In this release:

Statement of Outstanding Invoices
One of our most requested features is the ability to produce a customer statement detailing all receivables to date. This is a manual statement (as distinct from Automated Statements) and is accessible from the Reports >> Statement menu.

The statement provides filters for contact, date, sale or purchase, outstanding or just overdue, and currency. Any partly-paid invoices are differentiated by the amounts shown in the Total and Owed columns. The ability to click-through on any line item is also provided which takes you to the underlying details for that transaction.

This Statement of Outstanding Invoices has an inbuilt template and theme which you can customise further as required.

Bank Account Exception Report
This new report provides information on anomalies in the setup of bank accounts or bank transactions, such as a tax code being allocated to a bank account.

Enhancements to Bank Feeds
Additional banks are now able to be connected. To check if yours is available simply type its name into the “Connect to Bank Account” field in Automate >> Bank Feeds.We’ve improved the reliability of bank feeds with an additional refresh of the feed after connecting, and the ability to update your credentials from the main bank feeds screen to initiate a refresh as required.

API Updates
You can now pass all invoice types that we support through the API (this varies by zone). This now makes the API consistent with the invoice types available on the invoice screen.

We’ve also updated the API documentation to reflect this and other changes to the API over the last few months. For more details see our API help note here.

Laying Groundwork
We’re continuing to work on our infrastructure, bringing additional performance improvements. We’re laying the groundwork for our new user interface, with a lot of development work focussed right now around the new screens that are coming to Saasu. We look forward to sharing these with you soon.

The Zambrero group are using Saasu at the store level and at head office to consolidate the results. “We wanted our franchisees to focus on growing their business, increasing sales and exceeding service level expectations. The outsourced solution has allowed us to seamlessly integrate every new franchise store.” said CEO Stuart Cook.

Franchise businesses are perfect for a cloud accounting solution. Their de-centralised nature means systems can get very complex and inefficient if they need to be installed and managed on-site. With head-office administering the Saasu solution, new users can be added and access roles provisioned so each franchisee controls their store whilst head office gets the high level view.

The new Saasu Consolidated Profit & Loss Report was developed to support businesses that wanted multi-level reporting like this. Now you can create a “Consolidation Group” in Saasu which sets up which of your Saasu files you want to group together for reporting. The report then breaks out each group and totals the results.

Going forward we are announcing the releases before they occur so you can make yourself aware of changes prior to them occurring. In case you didn’t know Saasu does 2 week development cycles (what our engineers call sprints). We release the features and fixes from these sprints every 4 weeks if they pass our QA Engineer benchmarks.

In this release:

• Date Merge fields – You can now display dates using merge fields that can calculate. They do their calculations based on the Transaction Dates. Use them in Description and Summary fields. Also use them in Templates and Themes. Some examples are {Date+0D}, {Date+7D}, {Date+1M} and {Date+2W}. This is very useful if you bill for fixed time periods. e.g. If we have an Automated Sale invoice on the 10th of each month that will be recurring I can set up an Automated Sale with the Summary “For {Date+0D} to {Date+1M}” then it will display as “For 10Jan12 to 10Feb12″.
• Infrastructure upgrade – We get to deploy our new cloud infrastructure which enhances performance and redundancy of the Saasu Web Application. We manage your data in the USA, Hong Kong and Australia.
• Graphs for iPad – Dashboard cashflow graphs now display in your iPad and iPhone web browser. We have moved from Adobe Flash to HTML5 graphs.
• Security enhancements – We have removed the 16 character limit on passwords when signing up to allow you to use long form passwords. We have also added a password strength indicator.
• New Bank Feeds- Lots of new North American banks are coming online including: Chase Bank, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, Bank of America, Alpine Banks of Colorado and Toronto Dominion Bank. In credit cards GE Myer Visa and Amex Canada are now available.
• New Bank CSV Import Formats – We have added Macquarie Bank, Sydney Credit Union, Defence Force Credit Union and Summerland Credit Union.

Thanks for your business!

I’m seeing many more of our customers and partners on Twitter this year, so I thought it timely to share more of my thinking on how Twitter brings business benefit. If I was to share with you only one piece of advice on using Twitter, my friend @Iconic88 best sums it up:

“The power of Twitter is in your sharing, not your selling” Mahei

— Iconic88 (@Iconic88) December 16, 2011

If you focus on sharing and being helpful on Twitter, the benefits will flow.

