Do you have a question about terminology your advisors or Saasu sometimes uses? This list might help and it is constantly evolving so if it’s not here just ask us and we’ll get it added.
Accounting
Discipline of measuring, recording, communicating and interpreting financial activity.
Accruals
Used to spread expense or income over time. When expenses are booked that haven’t been paid for or where the amount going to be paid isn’t known then an estimate can be made and booked based on previous historical transaction information.
Allocation Account
The place in the general ledger where you would like a Transaction to appear. It is also sometimes referred to as a transaction ‘coding’. In Saasu we use the term ‘Account’.
Alpha Software
Is a very early release of new software that is risky to use for commercial purposes.
Beta Software
Is an early release of new software or software feature that may still be work in progress but is often largely functional and may be very workable if used with care.
Bookkeeping
Recording of all financial transactions undertaken by an individual or organization
Contact (the Saasu term for)
A person at a company you want to track, typically clients, prospects, suppliers, partners and employees, because we wish to report some information at person level and some information at contact level.
Company (the Saasu term for)
An organisation, firm or company which may have one or more people contacts (Contact Person) within it, see Contact. Each Business File (also called Org) may have multiple Contact Orgs within it (typically hundreds or them). One of the Contact Orgs may include the name and address of the owner of the Business File.
CSV
Delimited data format that has fields/columns separated by the comma character and records/rows separated by newlines.
Current Earnings
Your current financial years income less cost of sales and less expenses. When you commence a new financial year your current earnings are zero. As the financial year progresses your current earnings will accumulate as you make profits (or otherwise if you make losses over time). At the end of the financial year current earnings are normally moved to retained earnings which changes the balance in the account back to zero ready for the new financial year.
Dashboard (the Saasu term for)
An information space that you control for your specific user sign-in. It can be changed to hold nothing or lots of things. The sorts of things that can be shown are constantly being enhanced with little blocks of information we call widgets, each widget can be a different piece of information such as your profit/loss, balance sheet, who you owe, cashflow and more.
Debits and Credits
Entries in your accounts that add or reduce funds in your Accounts and Bank Accounts. When you withdraw money from your bank account your Bank records it as a Debit entry but in your accounting records it is a Credit entry. This may feel incorrect, if it does it is only because you are used to see your bank statements which are your banks record of your activity from their perspective, not yours. Every transaction in accounting has a debit and credit side to it. This is referred to double entry accounting. For example when you write a cheque for $110 for a telephone bill the entries being created behind the scene in the accounting system are CREDIT $110 to your Bank Account and DEBIT $110 to your Expense: Telephone account.
Debt
Something someone owes someone else.
Debtor
Someone who owes something to you.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Business software (or software delivered as a SaaS or managed service) for most if not all aspects of company information management such as finances, relationships, activities, inventory/assets, management and more.
File (the Saasu term for)
The collection of financial records in Saasu online accounting related to one person, company or other legal entity. Your subscription to Saasu may have one or more Files. Saasu is a multi-tenant online accounting system so a file is not actually a traditional file, it is a sophisticated virtual file in one of our databases that links all your data into one logical unit. See also My Saasu
Icon
The small images (pictures) on our site that typically represent links to related functions, pages, screens or information.
GST (Goods & Services Tax)
See VAT and Sales Tax.
Multi-tenant
Real SaaS offerings like Saasu have multi-subscriptions (businesses) and multiple files and multi users – all in one instance. This allows better cost sharing and centralised management for backups, security, support and more.
MOMS
Nordic term for VAT. See also VAT.
NetAccounts
Our old name which we still use a lot!
OMS (Order Management System)
A trader’s process for collecting, tracking, executing and preparing trades for settlement.
Online Accounting
Is a model of accounting software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand.
Organisation (or Org)
Short for Organisation, this is a name for a legal entity that is not a single individual. Org is a term used commonly by CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. In Saasu we tend to use the term Company instead of Organisation.
Prepayments (Australia)
A kind of deposit that may be non-forfeitable payments if the buyer doesn’t conclude the transaction or contract with the seller of the goods or services. Prepayments are different to a Security Deposit in Australia. These two different kinds of deposits have different GST/Tax and Accounting treatments
PDF (Portable Document Format)
File format for document exchange created by Adobe
Retained Earnings
Retained earnings are accumulated profits or losses from previous year’s that remain in the organisation. At the end of every financial year the current earnings are transferred to retained earnings. Retained earnings is an equity account within the organisations chart of accounts.
Saasu
The SaaS Utility company that makes sophisticated business software as easy to get and use as any other utility – e.g. turning on a tap or a light switch
Sales Tax
Tax levied on the total value of the exchange. See also GST, TVA, MVA, VAT.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Provision of shared software applications across the internet.
Subscription
One or more files and one or more users linked together under one financial relationship held with Saasu
TVA
Taxe sur la valeur ajoutée. See VAT.
User
A registered person, identified by a unique name (usually their email address) and (system internal and private) identification number on the Saasu.com system. Each user may be the billing contact for a subscription. They may also have varying levels of access (roles) to multiple other subscriptions and multiple business files (Orgs) within each Subscription.
VAT (Value Added Tax)
It is levied on the added value that results from each exchange. See also Sales Tax.
Zone
A country or legal jurisidiction or sub-set of either that has particular business operating rules or culture (for example a different tax rate)