An accounting software that works like we do ...

By Leo Gaggl

August 7, 2008

In running my businesses over the years I have been an unhappy user of MYOB for years. But due to time constraints I have always put off a change in accounting software as it is very disruptive and the alternatives were not too convincing (better the devil you know …). However due to the fact that our business is growing and we were at the end of a financial year the pain of using MYOB became greater than the pain of switching.

Meet SAASU NetAccounts.ï¿½ We only became aware of this software through a couple of Google searches and found some forum threads with people that were using SAASU. After some checking of the company operating the (‘software as a service’ after all needs a fair amount of trust) and checking with our accountants we decided to give the free version a test run. The data transfer from MYOB went smooth and the main users of the software were very happy.

The key deciding factors for us to choose SAASU:

Web-based user interface (after all are running an online education and mobile/web-application development company)
Intuitive user interface (for both myself as well as our office/accounting staff)
Software as a service (no need to install outdated client-server apps running on datastores from the dark ages)
Truly multi-user
Web Service API (we will be using the SOAP API to integrate some of our e-commerce facilities)
Ability to run multiple data files under one umrella

So far (and we have been using SAASU for over 5 weeks now) we have not looked back. There are some areas that can do with improvement, but the team at SAASU seems very responsive and there has already been one feature upgrade with another one coming along soon as far as I know (from their newsletter). We are currently working towards integrating some of our e-commerce sites with SAASU and have signed up as a development partner. I hope they keep up the good work.

We will problably need to keep running MYOB for historic purposes for a little while – but the day we can uninstall this software from all our machines will be a day of celebration for me and I will have a bottle of champagne with our office staff !