Twitter delivers competitive advantage

Your competitors, customers and potential customers are on Twitter too – are you listening for opportunities? There’s a lot of “noise” on Twitter however it’s very easy to “tune in” by setting up Lists and Searches to monitor updates and conversations. Twitter is informal in that its ok to just reply and talk to people where normally might feel uncomfortable doing so without an introduction. Offer help, advice or experience in your replies.

Twitter makes you more memorable

We’ve blogged before about the attention economy and the value of giving something rather than just selling. Twitter brings ever increasing demands on your attention so there’s a risk here. You’ll be more memorable if you’re helpful. Part of Twitter’s uniqueness is its 140 character limit which keeps a hold on how much communication you can offer per tweet. By being helpful and sharing your experience, you’ll be more memorable in the face of increasing attention demands on your customers.

Twitter builds relationships

Being part of the Twitter network brings you into contact with real people in real time – people you might not even have met face to face yet – a global network. These new types of relationships are valuable – questions get answered, recommendations get made, and trust is developed – people buy from people remember and your next opportunity could come from this. My friend Kate Carruthers put it really well in this blog post The idea of “Loose Ties over Time” is important as it demonstrates the ease with which relationships can be managed using Twitter for example.

Twitter helps you improve

We all want to grow and improve as individuals and this feeds into our business success. Using Twitter brings new ideas and thinking into your stream. You have to invest some time in following the right people. This depends on your business and interests. Use Search to help here – keywords for your industry, location and much more are available. Checkout the Advanced Search options. One of my favourites is the combination of links and hashtags to quickly find content of relevance. For example at the recent web conference LeWeb where many tweets are being shared, I want to find just the links, so I would search “#leweb filter:links” Note the hashtag use to filter to just those tweets.

Do you need help? I’ll be available over the holidays and would be happy to Skype with anyone who has questions using Twitter. Just drop a comment in here with your questions and I will be in touch.

Wishing you all the best for the festive season and success in 2012!

Wow!  The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to setup, and get started.  It demonstrated great utility. Utility means useful or beneficial: it’s easy to get started and use, you’re sharing your experience through photos rather than just via text updates, photo effects can be applied easily (it’s effectively commoditising photo manipulation), and all your photos are stored onlne and are accessible easily. Great utility.

Next, it asked me about my other web presences – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr and more.   Immediately it connected me to other users I know through other connected media.  It demonstrated a great community so you’re excited to find that others you know are sharing content using the application. This leaves you with the expectation that the content and experience you will have will be valuable and memorable. This expectation came true within moments of sharing my first photos as others immediately “Liked” and commented. You can view my photos here.

At Saasu these ideas of utility and community are ones we strongly believe in. We want our users to enjoy using Saasu, discover and realise the benefits for their business. They become our community and tell their own communities about us. We’ve seen this grow our business dramatically over the years and it’s allowed us to maintain fanatical pricing as we don’t advertise in the traditional sense.

Think about your own business in terms of utility and community. Are these areas you could improve on or learn on from the Instagram experience?

Recently at the annual “LeWeb” conference in Paris conference, the CEO of Instragram spoke about his vision for their company. I hope you draw us much inspiration from this as I did.

Trading terms

• Can now specify End Of Month (EOM) + X number of days for more flexibility.
• Contact, Sales, Automated Sales & Settings screens have all been updated to reflect the new trading terms options.
• Trading Terms details flow through to Invoice templates.
• Contact import/export (Saasu CSV format) also includes the trading terms details.
• The Webservices API allows trading terms details to be referenced.

What happened to the 7d 14d 30d links?

By design we have removed those selection options.

With the enhanced trading terms you can set default due dates for sales and purchases via Settings > Contacts > Trading Terms. In addition, for particular contacts you can override these defaults by setting trading terms at the contact level via Contacts > edit Contacts > Trading Terms. We’ve also added EOM + X days and COD options to allow fine tuning of the trading terms.

In effect this has made the old 7d 14d 30d redundant as you have more control over trading terms in this release.

Webservices API

• More detailed information within invoices is now accessible via the API.
  Specifically, “Total inc tax”, “exc tax” and tax amounts included in line items can be referenced.
• Merchant fee accounts on bank accounts can now be referenced.
• Merchant fees associated with an invoice payment can now be referenced.

