as group payroll and e-commerce. Enterprises are charged at higher rates. To find out more about Enterprise features and pricing contact us.

Damn this is cheaper than when I renewed recently!

If you paid recently and you feel the value from these new plans is better just create a help ticket and we’ll give you some free subscription time so your feel better!

A new release has been rolled out to all our customers. As usual it is free and you didn’t need to lift a finger.

New UK/International Banking Support

Three new financial institution connectors are now included in saasu for everyone.

You can import transactions in bulk from your online banking.

This is provided as part of the wonderful (and free) Saasu Bank Integration Guarantee (BIG) to all customers. If you have a bank you would like to be able to import transactions from please let us know.

The new ones are -

• Lloyds TSB for all our UK customers
• Paypal.com personal accounts for all our US and international customers
• Paypal.com merchant accounts for all our US and international customers

Improved Paypal support

Paypal started in the US and now have 200m+ users in over 100 countries. They were acquired by eBay a few years ago but you don’t need an eBay account to receive or pay money with paypal, you just need an email address and the simple features are free.

Saasu support 50 zones/countries, so with the bank import announcement above we think we have at least one financial institution for almost everyone.

Paypal lets anyone receive payment with just an email address link on your invoice. Use saasu settings sale section.

Paypal merchant accounts enable additional features like simple but secure checkout links with your logo on invoices, web pages or blogs so your customers can bay with credit card or paypal funds or even direct debit.

Payroll Improvements

Payroll processing has been upgraded to run faster for single payroll and bulk payroll processing. So you save just a little more time if you have one employee or hundreds.

Tax table updates for end of Australian tax year have also been completed and set up for all Australia zone customers on all plans in time for the end of financial year on 30 June.

Add contacts on-the-fly during bank reconciliation/import

Sometimes the first time you deal with a new customer is when they have dropped funds into your account.

Now you can add new contacts dynamically ‘on-the-fly’ from the bank import screen as you are looking at each transaction that has some in from your financial institution.

Safari speed freak

The saasu labs team each did some informal tests across a range of functions recently and here are the results, fastest to slowest. 1st:Safari, 2nd:Firefox, 3rd:Internet Explorer.

So don’t just assume your browser is best, trying others might be worth the 10 minutes it takes to download and install.

Firefox version 3

For our customers using firefox browser, a minor print preview issue in the latest version has been released.

Feel the need for speed?

You may notice when you next sign in that the Saasu Dashboard loads much more quickly. Some customers felt we could do better, so we did.

The dashboard was one of our oldest components, it has been revamped to load about 10-20 times faster. We have even more speed and feature improvements coming too.

New widgets

While we were looking at the dashboard improvements, we also lay the tracks for future components (usually called widgets) to be added. If there are some regular summary snapshots you would like to appear in your dashboard please make a specific suggestion.

Saasu News Feed (RSS Feed)

All Saasu product and company announcements will now feed into the Saasu Dashboard via a feed from our blog. If you haven’t read our blog or learnt about RSS now is a good time. RSS stands for really simple syndication and it basically lets you build your own newspaper of stuff you really want to see from anywhere on the web, not just in saasu.

We see a gradual global shift happening with people moving from email to RSS for some things because it can shrink your email in-box and grow the relevance of what you read.

Widget controls

Saasu refreshes your dashboard information automatically or if you are in a hurry use the new Refresh icon on the top right of each widget to update instantly.

Use the new Report Icon to drill down to the full report for each widget.

Between CeBIT palm pressings, customer chats and awards we have been quietly adding new features into our online accounting engine and light CRM area.

We released about 200 new features earlier this month and here are another fifteen time savers for you.

External Notes for Invoices and Automated Invoices

You have wanted to say “YOU OWE ME MONEY” for quite a while now.

Attachments in Activities

Handy for sales documentation, 3rd party docs and the like.

