About 18 months ago, I investigated Saasu and Xero as online accounting software solutions. Since then, it seems Saasu has improved (I remained on their newsletter subscription since the trial) and so decided to check this out. Actually, I only checked out the points that I care about, so this isn’t a comparison so much as a how-my-opinion-of-Saasu-has-changed.
1. Due dates on invoices
I can’t see how to do +14 terms in Saasi on a per-invoice basis. I know in Xero, you can just type in”+14″ and it adds 14 days to the date in the invoice date field. The terms / date due box in Saasu doesn’t actually allow the + character, so you end up with “14″ if you try this, and it auto-completes this to “14th of the current month”.
2. PDF invoice layout
Setup of printed invoices seems more standard in Saasu than Xero to me. Saasu will print all items, ex-GST, then a total ex-GST. Then the GST amount, and the total including GST. Xero prints all items inc-GST, the total inc-GST, then the included GST amount. This is strange, because when the invoices are viewed on screen in Xero itself, they do it like Saasu does, but the printed versions are different.
3. App latency (or, site ping)
Xero have a host right here in Perth, Western Australia, so I can get mad pings to them. Saasu claim to store data in Australia and the USA, but I can’t figure out how to access the Australian site. As such, I’m stuck with 300ms+ pings to their Rackspace servers in the US. When you are trying to convince people to move from a desktop application, that is just too much of a delay between clicks. 150ms would be acceptable, so Japan. 80ms would be fine – so over east somewhere (I have arranged cloud hosting for Perth people over east before with no latency complaints).
4. Complex user roles.
What I am referring to is what MYOB calls security, Quicken has a similar feature. It is the option to limit a user or group of users to a specific set of tasks. For instance, you only want accounts payable people to have access to AP, marketing people to have read only access to all sales, etc. In Xero, you can only restrict access to 4 sections: bank reconciliation, invoices (accounts payable and receivable), create reports, and view reports. That means, your accounts payable people will have access to the accounts receivable as well (and if they have write access to payables, they will have write access to receivables as well!) and your marketing people will have access to reports on all sections. I did email Xero about this about 12 months ago, to which I got a response that it was not possible to limit roles any further but it would be passed on as a suggestion. 12 months later and it hasn’t been implemented, so I guess it’s not that high on the priority list. Why am I slamming them so much on this? Because the competition has very fine grained control (both on and offline competition).
5. BAS summaries
Both seem to do this well. Saasu will give a much more detailed report though, even going as far to include the PAYG Installment items (Xero doesn’t give this, you have to go and look it up manually). The added information in Saasu does make it MUCH more cluttered though, and that’s pretty much the story between the two. Saasu seems better for those who know what they are looking for, Xero is easier to setup and use for those who can get away with what it offers.
UPDATE: I sent an email to Saasu to ask them how to get access to the Australian site (i.e. the site hosted in Australia, as they quite clearly say they store customer data in Australia on their sales material: http://www.saasu.com/pricing/ – “Security and Data”). The response I got was:
(1) They do not allow customers to select which region of hosting they want to login to.
(2) They don’t provide direct access to customer data at a specific location (i.e. requesting the customer service team to give us access to the data stored in AU is denied. More than likely, a direct request for this would elicit a response of “the data is the same as the live data, just access the live data”.)
(3) They will not provide evidence of 3rd party auditing to demonstrate that the data is in fact stored in Australia, as they have not received a request that would consider it necessary, nor did they choose to disclose any additional information as to why customers are not allowed access to this information.
I have several problems with this an so still cannot recommend them in the course of my professional job.
With (1) and (2) it effectively means that they do not have local hosting of the web application, as even if they do, customers are not allowed to access it. The hosting is in the US to a Rackspace cloud.
With (3), the only evidence they provided was a quote given by them, Saasu, in an article written on Techworld (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/391667/home-grown_cloud_storage_service_launched/):
“Sydney-based SaaS accounting business, Saasu has moved some of its local storage to Ninefold’s Cloud. The company’s CTO PaulGlavich said Ninefold storage augments the main hosting provider and forms part of the data replication cycle.”
“Saasu has multiple geographic locations around the world where data is replicated for security and redundancy purposes,” Glavich said.”
Now, I’m not paranoid, and I do think they are replicating the data, however, I find the sales information incredibly misleading and I do wonder how quickly they would be able to get the application back online should Rackspace have issues, or should the connection Australia has to the USA get interrupted (either by accident, intention, or legal policy). If they are just replicating data, and have zero infrastructure for the application (which would explain why customers can’t access it directly), I expect it would take some time to roll out infrastructure and restore that data onto a new cloud service.
I also find the reactive attitude to 3rd party auditing surprising given that this is a SaaS company dealing with one the of the most important and difficult to replace types of information with businesses (their accounts). I would think a proactive approach to auditing would make a lot of sense, and be a marketing boon when trying to sell companies on SaaS accounting systems.
It would seem to me that the marketing dog is wagging the business by the tail in this instance. The Sydney based company really does make it seem on the pricing material as though they have hosting here, which they technically do, but customers can’t access it. I can’t flaw it from a technical perspective with the way it’s written, but it does seem misleading to me. I read it as “multiple hosting locations — if one goes down you can still access the others”, but I’ve been given no information to support this. Somewhat disappointing.
