I have never believed in that philosophy. My late mother, Robyn Lehmann, taught me the lessons as a teenager about customer service. She ran a bakery/newsagency (interesting business model for another post) and I have a photo which I keep close to me of her in a business suit behind the counter serving customers. She raised the service bar beyond most people I have met in business and that bakery was a screaming success. She spent time with her customers and it was authentic time, not time to get sales. A genuine interest, the sales just followed accordingly. Her influence extends deep into the Saasu service ethic.

1. The net has had a huge leverage effect on the power of word of mouth

In the old world if you upset a customer they might tell a handful of people. This new world can result in them telling 100’s or 1000’s as they post their upset on a forum, blog or comment section of an online article. The reverse good word leverage also applies. Happy customers will tell the world through email, blogs, forums and the old fashioned way in person. In essence they have more leverage to spread the word than ever. Good and bad. They are your new age sales team.

2. Service is a Sales Channel

I have written about this before but in summary service allows you to have conversations. These conversations are an opportunity to learn about your customers experience in dealing with your business, it’s people and it’s products. Companies spend lots of money trying to find this information out through market research, surveys, focus groups and the like. You have the power to turn what is often thought of as a cost into a learning experience and a sales channel.

3. If business is about problem solving where do your find out what problems exist?

Customers will tell you their problems, they hold the keys to your business success. Just one little idea or problem can highlight a big business opportunity that can be used across your customer base. Your customers are smart and savvy. They operate under a commercial survival strategy. They see the world through a different set of glasses, from the other side of the counter. Their problems are often different to what you perceive them to be. Customer service is a channel into ideas and problems that you can solve for one customer which then could be leveraged and used for many.

4. Keeping it fresh

Continual contact keeps your business relationships alive. Much like calling a relative every now and then. People love to be loved. People are more likely to think of you and your products or services when you keep in contact at that next point of referral that comes along.

5. Just because you should

Life isn’t just about the money, it’s also about doing the right thing. Money is a bi-product of doing the right thing. Sometimes it isn’t, but mostly it is.

Expected Release Date: 15 August 2008. Any feedback and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Features

• Enter transactions excluding or including tax
  
• Default Tax Code for each Account in your Chart of Accounts
• Shipping contacts for Sales and Purchases
• Shipping slips
• Display Contact telephone number in Sales/Purchases
• Ability to create and control your Tax Codes
  
• Internationalization of Tax Code language used in the Tax Code drop downs
• Ability to hide any Tax code not needed
• Editable posting account for Tax Codes
• Usability improvements for Group Payroll
• Jump to the invoice that relates to the Payment screen
• Sortable Payments List

I guess as business people we all probably have some room for improvement in fulfilling on promises. Are we tracking our promises well enough? To-do lists capture many of them but what about those fleeting promises that are actually bigger than you think?

You would think all businesses would be great at tracking promises. Especially since most people are very worried about what people think of them and their business. Integrity is probably one of the most important values in a business.

The reason our businesses are less than perfect at keeping and tracking promises is because our businesses a built on people. Those people are only human, they forget, make mistakes, run out of resources to deliver on promises etc. So systems can help with this problem.

At Saasu we track defects, support and feature requests daily. All of which are promises. When we miss promise dates I personally feel it so we are always trying to improve on the system. Sure we could stop promising but that’s just a cop out. Our customers are paying us money to develop, improve and keep ahead.

Create an Activity type called Promises in Saasu.

One way we are doing this is by using Saasu activities to start tracking Promises. You can do this also. Create a Tag called Promise and give it type Activity. Put all your promises into Saasu as Promise Activities. You then have an easy way to list/print/track your promises, due dates and attribute them to the right people.

Anyone got any other ways they track their promises, work or personal?

Pic: Discoodoni on flickr.com

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!

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.

Sydney finally has her own Apple flagship store. It is enormous. Right on one of the city central intersections it looks like a lighthouse at night. You can’t miss it.

Sydney is the world’s best city by brand (2 years in a row on ABC), lifestyle (8 years out of 10 on CNN) and especially so now for geeks and business owners since it is also home to Saasu HQ.

The lessons here for marketing any business are fascinating. Focus. Quality. Clarity. Consistency.

Only days after 5,200 Apple geeks meet in San Fran for their WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) when Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 3G (watch video) will be 36% faster than the latest Nokia and half the price of iPhone today ($199 from $399), Jobs also confirmed that 98% of iPhone users use it for the web, as predicted in this blog ages ago the iPhone platform is a major structural change to the world of web access.

In case you didn’t already know Saasu works on the iPhone and the iTouch, it is the full web application, not a cut down one. So you can do everything on the iPhone that you can do on any desktop or laptop.