Catch language enhancements

Saasu Catch is the quick way to catch todo’s contacts, transactions and other info on the fly. The Saasu Catch bar is at the top of the menu after signing in.
Saasu’s Catch Language now supports “to do:”, “do:”, “h:” and “help:”.
Examples -

• h:importing - list of help items about “importing”
• do:call myles - create a To Do Activity in my Activities list.
• s:happiness - search Google for “happiness”

Audit trail

Improved accountability for multi-user businesses. All edit screens now show the basic audit trail of last change date and time, who made the change and when it was originally created.

Bank of New Zealand importing supported

As we build out our NZ feature set we quickly added this for a New Zealand customer.

Tags in lists

Some list screens (like activities) show the tags applied in-line (in the list) to save you drilling down, a simple powerful time saver because you control the tags you use.

Line focus

Handy line shading has been introduced so it is easier to read across wide reports and lists, you can see an example above.

See more on contacts

Just one click will show the sales, purchases and statements for a contact.

A little known existing feature also lets you research your customers, partners, employees and more on popular web based Professional and Social Networking (PSN) sites. PSNs cover around 200 million individuals now and include Linkedin.com (an independent site), Myspace (owned by News Corp), Bebo (owned by Time Warner’s AOL), Facebook (independent with links to Microsoft), and Orkut (which is owned by Google).

More speed

Our top transaction screens have been accelerated, even with the extra features they now run 20-25% faster than before on common functions.

Easier lists with easy dates

Getting a date (or a range of dates) has never been easier. Lists now show you the recent info to save you time. Most have a simplified date picker to choose common ranges with 2-3 clicks as well.

We were pleased to roll out another release recently with a whole bunch of new features.

The level of positive feedback across all our channels and countries has been excellent, from phone calls, emails, twitter, skype, instant messenger and more.

There have been so many positive comments and it has only been out a few days - have a read below and you will get the idea. Try it and tell your friends!

Sure, there were a few areas that needed a tweak or two, but 90% of reported issues were cosmetic and the vast majority are already fixed and live. This the great thing about SaaS - continuous improvement and community driven quality and ideas. We love it!

Faster. Better. Easier.

That is what we live for - saving you time and helping you do more while simplifying your life. It is being made available to all users immediately. No upgrade hassles, no effort no additional cost. That what I call Good SaaS.

The main areas of improvement are listed below the comments from our fans.

Fans love it

• Congratulations on the new release going live – it looks and feels terrific - Marytn from My CFO
• New version looks great. Huge improvement on the previous one (and that one was pretty good anyway) - Ben from CompSyc
• Love the improved interface, abundance of printing and export options. Accounting that makes sense at last, thank you. I will be migrating several other accounts at the end of the financial year as there is no point in struggling with the obtuse behaviour of MYOB any longer !! - Hew from Coral Sea Superannuation Fund
• Love the new look - Michelle from Lorose
• Overall very good. Think you are doing a great job, well done - Jason from Computer Support Partners (Ryde Franchisee)

The new stuff

• Speed - some of screens in our top 5 have been reduced by 60%
• Look and feel - most screens make better use of real estate and improved readability
• Transact - cleaner, simpler faster transaction screens that work faster and make your keying easier but have more features
• Activities - manage your to dos, meeting minutes, docs and more. Do the same for your team. Show the boss how much you do every day. Rack activities at the project, client, tag and even transaction level (complex quotes are now easy). This was talked about earlier.
• Catch - the quick way of capturing activities in seconds, now you can easily remember those five action items from every phone call.
• Just one click - extended the number of features that are one click away to over 90%
• Reports - better access to loads of reports, lists, views, exporting and more
• Tags - No more inflexible categorisation, use one or a dozen tags across the whole system to file, group, filter, list and more. Probably a world first(?) for online accounting we think.
• Get social - one click access to around 200 million entries in professional and social networks like face book, linked in, my space, bebo, orkut to see info on your prospects, partners and more. This was pre-announced recently
• Get connected - see maps of addresses on Google maps, search from the dashboard using Catch, connect to salesforce.com for advanced CRM, connect to 88miles.net for project timesheetings, connections for more banks, improved security logging, improved security reporting, improved security control for system-to-system connectors.
• Get control - improved role based security to span one or more businesses and subscriptions, franchises and corporate
• Payroll - drop your old payroll provider and get online, email payslips, automated bulk processing and banking

See it scream

See the new features page for more details and screen shots or watch the new quick tour video.

