Overwhelmingly people loved the conference. The common feedback from the audience was that the speakers were excellent and that it was refreshing to see a software company that didn’t just hard sell.

Photo: Just some of the army of Jim’s Bookkeepers professionally ready to go bright and early.

Our next conference will be a Saasu User conference so it will be multi-stream and deep dive into the technical use of Saasu and it’s supporting applications. We hope to run this toward the end of the year around November or at the latest February. We’ll lock in dates soon.

So how did the day go?

In the morning Pollenizer’s Phil Morle really had many newer businesses in the audience rethinking their strategy. The comments suggested they really liked Pollenizer’s iterative approach to the startup cycle. Rob Nixon then got the audience nicely polarised. Some felt uncomfortable and threatened by Rob’s future for the industry and others could see that change is on it’s way and really wanted to make the shift into his model. Dr Ian Sims then showed us a Debits and Credits rap song that really spoke to the truth that accountants and bookkeepers are rappers, they just rap on the inside. It was brilliant to get a feel for Saasu’s use in the university environment from a progressive educator.

After the break Klaeton Sheehan’s “Saasu Land” song was a great intro back into the late morning session. His story was very inspiring and there was some fear afterwards that lots of people might resign and start e-commerce businesses just to have a taste of his lifestyle. Stuart Cook then talked about how Zambrero’s rapid rise is actually fuelled by a passion to fund it’s charitable works. He also talked about the value created by the combination of Saasu, Cloud Account and OneSaas. This led on nicely to Jodie Coleman from Cloud Account who gave the upfront and honest impression of migrating hundreds of clients to Saasu. We asked Jodie to speak because she knows the tricks and traps and she calls a spade a spade which we greatly respect. We wrapped up with our CTO, Paul Glavich, who spoke about Saasu’s development processes and an offline version of Saasu. This feature may make it’s way into various aspects of Saasu and essentially allows usage where there is no internet for various reasons.

After lunch Stilgherrian shot a security volley across all our bows. He reminded us that security concerns are right across the industry but not just specific to cloud, software or credit cards. After this Corneliu I. Tusnea from OneSaas talked about connecting applications. His speech was comprehensive like the list of apps he now connects to. It really hit home the volume of data synchronisation that can be achieved which at the end of the day is data entry and copying that can be avoided by people and is better done by “the machines”. Jack Delosa shared his vision for having accounting offer their small business clients a better way to raise capital via the MBE Education offering. Last up Alycia Edgar shared her view on how businesses need to unblock their flow. Her new book about Saasu was also launched and we attempted a rapid crowdsource for the book’s name.

Closing out the day Grant Young showed us how you can create really great service results in your business by following a service design approach that looks at the detailed interactions and perceptions your clients have of your business. Will Scully-Power from Datarati then shared his insights sourced from managing some of the country’s biggest marketing automation implementations. He pushed the need to drop the Vanity Metrics like “Page Views” and “Unique Visits” in favour of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) based metrics that speak to the real results for a business from their marketing efforts.

After the awards which we’ll cover in a separate blog post I closed the event by talking about our Saasu culture, beliefs and what we had lined up for the future of Saasu. You can see my slide deck here.

Schedule

08:30 Registration

09:00 Welcome – Brad Howarth | Author and Journalist

Brad will MC the days events and give us his current thoughts around the future of the internet and cloud in Australia.

A writer and speaker on technology, entrepreneurship and communication, and co-author of the book “A Faster Future”, Brad has kindly agreed to be Master of Ceremonies for the day. Learn more about Brad’s work here.

09:15 Execution at Internet Speed – Phil Morle | Cofounder, Pollenizer

Life in the cloud goes a little faster. Startups are creating a new science for driving innovation and starting whole new businesses in the blink of an eye. Phil does his every day and will tell you all about it

Phil is a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with experience running massive scale consumer internet businesses. He was the founding CTO at Kazaa which saw 5 million users online at any one time, millions of downloads per day and a total global user base of over 100 million. At Pollenizer, Phil and his team help transform ideas into global web businesses. Learn more about Phil here.

09:40 Remaining Relevant – Rob Nixon | CEO, Proactive Accountants Network

What does an accounting practise need to look like in order to remain relevant in this new era of data, the cloud and online systems.

Rob Nixon is an Entrepreneur, Speaker & Consultant who helps accounting firms and their clients dramatically improve their financial position. Rob will speak to the opportunities in the industry today industry with the passion that anyone who has heard Rob speak before will attest to. Learn more about Rob here.

