The Quick and Dirty Verdict

InDinero is a young but impressive piece of software for online finance management, and we are giving it a B, or 82/100 on our scale. It quickly pulls in your financial data from banks, credit cards, and investment accounts and manages it all nicely on the homepage dashboard. It does a great job of keeping track of your accounts, and monitoring profits and losses on a monthly basis. There are some pieces missing from its overall functionality and we wish its integrations would be more varied, but as a young product we are impressed and excited for where it can go. While InDinero doesn’t fill the void of a fully robust, easy-to-use, all in one accounting solution like Quickbooks Online or Xero, it does offer a nice option for personal and basic small business financial management. Not bad.

And now… the details.

Functionality = 23 points

Dashboard:  The goal of a “dashboard” is to present an overview of all the information and data that is present in the given system. To accomplish this, finance systems like InDinero need to provide the business with a snapshot of their outgoing and incoming expenses, monthly revenue figures, and performance verse budget on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. InDinero does a nice job of getting all this information on the dashboard, though the page could use a little bit of help: as a user, where am I looking? Where’s the important stuff? Business owners want to land on the dashboard and immediately get the crucial financial information: InDinero has all the valuable infromation there, it just needs to be presented a little more adeptly.

Trends: When business owners are looking at their financial data, probably the first thing they want to see are reports. Reports on Revenue, Spending, P&L Statements, Cash Balences (and more), are crucial to monitoring financial status in a business. InDinero cleanly displays all of these reports in their software: we’re impressed.

Transactions: Manage all incoming and outgoing transactions and payments here. Categorize payments to manage your budget (which you create). You can create invoices inside InDinero to track the money owed to you, and you can also link the system to Freshbooks and Harvest to manage your invoicing. If you categorize your transactions well, and setup a budget smartly, then InDinero can be a great tool to manage your finances on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Our issue here is that the transaction categorization can be fairly manual and not as intuitive as a user needs (Why is there no obvious categorization for withdrawing cash from ATMs?). We spend money on a lot of different things, and having to tediously categorize every transaction is frustrating.

Budgets: InDinero lets you set monthly budgets for yourself based on the categorization of your transactions. For example, you can budget for $100/month for software licenses, $200/month for company lunches, etc. At the end of each month (or during the month if you want to be anal about it), you can glance at your budget vs. transactions and see where you over or under-spent. The display is clean and it is obvious when you went over a budget (the numbers are in red). This page is very basic though, and we hope it becomes a little more robust as to support more complex business needs.

Accounts: It is really easy to add/remove financial accounts to your InDinero, which is great. There seem to be some limitations though (Why can’t we add an HSBC business account?) This might be on the bank side though.

Usability = 18 points

It is hard to knock InDinero’s user-interface; it is so simple that navigating around the system is fairly intuitive and seamless. Want to see an overview? Check out the Dashboard. Want to see your transactions? Go to the Transactions page. Interested as to how you are spending verse budget? Head over to the Budgets page. Need to add a new financial account? Click on Accounts.

A few nit-picky issues:
Why is the reporting page called “Trends” and not “Reports”? Call us picky — these charts and graphs do represent the financial trends of a business — but naming conventions are important. It should say “Reports.”

On the Trends page, you don’t realize right away that you can create graphs by Category and Merchants; you must first click on Revenue and/or Spending to see these options. This is our favorite part of the Trends page, the granular level at which you can produce reports; it would be great if it was easier for the user to navigate to/use.

Security = 20 points

InDinero has a fairly comprehensive Privacy Policy that includes information on their SSL security system that keeps your data safe. That’s a good thing, because a questionable security system on an online financial system would be a huge red flag.

Integrations = 4 points

Currently, InDinero only has native integrations with Freshbooks and Harvest invoicing systems. These are nice, as you can automatically import your invoices (“money owed”) from these systems into InDinero. We do wish they would expand their integrations however (*cough* Google Apps *cough*).

InDinero does not currently have an open API (BOO!), but they do have plans to release it in 2012, so stay tuned.

