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.

We are having an issue with our database connectivity. We will post updates via this blog post as we have more information.

UTC 02:04 – Saasu went down due to what we believe was a connectivity problem with our database servers.
UTC 04:22 – It was established that instances running the database degraded due to hardware failure.
UTC 05:10 – Saasu went up after recovery of the database to new hardware.

Saasu recently released changes to facilitate provinces now using Canada’s new Harmonized Tax Rate(s). HST is a combination of Provisional Sales Tax (PST) and GST.

Saasu now provides HST 12%, HST 13%, Exempt and Zero-rated tax codes for these provinces respectively. The original GST 5% tax codes remain unchanged as they will still be required for historical data entry and provinces that haven’t moved to HST.

We have also provided new Sale/Purchase templates for use where HST is required instead of GST.

We provide the new tax codes in Settings > Tax Codes. Simply activate or deactivate the one you need. You can also create your own tax code as required.

You may also need to do the following:

1. Update custom built Templates and Themes using the word GST to HST where applicable.
2. Change automated Sales if prices and tax code need to be changed.

If you have any questions just ask the saasu service desk.

The Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Saasu are now available. We recognise that many customers require higher level functionality and services that traditionally are only available in expensive accounting software products. Item Attributes is our first major feature set for these plans. We have more features planned such as tiered pricing and procurement process and controls.

Item Attributes are variables for products and services such as size, colour, expiry, location, supplier codes and more. We add these to the Saasu infrastructure as required so feel free to suggest new attributes that we don’t yet support. They typically relate to your specific industry and workflow needs.

You can now request three additional attributes on a Enterprise plan above the inbuilt Item Attributes of Batch and Serial numbers. Location will be the third inbuilt Item Attribute made available shortly pending changes currently in development. We have received feedback from Beta testers and are adjusting our approach prior to a wider release.

The variables for Item Attributes are created on the fly inside Sales and Purchase transactions. When you buy or sell stock you get the chance to transact using the existing available Item Attribute variables associated with Inventory Items or else create new ones.

The Ultimate plan allows for up to 30 attributes. It will also have business rules management for attributes. Ultimate includes services such as Business Analyst support and Programming support for managing Themes, Templates, API connections and the like. The Ultimate version is designed to meet medium enterprise manufacturing, e-commerce and/or assembly type businesses requirements.

The key services and features related to these products can be seen on our pricing page.

Photo by: Alistair McMillan

Saasu’s Free Payroll updates were released Friday 18th June. New tax tables and changes to payroll reporting requirements have been included. Many Australians will be receiving reminders from old style accounting software companies that they need to buy their payroll updates. At Saasu, online accounting updates are free.

What you need to do
For the vast majority of you, nothing. The updates are automatic and free.

Where you have already issued PAYG Payment Summaries for 2009/2010
You may need issue Amended Payment Summaries which Saasu provides an option for in the wizard.

Reportable Employer Superannuation Contributions (RESC)
Mapping to this field in Saasu’s PAYG Payment Summary wizard may be required where amounts paid at the direction of the employee under a salary sacrifice or similar arrangement have occurred. While the term the ATO uses for this is similar to Superannuation Guarantee Contributions they are in fact different. Check with your Advisor or the ATO if you have RESC reporting requirements.

Scale 1 used in combination with HELP
Saasu supports Scale 7 with HELP currently. We now also support the less common Scale 1 with HELP. Employees with two or more employers and HELP debt can use this combination.

Coming soon to Saasu Payroll
Monitoring of upper and lower SGC thresholds for employees.

Photo: Alan Cleaver

Our iPad’s arrived at Saasu HQ today. So here’s a quick example of Saasu’s online accounting working on an Apple iPad. I ran the dashboard and a tax report.

Noticeably it’s fast and easy to navigate. We have also got it working in an iPad keyboard dock and it is clearly usable like a PC. You find yourself using the screen instead of the mouse quite naturally. Originally I was thinking it may sit outside the netbook and laptop demographics but having tried it firsthand it will be strong in that space.

We have released support for Journals in the Saasu API. This is on the back of Multi-currency transaction support for the API last quarter. You can also create Multi-currency Journals in this release.

The ability to create, read, update and delete Journals via the API enables many common tasks to be dealt with automatically:

1. Post a daily takings from POS or Retail system
2. Migrate data from other software into Saasu
3. Connect Saasu to practice management software to post entries to/from a ledger.
4. Provide a method for developers to book those tricky transactions that just won’t fit in Sales and Purchases. e.g. merchant fee transactions.

See our new look API Docs including the updates for CRUD operations for Journals.

The Saasu API was having intermittent connectivity issues late last week due to above normal levels of usage. We have been working to resolve this since Friday and you will now see a significant improvement in API performance and the web application in general.

Essentially our API usage accelerated to higher than expected levels as the number of concurrent connections had grown significantly. This was due to an increase in new customers and existing customers using the Saasu API platform more actively. Changes released tonight into the live version of Saasu have resolved this and added significant capacity.

One important note is that we will begin to enforce API usage limits. Traditionally we have been extremely lenient but the volume of requests and number of customers now using Saasu requires us to start ensuring fair play limits aren’t exceeded. The limits allow the developer community to have a high level of allowed requests in exchange for ensuring best practices for using the API are followed. Essentially if API connections are efficiently coded then the limits shouldn’t come into play. As always we are receptive to feedback on the limits, performance and otherwise. Just drop us a comment.

Do you need serialized inventory or stock location tracking?

The enterprise version of Saasu is all about Advanced Inventory management. We have added the ability to apply attributes to Inventory Items in Saasu. You will also be able track the location of your stock between different retail outlets, warehouses and consignment locations.

Soon we will provide early access to see some of these features already built to give our customers a chance to provide some feedback around our approach.

At this stage we haven’t yet finalised how this will fit into the Pricing and Plans for Saasu. When we release the final preview version we will provide an update on this.
 

Saasu’s new Automated Statements feature released last night is about helping you look professional, saving time and bringing forward cashflow. You can now send statements automatically via email.

• You can setup Automated Statements for each type of billing you do.
• You can have an Automated Statement run applied to specific contacts Contact or just attach Contact Groups you may already use in Automates Sales and Billings.
• You have the ability to create CSS/HTML designs to apply to your Templates for Statements. We call these designs Themes.

Let the engine do the work

The Automated Statement Engine does the work for you. Payment reminders, monthly statements, loans/finance tracking, subscription billing, renewal requests and facilitating debtors collection are just a few ways you can use it.

You set the rules

Send Statements to non-zero balance contacts. Even add a few days/weeks grace if you want to cut them some slack. Control the period that the statement relates to – week, fortnight, month or quarter. You can also send a Contact a Statement as a means to highlight your customers activity in much the same way banks, telco’s and utilities send statements.

Calling all ideas!

If in the coming weeks you have found a nifty use of this feature then let us know and we’ll post it in our Product Blog and link back to the genius who thought it up!

We hope you like it!