Online accounting software Saasu has solved a major accounting bugbear for e-commerce businesses that use PayPal to process customer payments. The deeper integration with PayPal promises to save online retailers a lot of time in bookkeeping and reduce accounting errors, particularly for high-volume websites.
When a customer buys a product on a website using PayPal, PayPal’s fee is deducted from the transaction before it is sent to online accounting programs. If the customer requests an invoice the retailer has to manually recalculate the PayPal fee and mark up the invoice.
Saasu’s integration identifies transactions made using PayPal, calculates the correct fee and categorises the fee in the general ledger. When a customer requests an invoice from Saasu it adds the fees automatically.
“It’s a really basic need that’s never been solved,” Saasu CEO Marc Lehmann told Digital First. “Merchant fees have always been a difficult area for small business. When we’re designing (Saasu) we tried to deal with problems rather than add features.”
Saasu users will have up-to-date cashflow and financial data because they don’t need to manually reconcile the PayPal transactions first, Saasu said in a press release. Saasu and PayPal customers can add PayPal as a payment option to their invoices so their customers can pay immediately online with a credit card.
The PayPal integration will especially benefit startups, Lehmann adds. “Imagine a startup selling a whole lot of product through PayPal and they have all these amounts coming without fees. Usually they have to markup an invoice to send it to customers. But this way they have their online accounting system full of the correct invoices.”
Saasu is designing similar integrations for other merchants. The next on the list is Westpac’s payments gateway, with others to follow, Lehmann says.