Price = 7

The Free plan is a nice way to get started, but it only offers 1 collaborator and 3 months of financial history. The next level up is “Upstart” for $19.99/month; this gives you 3 collaborators, unlimited financial history, and 500 transactions per month. For $29.99/month you get 5 collaborators, unlimited financial history, and 1,000 transactions per month at the “Small Business” tier. The highest level is “Enterprise” which gives you unlimited collaborators, financial history, and transactions.

At an average of about $6 per user per month, InDinero is fairly well priced. It is a little restrictive, however; what if you are a 4 person company that is a startup and only has a few transactions a month? You are forced to pay the Small Business fees? It is also weird to setup these tiers based on collaborators and transactions as very small teams can have a lot of transactions, and very large teams can have a few (high value) transactions. It just doesn’t seem to fit into the mold of most businesses.

Support = 10 points

InDinero has a fairly robust and active user forum as well as a Knowledge Base of frequently asked questions and best practices. You can give feedback to Support on the software and also submit support tickets to the InDinero team (we received an email back in 3 hours when we tested their response time).

InDinero seems to listen to its user feedback and has created a nice forum for customers to share experiences, offer insights, and exchange ideas on best practices. We love forums and are ecstatic that InDinero has such a great one.

Conclusions

We like InDinero and are excited to see where it heads. It’s probably worth checking out, though we’d be cautious about recommending it to clients. Hopefully with a few smart integrations and small changes, that’ll change.

The going is good, and we’re still screwing it up

We’ve been helping companies utilize new and powerful technology for just under three years now. It has been fantastic. We’re growing rapidly and seeing the sea-change in how some businesses are using software. But what’s even more astounding is the fact that so few people really are aware of just how available fantastic new services are.

If anything has become evidently clear to me, it’s a profound disconnect between the businesses we’re helping and the awareness about the next generation of software that is readily available to them.

Where SaaS vendors are hoping to gain traction and market share, a disjointed scattering of tech blogs and communities have risen in hopes of educating the greater business population. With the exception of Salesforce and Google, this has been a monumental failure on our collective part – from both the channel and the vendor.

My experience in the last few  years at several “Cloud Conferences” has led me to witness a total ostracism of the customer. We get a bunch of SaaS vendors and resellers all sitting around patting each other on the back and bragging. I understand that, to a certain extent, that’s what these things are for, but when I’ve asked the question (several times) of where we can actively engage the market the response is always the same: go and get yours.

Fair enough. We’ve definitely done that at VM Associates. But it seems really shortsighted. If we’re going to grow the market and push for serious adoption, it’d sure be handy to get an idea what the market thinks of all our fancy toys.

Channel People (var, isv, blah blah):

Back in the day, our job was to upsell people on new versions of old software. But you and I both know that the real way to make money was to set up cushy retainer contracts to make sure nothing broke down. When it did break down, we would essentially have our account by the sword, and charge them exorbitant fees to bring their company back to life.

That old channel model is over. Associated Software Sellers are dead.

We are not in charge of product. We never should have been, and now, thankfully that responsibility is going back into the hands of the people who are passionate about making product better. Simply put, the onus is on vendors to make sure everything runs because they’re in charge of product. 

So what are we in charge of!? How do we extract tons of money from the doe-eyed businesses we’ve been preying on?

We stop thinking like that, and we start thinking about how to add more value. And for many, this is a struggle because adding value in the traditional model is hard. Preventing catastrophe and restoring things to their norm has been our modus operandi for decades – and while those things are all good and swell, they’re not adding value, they’re preserving the value that already exists.

The channel needs to find new ways to offer value. 

Vendors:

Yes, I know. You’ve grown by 300% this year. Your valuation is through the roof. You’re going after low hanging fruit. You don’t have the time or resources for outreach and education. But if that’s the case, why is it that every single conversation I’ve had with the best SaaS vendors has been about how to grow the top of the lead funnel?