What struck me most was the range of accounting professionals and the roles they undertake.  The profession is so diverse – there were financial controllers for large corporates/government/education, partners and associates from accounting practices, students of accounting and business information systems and entrepreneurs with an accounting background building their own startups and interested in the opportunity cloud computing presents.

After some brief presentations from online accounting solutions providers we undertook a panel discussion and took questions from the audience.  Here’s a view from the panel:

The audience asked great questions, including:

What degree of customisation is available in your software?

The ability to use custom fields exists in some screens to track specific information.   Invoice templates can be fully customised to suit your own businesses’ look and feel.  The Webservices API provides the most customisation by allowing other software and web applications to interact with Saasu just as humans by creating, deleting, reading and updating transactions.

What is it like for clients of an accounting firm to make the transition to cloud accounting?

It was great to meet in person Saasu Gold Partner Colin Chandler from Mulraneys who responded to this question. Colin talked about the “paradigm shift” change in the way that accountants manage their client’s business using cloud accounting. Colin found that he hasn’t had to convince his clients to make the transition: once they see the benefits of ubiquitous access, collaboration and the move toward a more value-added relationship with their accountant, they were happy to make the change and experienced the benefits immediately.

Can you restrict access to users?

User Roles in Saasu allow you to control exactly what you want your employees, bookkeepers, advisors or clients to see in your accounting file.

Can I access my data after I leave the service?

If you need to leave Saasu we offer export formats for your data. Saasu then archives your data for 7 years. If you decide to come back to Saasu we require a minimum payment of 3 months subscription value to re-activate your file.

Overall a great event and the accounting industry are very enthusiastic about the opportunities of cloud computing.

What my Mum taught me – Robyn Lehmann used to say to me as a youngster, “Marc, just make sure you give great service, make sure they are happy and don’t worry, you’ll be wealthy in more ways than just money.”

I saw my mum turn simple businesses into amazing ones so obviously I took that advice on board after seeing it in practice. I also took on her example as an approach we call Service as a Sales Channel. It’s not really an expense, she knew this way before all the MBA’s in the worlds top universities figured this out.

A business that just designs itself for it’s own sake at the expense of customers will suffer the loss of Service as a Sales channel. A good example is how many technology companies these days don’t have a phone support offering. The catch is that when you “don’t give the love”, as we call it, you will have to “give the cash” to the advertising companies. This will mean charging your clients more for the product.

Seduction in Lieu of Service – So what’s the point of this? You’ll have to start marketing and schmoozing at levels that justify the price differences and missing personal service. A form of seduction in lieu service. Saasu is different. We are clearly in an alternate service and value category.

The Future of Accounting – To begin with it can’t just be about “Practices”. It involves business owners. They are the client, the reason for the existence of the accounting industry. As an accountant you service and bill them as efficiently as possible; you want to give them upfront or pay as you go pricing certainty if you can. You want to communicate with them before they call you. You want to be party to the business owner’s success. So this means there is always a balancing act around practice efficiency, the number of technologies you support and the businesses systems efficiency. Complacently falling for incumbency or beauty is often lethal for your client business owners productivity.

An efficient practice outcome for managing a business client can cause an inefficient outcome for the business owner. Conversely a business run exactly how the business owner wants it run may not suit your practice’s business model. You may have to deal with systems you don’t understand or support.

Getting real. Future Practices – Future Practices would look at the net efficiency/cost gains of both stakeholders. They would recommend a system to their client based on the total outcome for the client and themselves. The real situation is that both business and practice have internal efficiencies. A system may serve the practice well but serve the business owner poorly.

We see these decisions made every day. A practice is aligned to a certain software vendor, their processes are best optimsed to that software vendor. This is natural: you iteratively move toward best practice for your firm within the constraints of the systems you adopt and support. Clients are then channeled into that system.

The Problem – There is a major catch with this model. The “single vendor practice” I call them. The regard for client business efficiency is missing. Future firms will have a technology adoption curve that balances the number of systems they support with the efficiency of their firm and their client’s business. They are unlikely to evangelise a single product at the expense of business owners. They are likely to support three or four solutions. A toolbox with one tool will never trump one with many.

An example – We recently had a client who had been put onto a competitor product. This client approached us upset by the situation. His accounting firm was an evangelist for a particular platform and wasn’t prepared to provide our solution. The client wasn’t having their needs met by the accountant’s preferred system to the point where he was prepared to leave the accountant.

