If you have not seen Marc’s excellent recent post on Sustainable Business you should read it.

Today we will build on that article and take a slight tangent to focus on the specific use of SaaS (software-as-a-service) to improve your business and improve (not just simplify) your life with SaaS in three areas.

With SaaS we can develop more -

• Environmental Sustainability - reducing the pressure on the environment generated by your business activities
• Quality of Life Sustainability - in the sense of the impact working in your business has on your people
• Commercial Sustainability - knowing that most new businesses last less than three years in most countries and less than two years in many countries what can you do to reduce risk and improve best practice

The focus is on using SaaS to avoid the commuting into work every day, we are not discussing productivity savings yet, we believe that those are even bigger but read on and you will be amazed just how dramatic just the commuting savings are from SaaS.

Environmental Sustainability

The impact here is big, so big in fact it is remarkable but it takes a minute or two to really see it, here goes.

SaaS can reduce commuting, this is the single biggest benefit of SaaS to the environment in terms of carbon footprint.

If just 3 in 10 clients of Saasu.com can work from home (or arrange an online meeting instead of travelling) twice a month, the carbon savings are dramatic. Here are the maths per 10,000 clients:

24 (days a year) x 3,000 (commuters) x 40km (average km per return trip) = 2,880,000 km of travel.
At 3,600 km per tonne of Carbon this is 800 tonnes of carbon generated.

We should do some surveys of our client base and get some even harder data on this impact.

Quality Of Life Sustainability

Using the assumptions above, and if people work a 10 hour day including travel then we really really like the idea of 720,000 hours being put back into quality of life each year for every 10,000 users we have. Remember this is even before we help customers become more productive which we will cover in another article.

SaaS can help sleep & relationships - we can’t be so scientific about the personal quality of life value of a couple of days working from home each month but the simple ability to have 30-60 minutes more sleep, more partner, more children, more gym time leaves you working in a more considered way with a fresh mind - rather than spend 2 hours commuting which is the alternative - it must be good for you. Over the course of the year, that is a lot of additional quality time with your partner. Maybe not enough to help address the global growth in divorce & separation but it certainly can’t hurt.

SaaS can help obesity (ok so this is a stretch goal literally!) - If that time was converted into exercise instead of sleep we can help work on the obesity issues in most developed countries.

Saas can help financial health -If the commuting money is spent on fresh fruit and veg and home cooked meals because we have the time to do it, it helps our waist and our wallet simultaneously.

SaaS can help community health - If the time saving is spent on volunteer work in communities rather than commuting, imagine what you can build with over 80 person years of time - build a scout hall or a community centre or a youth education program or volunteer as coach for local sports clubs.

Commercial Sustainability

Of course, most of the time we spend working on the business we are thinking about money, but SaaS can also do more with a business than just manage the money.

SaaS can reduce risk - by delivering a proven business system of processes that brings the wider SaaS community of needs together in one place you are getting ideas for improving your business and ensuring compliance not just from us but from all the users of our products.

SaaS can improve cash flow - by increasing the rate at which your debtors pay you with email invoices and statements and follow-ups rather than repeatedly incurring snail mail delays. Also by improving your visibility on your cash needs with dashboard creditor and debtor information that is always there, every time you use the system.

SaaS can deliver improved inventory management - by increasing fine tuned accuracy on restock levels and having central point of control while using of multiple simultaneous distribution channels (e.g. shop, web, warehouse sale, Ebay) all connected electronically.

So, SaaS does improve life, not just simplify life!