Case study: IT firm swaps MYOB for strategic planning with Saasu

Con Zeritis, a long-time IT professional, set up Industrie IT four years ago to develop online and digital systems for large companies in the finance, retail, media and energy sectors.

Unlike in companies he had worked at in the past, Zeritis decided to use only cloud-based software (also known as software-as-a-service, or SaaS) rather than buy his own servers.

“We adopted a SaaS-based philosophy from the outset. While it’s our core business to solve our customers’ IT problems, it’s not our core business to muck around with our own” systems, Zeritis says.

The IT services company chose Google Apps for a productivity and collaboration suite, EchoSign for electronic signatures, and Harvest for time sheet management.

Industrie IT grew quickly to 60 staff, most of whom are software programmers, and it recently moved from Harvest to OpenAir, a professional services automation platform by NetSuite.

The company has one server which co-ordinates access to the office printers and network. It also ran the accounting program, MYOB.

Zeritis says he hadn’t been aware of cloud alternatives when he chose MYOB but it didn’t take long until he was looking elsewhere.

“I quickly got frustrated with MYOB, initially around the support but the product itself was cumbersome,” Zeritis says.

Another problem was the difficulty of accessing the MYOB file. Industrie IT has a very mobile workforce, and Zeritis moves between clients’ sites, the company office, his home and the accountant’s office.

“Not being able to access the MYOB files in a distributed manner was a real pain,” Zeritis says.

Another incentive to change software was a string of encounters with poor bookkeepers who Zeritis says weren’t accurate or effective.

“I'm sure there are some really good MYOB bookkeepers out there but that was another trigger to relook at the whole finance component, both the service and the solution,” he says.

Zeritis made several internet searches and found Xero and Saasu, competing cloud accounting programs. He chose Saasu because it included payroll, a feature Xero lacked at the time.

He says he was impressed with the ease of use and the simplicity of Saasu’s user interface. Although Zeritis has no training as an accountant he says he found it ease to navigate through the program himself without calling someone to pull out a report for him.

“You need to be trained in MYOB to use it even in its most simplistic form whereas something like Saasu, out of the box it was quite obvious how to access information. Ease of use was a major winning factor,” he says.

Zeritis says he also liked that Saasu was written in Australia which gave him confidence that the program had a good understanding of local legislation covering GST and payroll rules.

Changing to a cloud-based accounting program with automated bank feeds also reduced Industrie IT’s reliance on bookkeepers for daily administration and producing reports.

Next page: How Saasu opened the door to strategic planning