What went wrong – In this case it was easy to see. The accountant was completely focused on the practice. Possibly they were prepared to filter this client off their list. Possibly they felt that they would have to charge the client more for using a non-standardised approach to doing the tax remittances and returns. Many factors could be at play but the reality is that they didn’t want to deal with the client wanting to use Saasu.

What could have happened – The accountant could have engaged the client in a manner that was centric to the client need. Why did the client feel Saasu was so important to them? Was it workflow reasons? Was it more than an accounting system to them?

Beyond Accounting is Process – The business owners life is a process driven one. The reality in this situation, and many I see like it, is that process and workflow is now a major part of accounting system requirements. The business owners life is a mixture of manual and automated workflow processes. The world has changed, it’s multi-channel, multi-system, procedural, and services have been commoditised into their components.

What I find separates out great accountants is their ability to see a businesses accounting system as a business workflow system. They see through their clients eyes that the systems they need and use serve workflow, converting manual into automated workflow. It’s not just about tax and reporting. These things are important, but are only one part of the picture. Time is sunk in workflow, it is the constraint, the operational glass ceiling on business growth.

Operational glass ceiling – At Saasu we refer to the workflow and processing burden as an operational glass ceiling. Good accounting systems are designed to solve issues in this area just as much, if not more so, than the requirements of the accounting practice. This creates an interesting opportunity for companies like Saasu.

We are business centric but are now becoming more accountant centric. We have built features that helps with some workflow nasties. Our recent automated fee handling upgrade for PayPal is an example. Workflow and automation tools in a business can be the be the causal element behind rapid business growth. 100′s and often 1000′s of hours in workload can be saved over a year whilst it may only impact an accounting practice’s efficiency by minutes or hours at year end.

Order of magnitude – I think the scale here is what get’s missed. If we get real about this a business owner can often save entire salaries by adopting systems that attempt to achieve what Saasuians call “Automation Maximisation”. I’ve seen businesses adopt Saasu and reduce admin and operational functions by several full time hires. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now their accountant’s bill may increase if they aren’t a supporter or familiar with Saasu. It will have the converse effect if the accounting firm is Saasu savvy. In either case though the order of magnitude results in the business owner being much happier with their accounting firm for the big dollars saved. The accountant’s bill becomes a semantic issue with such value add behind it instead of a highlighted payable. I believe when accountants achieve this goal for their client the gods of karma, the gods of good luck, will repay in kind.

Don’t underestimate it, business owner word of mouth is pervasive. It’s why we have managed to stay ahead of much better funded competitors without spending anything on advertising. Thousands of new clients from “word of mouth” and “word of web”. p.s. we charge less for Saasu because we aren’t spending the big dollars on advertising.

Automation Maximisation – We have another saying at Saasu. You are what you haven’t automated. We talk about it all the time. What task or feature will next best remove that operational glass ceiling. It makes life hard because we get feature requests for things that won’t remove much at all, but the requester thinks is really important. So we do struggle with this.

As an example we auto-email statements really well. It’s caused receivables ageing to improve for our customers. Now we are working on a new Statement format, a “Statement of outstanding invoices”. We are also working on bulk printing statements. These are the two next biggest time savers in this area of Saasu.

Win-win There are practice systems coming onto the market that also manage your tax returns, can manage your practice website and run your firm. Acclipse iFirm is one such solution. Mike Chisholm the CEO of Acclipse is a believer in supporting multiple platforms. I agree with his view and it’s one of the main reasons we enjoy each others partnership in business. Conveniently Mike is embedding Saasu and Banklink inside his iFirm platform.

So the slam dunk is that you can have systems that work really well for clients but also create efficiency for your practice. The business owner and the accounting firm both win.

I love a TV show called the Good Wife. It’s a story about a lawyer who always tries to do the right thing. I am an open type of person as some of you know so I do refer to these client loving accountants who put their business owners first, The Good Accountants. If you are one come join us!

Good Accountants – All the good accountants I know are driven to put the best solutions and products into their clients. This will create profitable results for the business owner and help you keep the client long term. I don’t believe a firm is a sustainable business model that expenses practice efficiency to the business owner’s account. They pick a portfolio of technologies they will support and this creates a win-win situation. They do this because they believe in the solution they have designed for their client and not because they feel the need to pander to any particular software company. It’s your business, don’t be owned by anyone.

