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.