By the way, it looks sensational on the Mac, and screams on Safari and firefox on Mac OSX, Windows XP and Vista. The best thing? This just the beginning

This release is timed to coincide with CeBIT too so make sure you come on down and see the greatest technology and business show in the southern hemisphere. Our stand and a little of our presentation will be featuring the new release.

Tags are another recent innovation from the Saasu labs team. Tags are simply one or more words that mean something to you. The shorter the better we find.

Tags are a uniquely Internet centric way of labelling and filing information in multiple ways and multiple places. Tags have been around for many years on sites such as digg and del.icio.us but we think we are the first to bring them to financial management.

Tags can be found in the tag cloud, just one click will mark something (e.g. a customer) with the tag. You can also just type the tag in, if the system doesn’t know about that tag yet it will add it for you automatically and start tracking usage for you. The tag cloud appears on most add/edit screens plus of course on lists as a filter option.

Tags may be applied to any information, such as -

• contacts (e.g. customer, supplier, prospect, partner)
• activities (e.g. Project X, unassigned, critical path,
• transactions (e.g. urgent, delayed, Project X, Portfolio Q)
• employees (e.g. Project X, Skill Y, Location C)
• inventory items (e.g. Hot Seller, Warehouse A)
• investment items (e.g. Defensive, Review Due, Location C)

The power of tags lies in a the way they can be combined in infinite ways, e.g. how much did we spend on urgent expenses for project x last month? Include this tag, exclude those tags. You can start to see how powerful they are.

Key Benefits are -

• Tags can go on anything (for now we have enabled ten of our most popular add/edit screens, more to come)
• You can track how many things have that tag on them (in the tag list on the bottom of the main menu)
• Tags are super flexible, they can be combined in an unlimited number of ways
• Tags cross over everything, e.g. for a project you can tag Customers, Suppliers, Resources (Staff), Activities, expenses, income and more)

Here are some guidelines on the ways we think you should use tags -

• Keep them short, one or two words are best. Too many tags means the tag cloud can clutter up your screen (it automatically adjusts to prevent this but hey then you have to go digging in ‘more tags’)
• Use them for the important stuff, the 20% of projects that make the most difference to you, too many tags means more clutter and you are not focussing on the big picture
• Just because they are easy to add doesn’t mean you should, focus on the big initiatives that are important to you
• Ask yourself, are tags the best way to track this? In some cases they are good for problems that don’t have more structured procedures or solutions yet. For example tags work well for job tracking but is that the best way for your business in the long term? What will your data look like after you have months of jobs in there? Perhaps just track open work?
• Use tags for living data, i.e. stuff that is ‘in play’ and active such as orders due to ship or projects/jobs currently being worked on. You can also use tags for lots of other things such as traditional reporting but that is not their main benefit.
• Stay ahead of tag use in your team, agreed tag naming standards and stick to them, if you have a meeting agreeing to start a new project, setup the tag immediately and flag it as ‘popular’ so it always appears on the tag cloud that ensures it gets used, similarly if you decide to phase something out make it ‘inactive’ so it no longer appears in the tag cloud for Saasu users in your team.

Tags are available in our new release due soon, so try the preview or read more about tags.

We recently received a very kind note from a long term client. It shows just how we are helping people build great businesses and simplify life.

In 35 years of Accounting I have never come across a programme that is so simple yet comprehensive… I started with one client using Saasu.com Netaccounts and now have 25 clients having their paper work prepared every month… I have also put into place a system which will be starting this month with the potential to do many hundreds more clients. I have no hesitation in recommending Saasu.com Netaccounts and it is the ONLY programme that I use for book keeping.