10:05 Saasu Goes To University – Dr. Ian Sims | Griffith University

Saasu is now being taught at university. Learn about what this means for the education system, cloud computing acceptance and more from a very tech savvy educator.

Ian is a Chartered Accountant and CPA (Specialist in Information Technology) who combines these qualifications with a PhD, a heavy goods vehicle drivers licence and a certificate 1 in chain saw. While his research has been published in prestigious international journals, he has never lost his fascination with leading edge, sometimes “bleeding edge” technology and introducing others to it. Ian will talk to this work with his students and the benefits and opportunities that brings.

10:30 Morning Tea

10:50 E-commerce Automation – Klaeton Sheehan | Founder, Australian Direct

Klaeton will give us as really good glimpse into the brave new world of ecommerce. As he puts it, “the Automated Life of an E-commerce dude”

Klaeton Sheehan, founder of Australian Direct, epitomises the successful Saasu customer. He’s a new breed of young smart e-tailer 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. Klaeton will take us through his story of success and how he works.

11:15 Franchise Automation – Stuart Cook | CEO, Zambrero

Stuart Cook is the CEO of Australia’s fastest growing franchise (according to BRW) as well as one of the youngest franchise CEOs. Stuart will take us through how he works and the benefits brought to his business by using Saasu.

After being appointed the CEO of Zambrero Fresh Mex Grill just before his 24th birthday, he has lead the company to a growth of 600% in the last 18 months now employing more than 170 people across the group. Stuart has set his sights to take Zambrero to 100 stores by 2014. In 2010 Zambrero was the Social Responsible franchisor of the year, Mybusiness Magazine’s Best Retailer and the ACT’s Emerging Entrepreneurial Company of the Year.

11:40 Migrate, fast – Jodie Coleman | 1300GoCloud

In this talk Jodie will share her own journey and best practices that have resulted in her team having performed over 200 client migrations to Saasu.

With proven methodologies and attention to detail, Jodie assists her clients in what can be a time consuming and tricky transition between accounting systems. Jodie and her team epitomise the new breed of accounting firm emerging which by design can work anywhere with any client thanks to the benefits online accounting brings.

12:05 Saasu – Building for the Future – Paul Glavich | CTO, Saasu

This presentation will show brief insights into how Saasu deals with security, data redundancy, development processes, capacity planning, performance and conclude with a brief demo to show what technology and features you may see in future releases of Saasu.

Paul is a long time computer nerd, has been in the software industry for over 20 years and holds a Microsoft MVP. He worked initially as a developer and software engineer, then software consultant, team leader, solution architect, and currently with Saasu as the Chief Technology Officer.

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Security and the cloud: hype versus reality – Stilgherrian | Freelance Journo and writer

Stilgherrian is a freelance journalist, commentator and podcaster covering big-picture internet issues, with a focus on information security and cybercrime. He studied computing science and linguistics before a media career including ABC Radio and the first dot-com boom.

13:55 Business Process Automation – Corneliu I. Tusnea | CTO, OneSaas

Corneliu will show you not only a selection of best tools for your daily operations but how to automate the complete business processes run between these tools to help your team achieve maximum efficiency with minimal repetitions.

Senior Consultant with more than 15 years experience in Microsoft Software Development Technologies, with a strong focus on high-performance systems and security. He also designed and developed time-critical applications for Exchange Trading Systems.

14:20 Capital Raising and Succession Planning – Jack Delosa | MD, The Entourage

22% of Australian business owners are aged 60 or over, which means Australia is currently faced with a succession issue. Market research indicates that the first place a small to medium business owner will go to find out how to successfully exit their business, is to their accountant. Jack will outline what accountants can do to begin offering capital raising, M&A, and exit services to their clients and why this is a strong differentiator in todays economy.

From having his company listed in the Fastest 50 Start-Ups, to raising over $5m for his personal clients and acquiring businesses with his panel of investors, Jack Delosa is an emerging leader for future and existing entrepreneurs. Jack’s focus is educating and developing a new breed of entrepreneur through The Entourage and MBE Education.

14:45 Workflow processes – Are you blocking your flow? – Alycia Edgar | Coastal Accounting

What can you do to ensure you are making the most of Saasu’s Real Time Data for business decision making?