If you’re doing it right, you as the vendor are focused on product. You’ve got a mean lean agile machine that’s cranking out features, improvements and innovation at a blistering clip. You are tuned into customer feedback and have a vision of where your tool set is going to be in the next 10 years.

Here’s what you’re not focused on: client focused training, on-boarding and long term adoption strategies. 

This isn’t to say you’re not an essential component of that process, but the reality is you can’t treat your customers like clients. The only people who can do that are companies that are providing billable hour services… like your channel partner!

We, the channel, are in a perfect position to take top level strategy and build your solution into that package for our clients. In fact, the next generation of partners will use this as a competitive advantage to differentiate ourselves from all the “resellers” out there.

Anyways:

I’m tired of complaining about this, but I’m going to anyways: We need to build the new channel together. It’s not going to be referral based. Let’s just set that to bed right now. I want to hear from you all: Professional Services, Vendors, and Bloggers. Give us a shout in the comments about what you see for the future of this more-or-less untapped market.

So what’s the VM Associates solution for moving forward? I’ll let you know next week.

It’s thus extremely exciting to find small business software that does CRM well. Solve360 from Norada is one of those CRMs and we’re proud to award it an A+ and our seal of approval. Read on for our full review…

The Quick and Dirty Verdict

Solve360 is aimed at small businesses and teams of under 20 people, particularly those with project-heavy, collaboration-based workflows. If you fit that description then Solve360 is probably the best CRM you’ll find. We’re giving it a 94/100, our best grade to date, for it’s commendable feature list, elegant blend of form and function, and excellent security, affordability, and support. No solution is perfect but Solve360 impresses, and it’s heads above most of the competition. Well done!

The Details

Functionality = 26/30

Features are a tricky topic but Solve360 sports both the features you’d expect from a CRM, as well as innovative, intelligent features you won’t find elsewhere. On the mundane-but-important side is a robust but simple permissions system, an excellent mobile interface, an easily customizable array of form fields, tags and templates, and straightforward task management. It’s stuff we expect from CRMs, but which Solve360 executes extremely well.

On the slightly sexier side, Solve360 delivers some delightfully unique features. For starters, there’s near-seamless integration between contacts and “project blogs,” Solve’s project management vehicle. Besides serving as a central repository for information and tasks, project blogs also have a published view, allowing non-users to access and edit information in much the same way that Google Docs are shared. That’s a huge value-add for businesses who want to collaborate or share information with clients, partners, or other non-employees.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and Solve360’s feature set definitely has some downsides. Database queries, for example, are pretty limiting: don’t use Solve if you have a complex contact database on which you want to enter complex searches. Solve’s “opportunity view,” the way it manages sales, is also disappointingly limited. Don’t expect any sleek and shiny sales reports or granular information about your pipeline – that’s not what Solve does well. To be fair, it’s also not what they claim or seek to do well.

All things considered, Solve360’s features are impressive, particularly if you work in teams or closely with clients. We give functionality 26/30 points.

Usability = 19/20 points

Of the many design models out there, Solve360 walks the line between form and function, and it does so gracefully. There’s nothing quite like it: use Solve360 for a week and we bet you’ll find other CRMs clunky, slow, and unintuitive.

Solve360 actually comes with two starkly different “themes,” though both offer identical functionality. The original theme mimics a computer’s desktop, where contacts and projects are separate windows: a newer theme adopts Google’s recent black and white aesthetic. Both are a joy to use. We give usability 19/20 points, with a single point knocked for Solve360’s mildly steep learning curve (their language is idiosyncratic and initial navigation can be challenging).

Security = 20/20 points

Solve360 is an excellent example of how well-engineered cloud applications offer high-level security. You can read about their security standards here: suffice it to say they exceed industry standards for data safeguarding, and their uptime record is exemplary. We give them 20/20 points – an armed guard wouldn’t be better.

Integrations = 10/10

Solve360 boasts a well planned and well executed list of integrations, particularly with Google. Google tasks integrate with Solve360 tasks, Google calendar syncs with Solve360’s calendar, and (drum roll please) you can even link Google spreadsheets with your contact database for easy reporting. There’s also a Solve360 gadget which appears under each email message in Gmail, allowing access to that contact’s Solve page right then and there. Outstanding.

