Weighing in at almost half the cost of its nearest competitor, the $16.50 per month ‘Accountants Edition’ version provides access from anywhere in the world to Saasu’s powerful automation tools, extensive reports, and contact management system.

Along with access to these core functions, included in the monthly package are 50 accounts receivable invoices, 50 accounts payable invoices, and 200 reconciled bank statement lines.

In comparison, Xero’s Small pricing plan ($29 a month) offers only 5 Accounts Receivable, 5 Accounts Payable, and 20 reconciled statement lines each month. This price is even more than the Saasu Pro plan ($25 a month) which includes unlimited invoicing and bank reconciliation, as well as a fully integrated inventory and payroll system.

Marc Lehmann, founder and Chief Executive of Saasu, says “We’ve always promoted Saasu as an affordable, scalable system for any business type, and this new release means just that for smaller organisations and sole traders.”

“To limit activity to 5 invoices a month is restricting for some businesses, and to charge as much as Saasu charges for its full-featured product for this limited service is extortion. Saasu is focussed on providing affordable time-saving solutions for businesses and their advisors, and now we’re making a stand against these prices. ”

Marc has long been a strong advocate for the Software as a Service industry, and goes on to explain that “online software shouldn’t just be easier for customers to use, it should be cheaper.”

“Although we take great pride in having the most feature-rich product on the market, we realise not all businesses require such a comprehensive accounting system. We saw no reason why these firms should pay for features they will never use, and instead of limiting usage of all functions across the product, we simply focussed on providing the essential features our smaller clients love.”

Not only does Saasu make managing financials simpler for smaller operators, but for the accountants that work with them too. Allowing real-time collaboration on files from any location, Saasu always displays up-to-date information, eliminating the issue of out-of-sync files.

Mike Chisholm, Chief Executive of Acclipse, said “this option is just what accountants have been asking for. Everyone has small clients who can’t justify paying the costs Xero and MYOB are charging. We partnered with Saasu because we wanted an online accounting solution that offered great value to both businesses and accountants, along with great performance and features. I’m really pleased that so soon after announcing our partnership we’re able to deliver this new version.”

After a series of successful roadshows across Australia and New Zealand, Saasu has been inundated by accountants wanting to incorporate the product into their practice. Of this, Lehmann said “we’re seeing more firms pass through our training programme than we have before. After all, Saasu is about saving both businesses and their advisors time, and it’s great to see our customers getting excited as they realise this.”

Australian accountants can find out more, and become a Saasu Accounting Partner here

New Zealand accountants can find out more, and become a Saasu Accounting Partner here

For more information contact:

Marc Lehmann, Saasu CEO
+61 2 9233 6629 | marc@saasu.com

Mike Chisholm, Acclipse CEO
+64 29 245 7091 | mike.chisholm@acclipse.com.au

ABOUT SAASU

Saasu is an online accounting software company with over 10,000 customers from around the world. With millions of transactions each year worth billions of dollars Saasu is a market leader in the Software as a Service accounting industry in the Asia Pacific area. Saasu is a comprehensive online accounting software system for managing business financials. Saasu has capabilities in sales, purchasing, inventory, payroll, ecommerce, CRM, point of sale, document and workflow management. Saasu’s strong online accounting API enables connection to hundreds of web applications, software products, payment services and banks. For more information visit the Saasu website at www.saasu.com

ABOUT ACCLIPSE

Acclipse is a leading provider of solutions to thousands of accounting firms in New Zealand and Australia, with expansion into the United Kingdom and India currently underway. Acclipse provides the tools and support to empower the business success of accounting firms. The Acclipse product range for accountants includes full workflow driven practice management, web management, document and email management as well as value-add client accounting (cashflow budgeting and benchmarking). For more information visit the Acclipse website at www.acclipse.com.au

Interestingly the question is sometimes a disguise for a discomfort they feel around why they charge so much for their own product or in the case for accountants, why they are paying such a high price elsewhere versus what they pay for our online accounting application licences.

I might be crazy to have this dream but back in the early nineties when I was part of a team building one of Australia’s first online banking websites I was of the belief that the web was designed to save people and businesses money. We wanted to remove banking costs through a self service website.