It’s your business – Design your business or practice the way you want it. Ignore all the fear, uncertainty and deception software companies lay on each other. Adopt the platforms and technologies you like based on good due diligence. Accountants should take the time to be business owner centric in thinking about and recommending systems to businesses. If that system is not Saasu then that’s ok, I don’t want a poor result for the business owner. I want them to win at life. If Saasu isn’t in that picture that’s ok. We’ll win the race because we believe that by servicing your clients interests we will be repaid by you for upholding those ideals.

Initially I had agreed to attend as a guest of speaker/panelist John Birse and simply live-tweet the event and meet other attendees.  John’s a fascinating bloke, full of energy and ideas.  He is the CEO and National Division Franchisor for Jim’s Bookkeeping, Director of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers, and a Saasu Partner.

The focus of the conference was to “discuss the technology to enable physical, online and mobile points of sale in both B2C and B2B environments”, of great relevance to Saasu as we are all about automation as previously posted.   I captured some of the event by live-tweeting (you can view the archive of that here)  During the break I was asked  by Kate and speaker/MC Gordon Long (Head of Product, Merchant Solutions at NAB) if I would like to participate on the panel.  A key item for discussion was “economical and user friendly solutions to shift acceptance of technology” so Saasu fit right in that context.

Payments technology is at the heart of automating your business. At Saasu we’re continually updating our add-ons which connect the systems you love using. This month we launched our automated feed to PayPal. Early next year we will launch our add-on for payment gateway eWay to further automate your business.

Karolyn’s passion to help businesses fires up R2B. She guides business owners to uncover the insights buried in their books, helping them make smart decisions. Instead of telling them what they must do, she uses a personal consultation model. This helps her clients understand in depth how finances and business administration work together, then assists them with working out their obligations and the best means to manage them, carefully taking into account scarce resources, like time and money.

Saasu and R2B

The Accounting Partner Program was an obvious choice for R2B.  According to Karolyn,

“R2B relies on the affordable and easy to use Saasu accounting system. Its fixed monthly fees with no lock-in contracts, minimum periods or hidden costs let it provide SMBs with a safe and convenient way to have all their business accounting at their fingertips.”

Saasu is allowing Karolyn to relieve her clients of having to do bookkeeping and payroll wherever her clients may be. For clients who still wish to manage their own accounts, R2B helps them get started and provides Saasu training.

So why does R2B use and recommend Saasu?

According to Karolyn there are many reasons why she uses and recommends Saasu.  Here are just a few :

• Ease of Use – It is the most functionally integrated online accounting system, with 24×7 access in an easy to use cloud environment.
• Security and Reliability – For the last four years, Saasu users have experienced an outstanding 99.9% uptime.
• Affordability – It’s less expensive than Xero and MYOB LiveAccounts, and it allows businesses to save time, space, money and trees by removing printing, hard copy filing and communication costs.
• Software Upgrades – new releases are absolutely free, and occur automatically in the background. Additionally, updated tax tables are included with automatic upgrades, free of charge.

R2B and Saasu have a shared commitment to excellence and a shared focus on making the life of the business owner more effortless. To quote Karolyn :

“Something that I’ve always been passionate about is that all businesses, no matter how small, should have access to a qualified accountant. Now with Saasu, I also strongly believe that all businesses, no matter how small, should have access to an accounting system. Thank you for making this possible.”

Klaeton Sheehan, founder of Australian Direct, is one such customer. He’s in that new breed of young smart e-tailers carving a slice out of the traditional retail market. His online store specialises in portable fridges, battery & solar systems. If you’re an avid camper, road traveller or 4wd fanatic then you might already know about his business. In his words…

My business grew so fast that it felt like I was tied to a mule that somebody kicked. I had two choices either to be dragged through the gravel or eliminate what was unnecessary
automate my processes and outsource what could be done by someone else.

Klaeton automated his website, eBay sales and orders using Saasu. He also uploads invoices to Saasu then attaches them to purchase orders. He runs a paperless office. It also allows the sales team, accountants and bookkeepers instant access to his Saasu file and to all that Import and Export transaction and product data his operation relies on.

I asked Klaeton why he loves it…

Saasu for me is all about Integration & Freedom. Freedom to run my business from where I choose – home, the office or a beach hut it Thailand. Freedom to outsource my workforce and collaborate with multiple users in real time globally. The integration to other systems lets me automate mundane tasks to the point they disappear from my life forever! I was very lucky to find Saasu.

