Online Accounting Blog

There are several ways to manage your Sales cycle in Saasu including Tags, Activities and Custom Fields. We are adding more features to assist in this process and also to allow enhanced synchronisation for our CRM connectors.

There is a new field in Saasu Contacts page called Contact Manager. You can use this field to track the Sales Person or Account Manager associated with a Contact. The list is a combination of Contact and Employees in your file. Employees are labelled with an orange E.

Eventually the Contact Manager will be a new filter in reports. The idea being to allow you to use less Tags often used to represent Sales or Account Managers. It will help you manage a smaller Tag list.

This new auto selection method for Drop Downs and Pick Lists in Saasu will be used throughout Saasu including the Contact, Tag and Inventory Item selection methods. When usability testing is complete we will add it to the rest of Saasu.

Our live outage report is available at pingdom. Outages last month were for:

• upgrades and updates to the Saasu online accounting application.

Bank feeds are coming to Saasu but not just yet. We strategically delayed late last November after learning that Yodlee, a bank feed provider, was starting to add banks that we needed connections to. This could save us a lot of time and money, something which translates into a lower cost Saasu online accounting service for our customers.

Yodlee is an interesting company who specialises in supplying bank data feeds (permissioned read-only) to companies like Saasu. In short our customers will be able to give us approval to feed their bank data into Saasu.

Yodlee support over 9,000 banks and credit card companies. If Saasu attempted to connect to the volume of banks that we need to directly using our own resources then the price we would have to sell subscriptions at would be higher. We are realistic about what small and micro business want to pay for their accounting service so if this feature can be enabled cheaply then we will provide it.

Recently Yodlee had ANZ bank connected so it’s only a matter of time before other non US banks fall under Yodlee’s wing. Saasu will start providing bank feeds as soon as the service can be offered at the right price for small and micro businesses. In the mean time it takes about 3 minutes to transfer a CSV file from your bank and load it into Saasu. It’s very simple once you have have had a go at it once.

Saasu released a change of the menu system from left navigation to top navigation overnight. The menu instead of being displayed vertically is now horizontal and less frequently used options are now available in the "More" drop down list.

This is a customer driven release. Customers are asking for speed, more data columns in lists and reports with less icons and clutter.

We are happy to help as less graphic content has the benefit of cleaner screens and faster screen load times. You will see some minor changes later in the month as we colourise the online accounting experience a little more. We have heard the feedback that you like lots of colour to make accounting fun. Part of the change is also about preparation for new features and reports that will require more screen space below the menu system.

Please let us have your feedback so we keep it in consideration for future releases. We do our best to please everyone but we also realise change does come with resistance so we haven’t taken this step lightly. We think getting used to the changes should only take a few minutes but will result in a much better experience in the future.

If your business sells widgets and then immediately orders them from your suppliers then you will like our new drop ship feature.

Typically eBay traders, e-commerce shops and other businesses who don’t hold inventory on hand or who have their suppliers deliver direct will find this very useful. Essentially, when you enter a Sale you can choose a ‘Do more’ option called ‘Save and Drop Ship’.

Saasu drop shipping for small business is quite unique due to our inventory capability which extends to assembly/build style inventory and API support.

What happens?

Once you click Save and drop ship Saasu automatically loads a new purchase with the order information for your default supplier set as the Contact. It also loads the ‘ship to’ address you chose in your Sale along with a bunch of other important bits of related transaction information. All you need do is ‘Save and Email’ the purchase as a one step confirmation. This saves on data entry, reduces the chance of input error (during translation from Sale to Purchase) and helps to ensure each sale has a matching purchase to obtain better confidence in fulfillment.

We plan to expand this feature out further so let us know what you think, send in your ideas.

Big thanks to Klaeton who’s a Platinum Ebay Power Seller for all his help. His company, Australian Direct rocks it out using Saasu around the world – literally as a muso working & performing in Germany.

Commsec Securities Ltd is a leading securities trading operation owned by Commonwealth Bank Australia (one of the largest Australian Banks). Saasu released support for their account data formats last night. You will see Commsec as an option in the supported Formats drop down in the Import area of Saasu.

Have a format you would like us to support? Just let us know and we will support it free of charge as per our Bank Integration Guarantee.

Photo credit: Acid8000

A new release last night sees the first of the new charting capabilities in Saasu.

We started Saasu Business Analytics development by releasing the Sales Reports in Dec08. Sales Reports were a hot request from our customers last year.

The reports are dynamic in that you can click on sections of a chart to learn more. You can also flip between chart types on the fly.

To see how your sales pie slices or check out it’s long tail using a bar chart then have a look at the new sales reports. Sign in to your Saasu business file and then choose Reports > Transactions > Sales Reports.

A big thanks to Richard from Hiphome for the customer based input he had in the development process.

If you have any other areas you are super keen to see charting and graphing capability in Saasu then just let us know by creating a ticket. Make your vote count in the building of the Saasu online accounting application.