Previously Alycia worked in a variety of industries such as accounting firms, investment firm, government, small and medium business in the fields of management and financial accounting as well as information systems. As an owner of a surf shop for 5, this experience gave Alycia the ability to relate to small business owners about the issues they face in their business every day. Whether that is financial issues such as cashflow, or staff issues, marketing and promotions, time erosion from working in the business, lack of focus due to interruptions or her speciality, what is the story behind their financial numbers and what can be done about it.

15:10 Afternoon Tea

15:30 Service Design; Empathise and Research – Grant Young | Founder, Zumio

Grant present an overview of service design principles and practice, and how the application of service design can deliver business value, in terms of enabling innovation, finding operating efficiencies and reducing risk, for SMEs specifically.

Grant has a background that crosses strategic design, social network engagement and web application development. Grant is excited to be leading Zumio as an innovation strategist. Grant’s personal passion is to help support people live sustainable lives and is aligned with the pressing need for businesses to work more sustainably.

15:55 Revenue Disruption – Will Scully-Power | CEO, Datarati

Game Changing Marketing & Sales Strategies to Accelerate Growth in your Company!

Prior to joining Datarati, Will was the Data Director at global advertising agency M&C Saatchi/Mark.
M&C Saatchi launched a new agency called (Mark.) back in 2007 that merged direct and digital media – and introduced, for the first time for the agency, the discipline of data.

16:20 Awards and Prizes | Tony Hollingsworth – Evangelist, Saasu

Find out who will be receiving Saasu’s annual partner performance awards.
* Best App using the Saasu API.
* Best Platform supporting the Saasu API.
* Best Client Coverage by a Practise.
* Best Implementation Team.
* Best Client Coverage by a National Group.

Tony has over 20 years experience in the information technology and data industries, working with leading players including IBM Cognos, Dun & Bradstreet and The Nielsen Company. He is passionate about the Internet and excited about the way it is changing society and business. Tony’s primary passion is people – sharing his knowledge and experience to make them and their businesses more successful. A prolific and influential user on social networks including Twitter and an open networker, Tony has been blogging since 2003.

16:30 The Future of Saasu – Marc Lehmann | CEO, Saasu

What is Saasu going to do next. What are the trends for the accounting and business systems industry. Learn about our thoughts on these questions and also see some very interesting aspects of Saasu but from inside the mothership.

Marc founded Saasu.com back in 2000 using a slow funded approach in order to create an extremely good value online accounting engine. Previously, Marc was a Director of Principal Finance and Credit Trading Risk at Deutsche Bank. His latest goal is to build a web application that helps business owners remove the operational glass ceiling from their business life. Marc is a naturalist and a minimalist at heart believing the human race should be spending more time exploring and discovering and less time dealing with the paperwork of life.

17:00 – 19:00 Drinks and Food

Contact-based Discounts

There is now the ability to set a default Contact-based discount for item invoices for both sales and purchases.

This is set in the Contacts area in Saasu. You will notice in the Edit Contact screen a Default Discounts area for you to enter percentage discount values for both item sale and purchase invoices.

The benefit of this is that when you are creating an item sale or purchase transaction in Saasu, the discount will be automatically inserted into the invoice provided you have entered the discount value in that Contact’s record.

Bulk Printing of Statements

Saasu has always supported Automated Statements which you can schedule and have emailed to your Contacts. We now offer the ability to do Bulk Printing of Statements instead of sending them individually to your Contacts.

This is set in the Automate > Statements area in Saasu. Now when click Add to create a new Automated Statement there, you will notice we’ve enhanced the screen to include a new Layout and Send Method area. This allows you to select either a Contact Statement or an Outstanding Invoices Statement.

The benefit of this is that you can now nominate a user on your Saasu Subscription to be the recipient of the bulk statements. They can then print them in bulk immediately or for example send them off to a print house for printing.

Multi-currency Statements

You can now run Automated Statements for both base currency and several of the most popular global currencies. Simply go to Automated > Statement and now you will have the ability to select the currency required for your customer’s Statement.

The benefit of this is that you can now capture foreign currency invoices in your customer’s statements, giving you a more complete picture of business conducted.

Activities Dashboard Widget

You can now add a new widget to your Saasu Dashboard which lists Activities with a due date within the next 7 days. Go to Dashboard > Manage > choose Activities

The widget will display either ALL or TO DO activities that have a due date assigned and which fall due within the current work week.

This will be useful for businesses who rely on Saasu activities as a call to action for important work they need to follow up on for their current work week.

We’re pleased to be able to share the archived presenation here for your review. It runs for just over 20 minutes and if you’re an Accountant or Business Owner interested in learning more about Saasu and how to migrate from your previous accounting system, this is going to be a helpful starting point. Thanks to Sholto from BoxFreeIT for organising this presenation as part of their new “Wednesday Matinee” series.