I really believed that dream. I formulated Saasu in 1998 to continue that dream with the plan to decimate the cost structure of SME accounting software or at least change the way the big software providers operated in our country. I wanted to build a $1500 online accounting application with inventory, payroll, a light CRM and sell it for $299. That was my plan. This I thought would help empower businesses, save capital expense and put an end to tax table update racket that plagued accounting software in our country.

Many believe in the dream of the cheap web, I’m not alone. It is evident in Google Enterprise with their $50 per year plan, GotoMeeting with their $49 per month service and Last.fm with their unlimited music for $5 a month. Probably the most famous in this space for the fight against old pricing models (in the medium to larger enterprise sector) is Salesforce.com who while being a bit above some small business price tolerance levels is actually very inexpensive for it’s market.

The reality is that prices can be low, and businesses like ours are profitable and we can hand the massive savings the web brings back to customers through low prices. I must disclaim that I am a bit more of a social capitalist than your average CEO.

I refer to this as the big joke in our industry. Look around, online applications are nearly always more expensive than software. I’ve subscribed to a few products this year that while I think they are great products they are very expensive for what they offer so I can’t and won’t recommend them to customers and the reality is they are probably a competitor away from losing me. Products need to be both effective and inexpensive, not just one of these.

Sometimes the counter argument is that you should pay up and that for some magical reason this means you are getting a feature rich quality product. This isn’t always the case. In my experience expensive products often don’t have a great feature set. These companies usually have to spend a lot of money marketing to get the sales in the door because of the high price barrier. As a business owner or accountant we all should be totally committed to cost effectiveness ratio. Costs translate into the cost of goods value and thus translate into retail price our customers pay. Cost management is very important so you can make good margins BUT NOT at the expense of your customer. It’s what I call profitability with integrity.

When did the industry decide that small business has a bottomless pit of funds to pay subscription fees? They don’t! Every dollar counts, every dollar is felt, and that should be treated with respect as it directly impacts their business success and at the end of the day that means their families.

So where did it fail for many companies who don’t seem to believe in this crazy dream. I think the answer is with banks and shareholders. The dotcom bust really scared the crap out of bankers and c-level management in technology companies. Most went broke and then the rest decided that customers should pay up. Pay up for their ventures through higher prices, pay for their VC deals or equity issuance. The customer would pay for more certainty for their management and their shareholders and give them the grace of a quicker path to profitability through a higher price paid at checkout by the customers.

Saasu took 8 years to become profitable, we did that because we believed in our price structure. We dedicated ourselves to creating a low cost product. We hold prices as low as we can and we were alone in the market, we could have charged more. However, we believe in this crazy dream that web applications should cost less than software and we have stuck with it.

That’s who we are at Saasu.

Themes are about Saasu’s Community

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.

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.

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!

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.

In the video below the DTB file is Australian and is called an ABA file. Every zone is different so let us know if you would like your zone direct-to-bank format supported. Send us a sample payment file, else the documentation your bank has made available. (Note: don’t send us anything with personal access information).

Save hours of online banking data entry!

• Can you achieve better security than us?
• Is that laptop of yours (with accounting software on it) safer in your car, home or office than in our international data centre?
• Does your laptop have a guy with a gun standing in front of it to protect it?
• Do you back up your data as many times as day as we do?
• Do your store credit card numbers in your MYOB or Quicken file? What is your liability if you lose these?

We have done a lot to earn our customer’s trust. We must have considering we manage personal financial information for thousands of users.

Sometimes you need to trust others more than yourself, particularly in specialised fields.

This feels unnatural to some but it is logical and wise. You trust your bank with your money, you trust your email service provider with your email – all that critical and confidential correspondence.

You outsource these things and trust these specialist companies because they are better at it than you. These companies use the utility approach to security. They have built systems, processes and made infrastructure investments that exceed your individual capabilities. These companies have capacity and scale that brings high-end advantages to security that you can’t achieve easily as an individual. They can re-sell these services over and over with many customers which lowers the cost for you. So you get a high value, high security service for a low cost.

Software as a Service utilities like Saasu.com are exactly the same.

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.