Other standout integrations include a Freshbooks widget for invoicing, a Zendesk widget for managing support tickets, and push integrations with Mailchimp and Constant Contact. If you’re looking for custom development, the Solve360 API is well documented and robust. Taken as a whole, it’s clear that the Solve team has thought carefully about their target audience (small businesses with project-heavy workflows), done research on the best tools available, and made some very smart and functional integrations. 10/10 for an awesome job.

Price = 9/10

As with most cloud-based CRMs, Solve360 charges a monthly tiered fee, which grows with the number of users and the amount of data you use. That’s par for the course, and plenty competitive considering some of Solve’s pricier compatriots (*cough* Salesforce *cough*). We’re knocking a single point because of our very slight bias towards systems which charge per user, not per tier – an admittedly trivial complaint. 9/10 for price.

Support = 10/10

Solve360 maintains an unusually active and helpful user forum: we’ve never seen that level of committed fan-dom for a business application and we love (and understand) the zeal. There’s also very responsive support staff, a great learning section, and a generous selection of 3rd party consultants available who don’t collect referral fees (we like that). 10/10.

Conclusions

We’re pretty cynical about business software – we’ve seen way too many programs promise a lot and deliver a little. Solve360 is emphatically the opposite of that. It’s intelligent software that blends innovative design with well-constructed features, and it deserves its place among the elite of small business CRM. We think it’s worthy of our our seal of approval, and we’re excited about where it’s going. A+ stuff.

If you’d like to talk about how Solve360 might work for your business, or if you just want to talk cloud computing, drop us a line at contact AT vm-associates DOT com. Cheers!

A few days ago we received a trial invite to Thinkfuse, an up-and-coming piece of software focused on group communications (read: project status reports). Without going into a full review (Thinkfuse is still in testing mode), suffice it to say that Thinkfuse represents exactly what we *love* about good new products: simplicity, focused innovation, and intuitive design. Well done.

Still, after thinking through Thinkfuse (there’s a pun in there somewhere), it’s clear that it’s not a product we’re ready to adopt, at least not yet. Let us explain.

Thinkfuse helps groups of people facilitate project status updates. Every week (or day, or month), it asks a project’s owner to report on what happened since the last update, and what’s planned to happen next. Project stakeholders are updated and the report is archived. Pretty slick.

Problem is, the features more or less end there. Want to view the contextual basis for a contact mentioned in the report? Thinkfuse isn’t CRM so too bad. Want to act upon upcoming tasks? Thinkfuse isn’t a task manager so too bad. Want to see the project’s schedule for next week? Thinkfuse isn’t a calendar so too bad. You get the point.

This creates a problem for Thinkfuse. We love it because it’s not bloated with stuff – it does one thing (status reports) and it does it extremely well. Yet, without more stuff, it’s paradoxically unhelpful, at least to us. Looking into Thinkfuse’s future, we’re unhappily reminded of Basecamp, the bloated-yet-inexplicably-popular piece of software that started the project management revolution nearly 10 years ago. When it began, Basecamp was great: it offered barebones functionality and “fresh” design, just like Thinkfuse. Today Basecamp is an unappealing mess of features, integrations and general annoyingness. Uck.

The point is that products like Thinkfuse face tough decisions about how to grow and what features to adopt (or not adopt). In today’s low-barrier app-ecosystem, successful products will increasingly walk a line between elegance and function. Game changers will marry the two.

For the record, we’re really excited about Thinkfuse, and we happen to know their team is actively examining where to take Thinkfuse next. The nerds we are, we can’t wait to see!

Check us out at vm-associates.com for more thoughts on cloud computing and business software.

Imagine there are two supermarkets in your neighborhood with the same fruits and vegetables, meats and dairies, and the same selection of home goods and produce. They are equal distance from your home and the pricing is comparable. Why do you choose one and not the other? Our guess: your interpersonal relationships and history with the people behind the stores.

