Saasu to pull Westpac customers further into the cloud

Westpac has signed a deal with cloud accounting company Saasu that will provide the bank's customers with a hefty discount and early access to new functions that will allow electronic payments to be made from within the accounting platform.

According to Saasu CEO Marc Lehmann, Westpac or St George customers with a Business Connect online account will be able to sign into that service, and from there directly access their Saasu accounting software.

While bank feeds, which automatically populate cloud based accounting software with bank data, are now in widespread use, Lehmann said this latest arrangement provided more than just bank feeds and a real time view of cashflow.

The tighter, secure integration means that in the future Saasu will, for example, be able to offer BPay functionality from within the accounting system itself, according to Lehmann

It's not the first integration that Saasu has engineered - it has an arrangement with OzForex that allows it to process retail foreign exchange transactions from within the accounting system, and a similar integration with PayPal.

Saasu's rival Xero is also working to more tightly integrate its accounting software with bank systems and last month announced a deal with NAB intended to allow more information sharing between bank systems and accounting systems.

A private company founded in 2000, Saasu is coy about the number of small and medium enterprises using its software, but Lehmann claimed there were now more than 10,000 Australian users of the service.

While it's a much smaller cohort than the 116,000 using MYOB's cloud accounting systems in Australia, or Xero's 203,000 local users, the Westpac arrangement will provide Saasu with a much higher profile and the opportunity to grow, thanks to a deal which will see Westpac customers pay three month's fees for a year's access to Saasu.

This will mean some Westpac and St George customers will pay A$105 for a year's access to Saasu, rather than the usual $420.