Ideas Blog

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

Introducing CrowdTheme™

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

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

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

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

Innovation background

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

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

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

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

What’s this mean for the future of accounting?

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

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

I often get asked how a business can minimise the time spent (and thus money) “doing” their accounts.

The first step is to get online to create access, convenience and remove tasks that you otherwise have to do such as backups, upgrades and installs.

Secondly, and more importantly, you need to change your thinking to “generating” your accounts. You accounts can be a smooth, automated pipeline of transactions. It doesn’t have to be data entered.

Many businesses I meet still “do” their accounts while they should be generating them. This is about connecting and automating your accounts using a variety of techniques that are NOT limited to bigger businesses. The reality is that there will always be an element of data entry but it can be massively reduced to a small fraction of your work-flow.

There really is only 3 ways of generating your accounts. Most other methods are a variation on these themes or a hybrid of them.

We are interested in our customers saving time so if you have any questions post a comment or get in touch. We are firstly in the business of selling time savings, secondary to that is the accounting software.

REAL TIME – Straight through processing

“Are you serious Saasu? I’m a consulting business, it can’t be automated.”

Even a consulting businesses where you would think it’s hard to automate you can achieve 60-80% automation of transactional work flow. If you think about it (look at your statements), you pay for the same things over and over. Mobile, phone, internet, rent, electricity, wages etc. Often the frequency is consistent and it may only be the amount that varies. These transactions can all be automated to the point where there is no data entry (constant amount) or a followup edit (change amount). Expenses on credit cards can be captured by importing credit card data and bank statements. You simply clear what isn’t needed and apply account codes to the remainder.

This is the best by far on a cost per transaction capture analysis we’ve done of the variety of methods. We call this “exceptions based accounting”.

Highly transactional business models should automate as much as they can using recurring Sales and Purchases for all your normal recurring revenue and fixed costs. If applicable, connect your point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce website, project management and CRM systems to Saasu via the API or using a Connector. Transactions can occur in real time automatically. Contacts can update across systems. New customers can be created, invoiced, payment processed and emailed paperwork automatically without human cost, resources and risk.

Saasu provides customers with shopping carts, software connectors and payment gateway connections to assist in creating a straight through processing business model.

NEXT DAY – Feeds and Import

This method works well for micro enterprise but starts to fall apart as you grow the business or as your business becomes more technically complex. e.g. inventory, time and project based businesses. It doesn’t scale for complexity or compliance.

Under this method you export you bank statement from online banking and import it into your accounting file. Nearly all accounting systems have this feature including Saasu, Sage and Quickbooks. Systems like Banklink and Xero have taken it a step further by providing a service to do this import step for you on a next business day basis or weekly basis. For micro a enterprise this is about an extra $360 per year above Saasu’s pricing. Bank fees may also be charged by your bank account on a per-transaction basis for data feeds. Feeds aren’t real time but they are convenient and close enough for micro businesses. To a degree you are trusting the bank or card company’s data to be correct.

DELAYED – Data entry

Data entry is by far the most expensive and unfortunately the most common. Data entry should be about exceptions so bookkeeper and accountant skills can be reserved for advice and higher level tasks. A good bookkeeper is the difference between order and disorder, fear and anxiety. Automate as much as possible and have your bookkeeper or admin staff be you assistant CFO to your business rather than spend your dollars on them just doing mundane data-entry that can be done by a computer.

Saasu was one of the Top 10 Web 2.0 businesses mentioned in Smart Company magazine and website.

It’s always always nice to get a mention but when it’s along side some great companies we look up to like Atlassian and RedBubble it feels great.

The article points out Saasu’s strong growth in new business from offshore. Australia is where we began but as we internationalise to support more zones this is changing very quickly to be an global software as a service business in online accounting software systems.

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).

Free $0

15 transaction cap per month
Unlimited users subject to fair play
100 MB, email support
sign up

Pro $59

Quarterly per business file
Unlimited users subject to fair play
2000 MB, phone and email support
sign up

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!

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…)

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…)

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.