Owner, Regional Bookkeeping Business
Mar 08

You can understand why we were so pleased. The full letter is below with explanatory notes for our international customers our comments are in [brackets].

18 Mar 2008

Dear Marc,

I am taking this opportunity to do a testimonial for your company and your staff and I apologise for the delay but I have been so busy with all the new business that I have been getting.

Firstly let me say that in 35 years of Accounting I have never come across a programme that is so simple yet comprehensive as Saasu Netaccounts.

I have been practising as an Accountant for over 30 years and have completed in excess of 50,000 returns from Individual to Company returns in that time.

Several years ago I decided to concentrate on Book Keeping work as I had more and more clients present who were in a mess and many who could have failed in their business because of outstanding Tax Returns.

I accidentally found your programme on the net whilst searching for a pure book keeping system as opposed to the “one fits all businesses” as most businesses tended to buy.

I found many businesses with a computer being used by their teenager with the accounting package still in its shrink wrap package up to 4 years after being purchased.

One business had never lodged a BAS [Australian sales tax return is called a Business Activity Statement] and only contacted me on recommendation from a friend after the ATO [Australian Tax Office] issued a “lodge or else” type notice with very little time to comply.

Saasu.com Netaccounts enables me to get the shoebox or semi-trailer of papers and enter them into a situation where the BAS can be prepared accurately and the figures then given to the Accountant for the other Accounting work including the BAS to be completed.

I started with one client using Saasu.com Netaccounts and now have 25 clients having their paper work prepared every month.

I have also put into place a system which will be starting this month with the potential to do many hundreds more clients.

This would have been impossible using any other system.

The support staff and Marc Lehmann in particular have always been available to help and have also been prepared to change things in the system if suggested and worthwhile.

I have some clients who just require the basic book keeping to get information to their accountant for Tax Returns through to those that need information for Payroll preparation and other reports for their financiers and banks.

Some of my clients are very basic skilled on computers but the ease of access makes record keeping simple for them and access to reports also very easy.

I have clients in Wollongong, Sydney and Newcastle and have no trouble communicating with them how to retrieve reports or information.

I very rarely have to see my clients face to face which means much less travelling and no lost work time for them.

I have no hesitation in recommending Saasu.com Netaccounts and it is the ONLY programme that I use for book keeping.

Yours sincerely

Tony Cunningham,
Nationwide Bookkeeping

Here is a way you can Catch all those great ideas you have for your business. Saasu helps you apply a system to them, making sure the right ones get used in your business. It’s all too easy to inadvertently add complexity to your business.

Saasu Activities - An IDEAS Framework

In the new release of Saasu (see preview) we have Activities. Activities are all kinds of things; Meetings, Notes, Milestones etc. One Activity types is an Idea. We included this feature for our own use and because we felt other business probably have the same problems as we have in dealing with lots of ideas for improvement, change, new markets and the like.

This feature can help your organisation capture ideas from your employees and advisors who have access to your file. Once your management structure has reviewed the Idea convert it into another Activity type called a Procedure. Your could print or publish your procedures and you have your procedures manual. You can build up your set of business procedures organically over time rather than dedicating fixed resources. Create rigour in your business execution, create some control in the change process. Simply being a little more systematic and could save complexity being added to your business through Ideas which aren’t approved or tested before being actioned.

An Idea in Saasu could be a single sentence or an entire proposal. The key is that you all have access to it in a controlled environment. Someone owns the idea in Saasu and it can be added to todo lists. have date deadlines applied and more.

Saasu IDEAS framework

There are many ways you could use the tool we are providing but here’s one example where we have created.