Some of the key takeaways from the presentation are:

• accountants unfamiliar with the Saasu migration process or lacking experience in doing so often don’t know the right questions to ask or where to start
• it’s important that the accountant qualifies the client need as much as possible in order to determine if Saasu can do the job that the client wants. This is best achieved by spending as much time as possible in front of the client, walking through their business to get a solid foundation to understand the best way to migrate
• There are 3 broad levels of migration to Saasu from a previous accounting system:
  1.Historical
  2. Trial Balance
  3. Roll Over Date.
  The Trial Balance approach is the most popular and recommended as it is the fastest and most efficient way to migrate to Saasu
• The quality of the data in the previous accounting file affects the success of the migration to Saasu. Note the difference between a “data cleansing exercise” and a “data migration exercise” when working with your clients

Things to be aware of during a Saasu migration include:

• Cash v Accruals for GST.
• Payroll – SGC Super Control Account vs Super Fund Control Account setup in Saasu
• Inventory exports to update price lists
• Statement Reconciliation to MYOB files.
• Balance Sheet Sub Ledger AR & AP vs General Ledger
• Posting to wrong Bank Accounts
• Payroll – SGC Super Control Account vs Super Fund Control Account setup in Saasu
• If you have greater than 1000 employees then Saasu is probably not right for you
• If you have greater than 10000 stock items then Saasu is probably not right for you

I hope you enjoy the presentation and find it helpful for your own business.

Speaking on the webinar will be Martyn Dominy from MYCFO, one of Saasu’s most experienced accounting partners and a former CFO of a large US software company. Martyn and his team have converted more businesses from desktop accounting software to Saasu than any other accountant.

Martyn will be sharing his secrets for successful conversions to Saasu including common hurdles and time-saving techniques. Martyn will also cover best practices for setting up a Saasu file.

These webinars are part of a fortnightly series called “Wednesday Matinee”, a half-hour webinar for accountants and bookkeepers who want to keep current with the latest in cloud software. They are hosted by Sholto Macpherson, Editor and Publisher of BoxFreeIT.com.au, a news and reviews website on cloud software for business.

“The greatest challenge with cloud software is making a smooth transition from desktop or server software. Once businesses are using the cloud they usually are very happy”, Sholto said.

If you are using Twitter the hashtags for the webinar are #SaasuMigrate #WedMatinee

Register for Secrets to Successful Saasu Conversions here or email Sholto Macpherson at Sholto@BoxFreeIT.com.au for more information.

Invoice Tags at Line-Item Level
You’ll notice on the Sales and Purchases screens a new column, “Tags”, available for each line item. This allows you to allocate costs (on purchases) or income (on sales) to various jobs, divisions, people, projects or other uses you have for Tagging in Saasu.

You can enter up to five Tags per line item by simply entering them in the column, which will expand as shown to reveal all Tags in use for that line item. If the Tag already exists, it will display in the drop-down list and by typing any characters into the column, Saasu will search the Tag list and present a list of matches to choose from.

If required the hot key to open the Tag List before typing anything is the down arrow.

Full API Support is also provided allowing add-ons to Saasu to take advantage of this feature – the API will allow creation of and retrieval of Tags at each line item on the invoice.

When you import and export transactions to and from Saasu, these new tags will carry through.

Please note that due to the size of this project we’ve taken a phased approach to this new Tags feature. This means that you can start recording and capturing the tags for your transactions now for future reporting. In coming releases we will update the Reports area to start working with these tags. The aim being to have the important reports covered by the end of the quarter. We know you may want to start updating your data in preparation so we have taken this initial step to allow this.

We will continue to allow Tags to be applied at the entire transaction level – any Tags entered this way will apply to all line items in the transaction.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve improved the performance of Saasu for large files so that for example the performance of reports such as the Aged Receivables Report have improved.

iPhone Application

Changes have been made that were affecting Saasu iPhone application functionality for some users.

Plan Changes

The new plans are now in effect so that any changes to your subscription are now supported by these new plans.

Downgrades are now supported as part of these plan changes. You can downgrade provided that:

• the average number of transactions for the life of your file is less than the number of transactions provided by the plan you are downgrading to
• you are not using the functionality that isn’t available on the downgraded plan.  For example you will be asked to make employees inactive if you downgrade to a plan that does not support Saasu Payroll. Please refer to our new plans for more information.