It is brilliantly simple. It can be difficult for accountants to explain the concept of cloud computing to their clients and conversely for business owners to explain it to their accountant if they aren’t yet cloud savvy. So the video could be used as a good reference video for Accounting Practice websites. Well done Ben.

The analogy is that the Cloud is like a Utility (Side note: the U in Saasu stands for Utility). This is the best simple analogy to make. There are academic nuances around why it’s different but for the purposes of education over semantics we’ll put that aside in this post. Learn about the differences here.

Inventory Item History Report
The Inventory Item History Report now has additional information and filters that will help you better understand your margins, average costs and cost of goods numbers. It includes:

• reporting of average cost
• reporting of margins
• gross profit margin for your entire sales
• the ability to export to spreadsheet/CSV
• the ability to filter by transaction type

Merchant Fees
Saasu has improved the handling of reconciling against fee items. If you have not nominated an account to record Merchant Fees against, Saasu will prompt you to do so in your bank account setup.

Fast Coding
The new Pending Transactions feature in Bank Feeds we released two weeks ago has been well received. Your Fast Coding screen in Bank Feeds now also displays pending transactions as read-only (greyed out). If Bank Rules are set up and applied to your transactions, Pending Transactions are excluded from this.

With hindsight we have found allowing our customers to reconcile Pending transactions to be more problematic than helpful. Accordingly, in our release last week we changed Pending transactions to be Read-only until Yodlee, our bank feed provider, updates them as finalised.

You can elect to view (but not reconcile) Pending transactions as an option on each Bank Feed you use in Saasu. By default this feature is OFF. You can turn this ON by going to View > Bank Account > Click on the Bank Account name to open it in edit mode > Tick the option Include Pending Transactions > Save the screen.

PayPal Automated Data Feeds
Connect your PayPal business account and transactions will flow straight into Saasu. We’ve also catered for the handling of merchant fees to save you time – Saasu accounts for the fees behind the scenes to an expense account.

Automated Bank Feeds for all Banks Globally
We’ve switched on all banks globally from our feed provider giving you a much broader choice of banks.  We’ve also built in a message to display when attempting to connect to a bank requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA).  We are working on supporting MFA in a future release.

Fee Handling for Automated Bank Feeds
Support for merchant fees in payments to bank accounts is now handled in Saasu.

You can now easily update a transaction directly in the feed to account for a merchant fee and Saasu will account for it behind the scenes to an expense account.

“Pending” Transactions in the Automated Bank Feed
We’ve received plenty of feedback on displaying pending transactions before they have been finalised. In this latest Saasu release the pending transaction behaviour has changed completely.

You can elect to receive pending transactions as an option on the back account (View -> Bank Accounts) but by default this is OFF. Also, due to the highly unstable nature of pending transactions and issues with reconciling against them, they are now displayed in ‘Read-Only’ mode and cannot be edited. They can only be edited once they are confirmed/posted. We have made them read only to ensure the data integrity.

“Quick Start”
We now have an easy 3-step setup for new subscribers.

This is a much more intuitive approach for new users, helping them navigate through the initial setup process for their files.

New Dashboard
The new dashboard allows for easy addition or removal of “dashboard widgets” by dragging and dropping the widgets into place.

This is part of our move towards a more customisable approach to the Saasu application.  For example you can now have a separate cashflow widget for each bank account.

Enhanced Bank Reconciliation Report
The report now supports the “clearance date” field in payments. This allows you to run the bank reconciliation report to generate historical reconciiations.

Update to Bank Feeds Screens
We’ve simplified the design of the inbox to make it more intuitive to use.

Direct connection to PayPal

We’ve built this as a direct feed. This means Saasu communicates directly with PayPal to get your data twice a day. It’s easy to setup in a few minutes. All you need is a business PayPal account, as personal accounts don’t have API access. PayPal offers free upgrade for Personal to Business accounts.

Fee handling

You can easily account for fees associated with your PayPal transactions. For example: a $97.80 amount received in your PayPal automated feed may relate to a $100.00 original Sale. You can now easily update this transaction to account for the fee by editing $97.80 to be $100.00 in the feed. Saasu will automatically account for the $2.20 PayPal fee.

Multi-currency is supported

The automated feed will also handle most common situations for multi-currency files such as those paying foreign currency amounts for goods or for billing people in foreign currencies and accepting payments via PayPal.