An idea has a life-cycle just like sales, business models, markets and products -

1. IDEA - it starts as just that ‘an idea’, your thinking around opportunities, efficient process, intellectual property and the like.
2. DOCUMENT - get the idea down. A brief version or the detail as a brief, white papers, business plan or whatever you feel is appropriate for your documentation phase.
3. EVALUATE - all ideas need scrutiny, if you never put them up for scrutiny they don’t exist (except in your head). Allocate your Idea to a new Owner who will make the call or review it for discussion.
4. APPLY - all ideas that pass the tests of evaluation need to be applied to real life situations that they were thought up for. Convert the Activity type from an Idea to a Procedure in Saasu
5. SYSTEMATIC - Ideas can be re-worked moving back and fourth through the cycle.

The evaluation step is key. Ensure the right person is controlling what passes, what goes back on the shelf and what’s removed. This person should have a keep it simple mentality. They should be wise and knowledgeable enough to evaluate the ramifications and the advantages of applying ideas to the business. It could be a committee, a board of directors or a CEO. You will need to work this out for your specific industry and organisational structure.

Engineer your business better by going back and documenting existing processes and put them through Saasu IDEA. Removing any deadwood you find and improving existing ideas to create efficiency and advantages.

In summary, start filtering your ideas with the rigour of a framework and ensure the right ideas are added to your business.

The reality of small business is that despite lots of automation, importing and connecting tools there will be times you need to enter transactions. The world is progressing to the point where a company can share invoice and other information which Peter our CEO recently wrote about. However, there remain companies who use older style accounting software that simply aren’t connected to the Internet.

The Internet is a pre-requisite to extinguishing data entry intelligently.

When designing Saasu we consider keyboard lovers

Keyboard lovers are those people who like to leave the mouse untouched (as much as possible). Those who pride themselves playing the Internet piano with mastery. And of course, short-cut junkies. I have seen many bookkeepers and accountants do their keyboard work and to see those dexterous fingers write up an invoice with speed and mouse independence is very cool.

Enabling enter and spacebar keys to add invoice line items

When you tab across a line in an invoice to the plus icon you can now use the spacebar or enter key to create a new line item. You should never need your mouse to enter an Invoice if you don’t want to.

It might seem like a small change and it is certainly not rocket science but it adds a lot of usability. Mouse independence is often dramatically undervalued in designing online business productivity systems. Overly slick Web2.0 design often denies people the ability to do things in fast, practical and simple way.

Imagine you process 100 sales per month along with corresponding payments and customer data and that you waste 1 second going to and from keyboard and mouse each time two or three times per item. Delaying your customers who may be waiting is not great. Adding to the overall pressure of delivering customer service excellence is worse. Wasting (100×3x3×2=30) up to 30 minutes on something trivial like that is just not on.

This is in our new release along with nearly 200 other improvements.

Typing is faster than mousing. However, data creation via automation and direct connection trumps them both.

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

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

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

See Video on YouTube.com

Wouldn’t you love to pay lots of bill at once?

Saasu has released our Direct-to-Bank File (DTB) payment feature. Simply (a) tick all the unpaid purchases you would like to pay in your Saasu Purchase List, (b) create and save your payment and (c) click the icon/link that becomes available to create the direct to Bank File and save it to your desktop.

(more…)

Here’s a purchase we no longer need to enter in our business. We just tick it off during reconciliation each month. You can see how it’s entered and automated from the screen shot. So let’s keep this post short and simple, Saasu style!

I spoke at the NSW.net ICT cluster last week to a bunch of potential and current Microsoft Partners (we work on all operating systems for your information). I gave our 5 minute pitch and as usual during Q&A there were lots of questions (SaaS is a hot topic at the moment). We always get a security question and my answer is always the same, it’s a bunch of questions that effectively return the challenge. I only asked a couple of these but I’ve listed some others I often ask as well. (more…)

Bulk ‘Big Company’ Salary Handling For The Rest Of Us

This blog entry has been two years in preparation, we think we have solved a major issue for most businesses in a very elegant way.

Interested? You should be - we decided to make a system that normally costs tens of thousands of dollars free for all our clients, at least for now.