I love this story because it is bringing practical experience into the classroom and fast tracking students’ learning, before they’ve even joined the workforce. Using Saasu, students are learning about business workflow AND the underlying accounting – from creating pre-quote opportunities through to orders and invoices. The depth of Saasu’s feature set created the educational opportunity.

Students have access to online videos explaining accounting principles in terms of real business applications, getting hands-on with Saasu files and working through real-world examples.

Dr Ian Sims, Senior Lecturer of Accounting at Griffith University Business Schools said…

My role is to introduce our students to “Business Information Systems” in their first semester of study for the Master of Commerce. By setting practical tasks using the cloud-based Saasu software, I can give them exposure to recording business processes as they will be when they graduate, rather than using twentieth century software. Additionally, I am able to take advantage of all of the normal cloud advantages – a constantly updated application, secure software management and ubiquitous access on most computer platforms and mobile devices through browsers and apps…

What do you think of cloud accounting being taught at university? I think it reinforces my view that this year will see a record number of business move their accounting to the cloud.

Zambrero loves Saasu

On track for 50 stores nationally using Saasu.com, the progressive new chain Zambrero is run by Stuart Cook the 26 year old CEO wunderkind.

Stuart and his team have already rolled out 23 stores in record time in recent months.

Stuart gave some of the credit for the Zambrero success to Saasu in his recent presentation to nearly 600 other young entrepreneurs in Sydney this week.

Zambrero provide soft tortilla in a delicious range that also has a soul. They support a charitable program that delivers food to the needy as well as two other programs.

Learn more about this inspiring team on a separate Saasu blog post about their founder Sam Prince, one of the Young Australians of the Year (who also loves Saasu).

With hindsight we would have worked this into our systems handling, but when we statistically looked at the numbers it wasn’t many that would qualify. That’s bad, and not in our values. We pride ourselves on the values that customers matter and fanatical value. So again, in hindsight, I think the decision not to allow downgrades missed meeting these values for the people that it does affect. If you are one of them you are just as important a customer to us as all the others.

So in light of this we will allow downgrades.

On the 3rd of April, when price changes take effect, you will be able to select a lower plan. Saasu will warn you if you don’t meet the plan limits. The rule is simply if you are under the transaction volume limit (measured as total transactions divided by duration of your subscription) and you don’t use the features of the higher plan then the system will let you downgrade.

Enjoy the savings.

Marc Lehmann,
CEO Saasu.

New Plans

We will still have 4 plans but instead of the current ones – Accountants Edition, Professional, Global and Enterprise – the new plans will be Extra Small, Small, Medium and Large. The existing Accountants Edition will be renamed Small and will now be available to all customers. The current Professional and Global Plans will be consolidated into the Medium Plan. The existing Enterprise Plan will be renamed Large. The newest addition to our subscriptions will be the XS (Extra Small) Plan which is targeted at the sole trader or micro business.

The existing plan names had sometimes been confusing for customers and the move to more generic naming should allow new and existing customers have a clearer idea of where each of the plans is positioned. The software, clothing and food industries have all adopted this globally understood model.

Full details of the pricing and functionality of the new plans is available on the Saasu website.

Free Plan > Extra Small Plan

On January 1st this year the Free Plan (Less than 20 Transactions/Month) was replaced with a Trial Plan.

Free files that were created prior to 1st January, 2012 will be migrated to the Extra Small Plan. The expiry date for this file will be set to your current subscription expiry or, if you don’t have any paid files, the expiry will be 1st January, 2013.

In order to defer the price changes and extend the expiry you have the option to renew your subscription between now and April 3rd, 2012.

Free Trial files created between 1st January and 30th March this year will have the expiry date set to 30th April, 2012.

So why the change? Saasu feels that accounting with bank and other data feeds is now essential for efficient bookkeeping. We want to focus our development energy on supporting products backed by this kind of feature. Getting this data has real costs for Saasu. We feel this is still an extremely cheap alternative at $9 per month. We believe if you value your time you will appreciate this.

Trialling Saasu

The 30-Day Trial option lets prospective customers trial the Saasu application at whichever level they wish (Extra Small, Small, Medium or Large). Previously if a customer wanted to trial the functionality of the Enterprise or Global plan they were required to sign up and pay for 1 month. This is no longer the case.

Professional & Global Plans > Medium Plan

The consolidation of the Professional and Global Plans into the Medium Plan allows customers on this plan to turn on multi-currency in the Settings area, if you wish to use it.