28 Oct 2011 02:31 GMT
OUTAGE: Saasu is offline for an unknown reason, we are looking into it.

28 Oct 2011 02:55 GMT
UPDATE: Saasu is online. We will advise as to cause of the issue when available.

28 Oct 2011 03:52 GMT
UPDATE: Saasu is offline. We are experiencing problems with our hosting service. Saasu should be available within the next 20 minutes. Our managed service provider is looking into the issue.

28 Oct 2011 05:50 GMT
UPDATE: Saasu is online. We will advise as to cause of the issue when available.

02 Nov 2011 08:00 GMT
REPORT: Saasu’s managed hosting provider was in the process of provisioning extra infrastructure to allow Saasu to expand and provide greater capacity and redundancy for its customer base. During this provisioning process which is usually totally non intrusive, a hardware/infrastructure failure in the VM infrastructure caused the Saasu server instances to go offline. The instances were restored shortly thereafter however integrity checks were performed for a majority of the downtime to ensure that data integrity was retained for Saasu customers before bringing the system fully online.

I was at Web Directions conference in Sydney recently and thought I’d share my notes from the speakers I most enjoyed as a series of blog posts over coming weeks.

Design your business, don’t just plan it.

It’s a design-centric conference however the content is very relevant to most business models and how you design your product and service experience for your customers. At the end of the day if you haven’t designed your business, your business planning may be way off the mark. Planning without design causes misallocation of resources. You may not take into account the personas or archetypes you sell to.

Stephen Anderson

Here’s the first by Stephen Anderson who consults on designing fun into businesses and your customers online experience of it. Stephen’s book is called Seductive Interaction Design. He starts by using the example of a teacher whose customers are an audience of students. A teacher himself previously, Stephen observed that there are 3 Types of Teachers. There are those that:

1. Apply themselves by just doing the minimum job and think it’s all a bit boring – they don’t create anything inspiring to make you learn. [Marc: You could see this as the most basic, passionless level that products or services could be designed to].

2. Sugar coat with cute rewards for work. They might add fun elements such as smiley stamps. It is what designers now call gamification, it can help improve a product’s appeal but you can get it wrong. [Marc: Frequent Flyers are an early example of this].

3. Seek Mastery as the aim to delight, engage, create passion and debate. It requires great teachers to look deeper and find the joy, the meaning. Customers get this from what are called intrinsic motivators. Stephen suggests you use the 5 whys technique to dig out what the joy is.

Intrinsic Motivators

The intrinsic motivators are challenge, curiosity, control, fantasy, competition, cooperation, recognition, self expression, pattern recognition, ownership and set completion

Stephen recommends using the Kano model to work on this. He regards this as the best model to follow. This model calls for de-lighters to be added. Things that bring joy to your customers. He notes that de-lighters do become expectations eventually. It was good to hear this as this is what we use at Saasu thanks to Grant Young who introduced Kano to me originally. Grant’s company Zumio can work through this model with you for your own business, if you are after one the best ROI investments you’ll ever make.

Bizlinc is a “mini ERP” system which  provides functionality that takes sales and marketing prospects right from initial enquiry/contact through the quoting and sales cycle. Quotes are delivered and if won, Bizlinc manages service and product fulfilment, manufacturing and purchasing as well as invoicing and payments.

Bizlinc is built on the Force.com platform – developed by leading CRM provider Salesforce.com giving Bizlinc users access to the platforms built-in social and mobile functionality, automation processes, reporting, activity management and search.

For example by utilising Chatter, Bizlinc connects users to colleagues, suppliers, customers and transactions that relate to their specific areas of focus.

For more detailed information about how this connector interfaces with Saasu, see our help note.

As part of the launch of this add-on Bizlinc are offering an iPad 2 in this special promotion.

The value proposition is that if it’s easier to capture the time as you work then you can recover billable time that was otherwise lost due to the burden of managing spreadsheets or paper. I concur with this, we see lots of new customers arrive at Saasu who are trades people, bookkeepers, service companies and the like that have been under billing because they don’t track their time.

I first met founder Ian Cummings when he built the successful Travellr.com Q&A website. Ian has built successful consulting and application development businesses in the past and he mentioned to me last year that he always wanted an easy to use software tool that quickly captures time across multiple projects. He said he was going to build one. Well he walks the talk, and here it is…