Paying salaries and time based reward-for-effort in any size business is a time consuming task.

We have this need here at Saasu.com for our own team and pretty much all of our clients face the same issues - it is a long wish list but if you are a business owner I am sure most of the items on it will resonate with you.

We think the most important point is doing all of the things on the list while keeping it simplified for the average business to setup and use in minutes so it pays for itself today not next year in reduced time, hassles, training costs, errors and in so many other ways including a happy team that gets paid correctly and on time.

That is the hardest thing to do, the reason we are blogging about it is we have just released Saasu Advanced Payroll.

Top 12 Payroll Tips - Making The Right Decision

These are our tips - consider them a check list when deciding on your next system -they represent what a good scalable but simplified payroll service must cover at a minimum.

1. Standard Payments Should Take No Extra Time - Setting up standard payments each week, fortnight or month, additional staff one an existing scheme or in an existing group should add no extra time to the regular pay run.
2. One Off Exception Payments Should Be Easy - Handling all those exceptions from the standard pays with minimal fuss for just the next pay but not other pays
3. Entitlement Tracking Should Be Automatic - Tracking and accumulating holiday leave entitlements and other entitlements depending on where/when/how they are working
4. Time Based Pay - Tracking time and paying employees based on time worked as well as invoicing based on time
5. Groups (Also Called Batches or Runs) - Minimising effort for similar categories of employees by grouping them together for processing by type or location or grade or something else
6. Payslips & Tax - Distributing payslips or salary confirmation sheets to individual employees who are often geographically dispersed - email is best for payslips. At end of year the production of taxation certificates (also called group certificates in many countries) is also essential
7. Banking - Getting the instructions to the bank with the right employee account details (often at other banks) - an automated bulk transaction file is best.
8. Approvals & Controls - Making sure it all happens without errors - so you need some sort of draft approval process
9. Fast - Making sure it all happens in a timely way so the money hits employee accounts when they need or expect it - must be highly automated
10. Zones - Handling the vast variety of different conditions and calculations around the world in different jurisdictions (we call them zones) - must be configurable (we are just supporting Australia for now but other countries will be rolled out progressively based on demand).
11. Integrated - No duplicate information - it must share records with existing HR or employee tracking systems and timesheets and expense handling systems.
12. Self Service - Your team must be learn the system themselves without paying for training and be able to enter their own time or see their own payslips - online via the web when ever they want

We didn’t add ‘Make sure it is software-as-a-service not old-style-on-premise-software’ because it goes without saying

The Best Bit

• Get It Now - You can have efficient payroll in your business in just minutes with Saasu Advanced Payroll
• Free - We are providing this service free to existing business subscribers and new clients who join before Christmas on our standard business plan - just tell us and we will turn it on for your business.
• Already Proven - we have already processed thousand of salaries this way (paying tens of millions of dollars) and it has been a very smooth experience.
• It Is Unique - There are a few other services like this out there but we believe there are no others at this price point and none as simple to use.

Update From Service Team - After One Week Of Free Offer…

Advanced Payroll Is A VERY Popular New Feature, we have had a rush from clients looking for access and using it in their business. Thanks. It is nice to know people like our stuff!

Just to repeat -as a reward for existing business clients (and new business clients who join before Xmas) we are offering this new module free.

The offer of free access will run until at least March 2008, thereafter advanced payroll will be part of a higher subscription plan (probably called business plus although we are still deciding plans and their names).

Pricing has not been determined but we expect the difference won’t be very large at all, it will depend amongst other things on the service/support costs we incur for an average client using the new module.

This price setting is part of a complete plan review to introduce lower plans with reduced price and functionality for entry level and higher plans for corporates - all of which is part our ongoing efforts to deliver great value software as a service to simplify your business life.

By using plans we can stage complexity (and hence simplify use for you) according to the scale of your business.