After 3 years of price stability Saasu has added a lot of features. This change will also provide broader customer access to Saasu’s renowned passionate phone support, where previously this was limited to higher plans. Saasu continues to be a lot better value than competitor products for our feature set.

Enterprise Plan > Large Plan

We are keen to provide the functionality available in the Large Plan including serialised inventory, customised reports, KPI reports and consolidated reports to a broader range of customers. As such we have made the price of this plan more accessible.

Further Information

As always the Saasu Service Team are available to answer your questions and you are welcome to contact us if you require any additional information.

why did you choose Saasu?

Saasu was recommended by a friend at another startup who is really happy using their product. Their software is web based so we’re able to use the software from any computer. We like the idea of ‘software as a service’ or ‘cloud computing’ and want to operate as much of our business online as possible.

Their API is excellent and we’ve been able to easily integrate Saasu with our websites to automatically track our sales for our 2 online retail businesses – Shoes of Prey selling custom women’s shoes and Sneaking Duck selling prescription glasses.

Saasu has been around since the late 90′s and their business is growing so they’re likely to be around for quite some time. It also helps that their pricing is reasonable.

Having a fast and clear insight into the financial aspects of our business has made our internal decision making much easier and more efficient resulting in better business decisions

in what ways has Saasu made an impact on your business?

Saasu has made our accounting so easy. It’s easy to enter data and easy to run up to date reports to understand where our business is at. Having a fast and clear insight into the financial aspects of our business has made our internal decision making much easier and more efficient resulting in better business decisions.

With 60% of our sales coming from customers outside Australia, in currencies other than Australian dollars, Saasu’s multi-currency functionality makes it easy to capture, track and report on these sales.

what are your favourite aspects of Saasu?

1. The API makes it really simple to pull sales and other data from our website into Saasu.
2. I love Saasu’s new bank feeds system which automatically pulls in transactions from our bank accounts and matches them to Saasu transactions. Bank reconciliation used to take a couple of days per quarter, but can now be done in a matter of hours, a huge time saving.
3. The fact that Saasu is cloud based so is accessible from anywhere.
4. The support offered by Saasu is fantastic. Their team are very knowledgeable, very responsive and have taken the time to help us work out solutions to some tricky situations.

what’s next for your company and Saasu

We employ 18 people at Shoes of Prey and Sneaking Duck and do millions of dollars in sales annually and Saasu allows me to manage all our accounting and bookkeeping in only a couple of hours per week. Our next step is to hire a PA/Office Manager to take on our bookkeeping work as part of their role. Saasu is easy to use so it will be simple to train them, even if they don’t have bookkeeping experience.

Dashboard Widgets
You will find two new dashboard widgets to help you manage your business. The Sales Report and Purchases Report widgets provide a graphical view of your Top 10 customers or suppliers for the selected time period. This is presented graphically and we will show you what percentage of your total business that the Top 10 represents.

To access the new widgets simply click “Manage” on your Dashboard and drag them into position.

Further Infrastructure Changes
We’ve added further infrastructure changes in this release to support better performance, redundancy and additional capacity as our customer base expands. An upcoming blog post will explain these infrastructure changes in more detail and what they mean for you.

We also don’t want to make you pay $500-$1000 a day you often pay for the privilege to attend events like this. Instead you can attend for just $99 if you signup before 1 April 2012. Our interstate friends can then use that difference for their flights.

The focus of the day will be on practical information from people that understand the successful, real-world application of cloud computing and the impacts on business. We will have topics that other software vendors walk away from. We will discuss security in the cloud, what the risks are. We will talk about integration and migration. You’ll see the new Saasu. We’ve hand picked some automation experts to talk, people who have heavily automated their business. Hopefully you get some insights into how to get into automation heaven. You will learn about service design, marketing automation and creating momentum.

There will be a range of presentations across the day and we will be taking the TED approach, keeping them focused and short. We are still finalising all the speakers but you can expect keynotes from:

• Stilgherrian
• Rob Nixon
• Mick Liubinskas / Phil Morle

Based on the interest and requests we have had for this event it will oversubscribe, as there are a limited number of seats. So unfortunately you must be an active Saasu partner or customer in order to attend.

Saasu Cloud

AUD $99
FRIDAY 11th MAY 2012
8:30AM REGISTRATIONS – 9:00AM START – 5:00PM DRINKS/FOOD
NSW TEACHERS FEDERATION HOUSE, SURRY HILLS, SYDNEY

Register Now

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.