Small and medium businesses are inherently time poor. As such any tool that automates their processes is a good thing. Those who aren’t involved in business would look at automatic bank feeds (such as those offered by Xero) as a fun toy, but little more than that. This fails to appreciate just how much of a difference automation can make to an organization where, more often than not, the accounts person is also the main operative, the HR person and the legal department all rolled in to one.

During the recent CloudCamp in Sydney I had the chance to catch up with Marc Lehman, CEO at SaaS accounting provider Saasu (more on Saasu here). Marc and I talked about where Saasu is at, both from a business and from a product perspective. Much of what we discussed I’m not at liberty to write about, but one feature – soon to be released – Marc was happy for me to talk about.

Saasu has an interesting approach in that they give customers the ability to create and use multiple templates within the application and also create CSS/HTML designs to add apply to these templates. More than a lightweight user skin however, these templates give users the ability to customize the look and feel of many parts of the application.

Saasu are about to release a new statement engine that leverages this template functionality and delivers real benefits to their customers. The statement engine enables a whole host of automated features including:

  • the automation of payment reminders
  • the ability to automatically send monthly statements
  • the ability to run subscription billing from the application
  • the facilitation of debtors collection (otherwise known as dunning) r28-statements-engine

While I’d not entirely agree that the functionality Saasu has introduced would drive complete subscription and billing from within the application (subscription and billing is highly complex – see this whitepaper we recently published), the functionality that Saasu offers gives businesses with a simple recurring revenue model the ability to automate their processes.

More importantly it enables them to manage their cashflow and allows them to chase shoddy payers with almost no intervention required – a double win for all.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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