Jobs also announced that iPhone 3G will be in 22 countries on July 11 and a total of 70 by year end. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the current 6m iPhone users go up to circa 100m+ by end 2009 (another blog on why another time).

If you go to the Apple Sydney store opening it is 5pm tomorrow (less than 36 hours ago the construction boards were up, now there are loads of apple geniuses running around and customers sleeping outside in line so they are first in tomorrow. TV and other media are already circling. The saasu team will be there of course to answer questions and do the odd demo. While I was there recently the kind apple crew gave umbrellas to those waiting in impending rain outside - well done gang.

Saasu.com is the best value accounting SaaS on the Mac in the world, we love the Apple iPhone too.

So we are offering 3 months bonus FREE to anyone signing up to a paid saasu netaccounts subscription for this week only. Just type APPLEROCKSSYDNEY when you sign up.

Note to Apple environmentally aware staff, please lobby your light house marketing guys to use efficient bulbs (if you don’t already) or turn off those lights when you go home pretty please.

Oh, and a bit of gossip to finish, something else is happening at 5pm tomorrow too. BRW the esteemed business review weekly magazine is launching their special Web 100 edition. Saasu might get a mention…

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.

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.

A BIG thanks to all the customers and partners who have helped us build an even better application over the last year. Your subscription dollars are hard at work in Saasu Labs.

What CeBIT had to say

The Software as a Service business model swept major categories in the prestigious CeBIT.AU Business Awards 2008, taking the most contested categories and marking SaaS as the hot technology currently in the sector. Saasu.com was nominated for three awards and won the CeBIT.AU Business Advantage Award – arguably the most prestigious of the event – with its Saasu.com accounting package. Saasu.com was also a winner in 2007, with its integrated Net-based financial system that has seen enormous growth since the company exhibited at CeBIT Australia last year. Full CeBIT press release.

More SaaS ecosystem winners

Our friends over at eWay took the CeBIT.AU Excellence in Technology Services Award. eWay is a payments gateway provider. Congrats to Matt Bullock and his team. The eWAY payment gateway service provides secure Online payments and Mail Order processing of credit cards in real time via the Internet.

IPscape won the CeBIT.AU Excellence in Communications Award. IPscape has a Software as a Service product for contact centres. Congratulations to Simon Burke and his team. IPscape provide a SaaS product for contact centres typically less than 100 seats. Like Saasu they take care of upgrades, hardware and maintenance. Services that simplify the way contact centre technology is priced, delivered, and supported.

Photo Credit: CeBIT

One of charities we support is Kiva, the microfinance gurus.

Kiva help developing nations from the ground up. They don’t donate cash, they lend it to entrepreneurs (we relate to these guys!) to help them start a business. Teaching them to fish for themselves (so to speak) rather than throwing them a fish.

The Saasu labs gang were celebrating recently because one of our first loans on Kiva was recently repaid. Kiva is a great service if you want to make a difference. The best thing is the funds are repaid and then recycled so the model is not only proven to work (impressive statistics on field partners) but it keeps on working.

See how your subscription to Saasu made a small difference to one guy via the Saasu foundation.

Kiva is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit in the US.

Saasu further supports the non-profit, education and health communities though the Saasu DISC program which is also part of our RTG. So if you know anyone in those segments tell them to give us a bell so they can get their free or discounted stuff.

I did some work in Cambodia (in Takeo province outside Phnom Penh) a few years ago as part of some other stuff and they have had a rough time over the years so it is nice to see some progress. Although, with only 3 in every 1,000 people having internet access, that progress is very slow (read about it on Reuters AlertNet).

But don’t just take our word for the fact Kiva do a great job, they also recently won a prestigious Webby which is very cool.

Saasu also had some more praise recently. Our good fortune continues in the form of customer feedback and and also globally recognised industry awards.

On top of the many great comments we get every day for our latest release(see below), we have also been nominated for and listed as finalists for three awards at CeBIT 2008 some of you might remember last year we won the big one

Three of my all time best customer testimonials recently are (paraphrased) -

• We chose saasu over netsuite on price (mid market customer)
• We chose saasu over zoho on features (small business customer), particularly Saasu Catch
• We chose saasu over MYOB on ease of use and because it is online (small business customer)

This demonstrates at the coal face the saasu productivity and cost benefits. Our unique delivery model is really performing for businesses and individuals.

Now for the fun stuff. Saasu has made the finals for three CeBIT 2008 awards -

• Business Advantage Award - Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 5
• Excellence in Technology Services Award - Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 4
• Platinum Award for Export Excellence - Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 2

Thanks to all of those who support the Saasu foundation via our products. Congrats to Kiva and Boun Kim Loun. Oh, and fingers crossed for the CeBIT 2008 awards.