Payroll entries made via standard payroll and advanced payroll will be accessible for all payroll users (business or business plus if you will). So if you decide not to use advanced payroll later that is fine, you can still see all payroll the in the same consistent way, you just can not process them in bulk.

And of course we always ensure you are protected with the saasu.com satisfaction guarantee.

The team in Saasu Labs are working their tails off. The move to international is going nicely, check out the geo beta coverage we are getting from just a partial list of participants looking at just one server with the new stuff - 111 cities from 30 countries.

We are trying to focus on features though and getting synergies between new and existing so the current clients get the new features first (as a reward I suppose).

We also cut the initial Saasu Zones list today. Saasu Zones are the new flexible equivalent of legal jurisdiction and/or country and/or state and/or domicile and/or residency and/or a couple of other things in old style software.

The aim obviously is to enable flexibility because we can configure a new zone with components from other zones so the more features we enable for more countries the faster we can do the next country. All that high end corporate and private banking experience in the team is starting to payoff and our clients will benefit.

With around 2 million small businesses in Australasia it is no surprise that proven models are being sold as franchises. Nor is it a surprise that the franchise segment is a huge growth area for Saasu at the moment.

The key driver is flexibility and scalability- the ability to work across one or one thousand small businesses easily.

Franchise owners typically don’t want to waste time setting up financial systems that might be incompatible with the umbrella/parent franchisor network. Similarly the umbrella network managers don’t want hundreds of franchisees running their businesses on different systems so collating management information is difficult or nearly impossible.

This is where Saasu has found our sweet spot in Australia and increasingly in New Zealand and other countries.

There are no other systems on the market we are aware of that have the same level of multi-user, multi-business, single login, flexibility as we offer for franchise owners and franchisors to co-operate at different levels and get real-time business information across one or one thousand businesses.

One login can access multiple businesses and the business owner can set varying levels of access for different users. Each business can be configured differently for chart of accounts etc yet still roll up consistently formatted reports for the franchisor in PDFs or spreadsheets to email or even better with online login direct access.

Franchisees should just try it by logging in for the free version and if they like it sign up.

Franchisors should contact us or one of our partners to discuss strategies for migration, co-branding and lots more.

Franchise advisors and lenders (capital providers) can also benefit immensely from the ease with which they can monitor business performance remotely and even benchmark across businesses.

We were pleased to have Saasu featured at a course on entrepreneurship last week held by trendy education group FRANK TEAM, around 40 students were there to hear about how to develop their ideas and of course how Saasu can make the journey easier. We thought we’d help the best ones get off the group by sponsoring the event with prizes. We’ll try and profile the best ideas here too. Cheers, Peter.

When you are building your contact lists in Saasu be sure to setup your Contact Status and apply it to each new contact. Also add you industries. Then you can export your contacts by industry or status e.g. prospects to a CSV file. Step 2 is to simply remove columns you dont need and bring the finalised CSV file via import into Campaign Monitor (a superb web based emailing tool). We do this at Saasu to manage customer email notifications and it works very well. We are looking at integration through their API at the moment and will keep you posted.

We are about to release our new extended payroll module for new service based businesses, this enables automated pay runs one employee or for hundreds or thousands of employees in service based businesses such as consulting or really any business that pays (large numbers) of staff by the hour or day from timesheets. If you have over 200 employees and would like a sneak peak please contact us for access to the feature in Beta .

The Australian federal treasurer gave all Aussies a tax reduction recently which was very kind of him. As you would expect, we upgraded all our Australian client’s tax tables to support the new ones overnight without any fuss or bother for them all. Of course it was free too.

Ed: Our condolences to those poor souls that haven’t seen the Saasu light yet and are still wasting time and money buying and installing upgrades to old style software. Or even worse sending off for CDs or downloading new versions of their existing old style software when they could be working online with us in minutes. If you have friends suffering from this terrible modern day affliction tell them to call the Saasu service line and one of their kind counsellors will be pleased to help (it only takes minutes which is a lot less time than the twelve steps