This principle can be applied to any business model: happy customers are the backbone of a successful company, and the best way to keep your clientele happy is through responsive, eager, and welcoming relationships. Yes, we’re talking about customer service. If your customer has a problem, you have a solution. If your customer has a question, you have an answer. The customer owns the store.

Of course, many businesses don’t have the luxury of the grocery store. They don’t have staff to train to smile: relationships are managed virtually. That’s tough. To make things worse, traditional online customer service solutions have been geared toward enterprise-level companies, with huge CSR departments. That’s not conducive to good customer service for small businesses.

Luckily, that’s all changing. New user-friendly SaaS applications are making customer service accessible to everyone who needs it (*ahem* all businesses *ahem*), at affordable costs. As we reported on over the summer, we are ecstatic about our new partnership with Zendesk, the unquestionable industry leader in cloud-based customer service and help desk software. We use Zendesk internally, we’ve setup dozens of clients with Zendesk solutions, and we’re happy to see 100% positive feedback. It’s good stuff.

We pride ourselves in being accessible to our clients and know that without happy customers our business would crumble. Zendesk (and of course our internal zeal for kick-ass customer service) helps us deliver customer service as though we know our customers in a neighborhood type way.Whatever solution you use, happy customers equals prosperous business. It just makes cents (get it?). If you haven’t already, think through your current support system and consider whether you can’t do better. Cause you probably can.

This week we’re reviewing Saasu, an Australian-based accounting application that’s trying to change-up online bookkeeping. It’s not exactly a newcomer – they’ve been around for over 10 years – but they’re slowly gaining market share, and for good reason. Let’s take a look.

The Quick and Dirty Verdict

Saasu is a fully featured, competent accounting system, but it fails to offer significant value when compared with its competitors. We’re giving it a 87/100, a respectable B+ by our scale. If Saasu shores up some of its obvious shortcomings (tax support in the US, for example), it could easily earn an “A” – until then, we’re not 100% convinced that small business owners can’t do better.

The Details

Functionality = 25/30

Saasu is feature rich, refreshingly so considering the specialization route many accounting tools take. It supports invoicing, expensing, purchasing, subscription payments, bank feeds, international currency, payroll, timekeeping, even inventory management. They even sell point-of-sale hardware and software that syncs with your Saasu account, a tempting ERP-lite approach that some small businesses might really like.

Unfortunately, Saasu isn’t perfect, particularly for US-based companies. There’s no US tax support, meaning your financial reports won’t translate easily into figures the IRS likes. Compare this with how Xero manages taxes and it’s a hard sell. Saasu’s contact management system is also disappointing – it’s not meant to be a CRM (or an ERP), yet Saasu offers a sort of disappointing hybrid CRM way of managing accounts (this is helped by 3rd party CRM integrations). Finally, there’s no Android app, though it’s on the horizon (the iPhone experience is quite good).

All things considered though, Saasu’s features are impressive, despite their gaps. We give them 25/30 points.

Usability = 15/20 points

Before we bash anything, let’s make it clear that Saasu’s UI and UX is perfectly ok. It’s clear, functional, clean(ish), and perfectly adequate. It’s all those things. It’s just not… innovative. Using Saasu feels like using, well, an accounting tool. It’s boring. For a tool that can run 70% of a business, it’s disappointing that more effort isn’t put into making it a positive, rewarding, dare-we-say exciting experience. We give usability 15/20 points.

Security = 20/20 points

Saasu maintains impressive security standards and, to the best of our knowledge and research, has never suffered security breaches. They maintain multiple redundant backups, utilize SSL encryption, seek 3rd party uptime verification, and are fully-transparent about system continuity should they seek bankruptcy or takeover. We like that. 20/20.

Integrations = 9/10

Saasu sports a wealth of integrations with outside apps, and in general the integrations seem to really improve the Saasu experience. There’s too many add-ons to list here – check out their ever-growing list for yourself. Standouts include everyting from Itunes and Ebay to Mailchimp and Paypal. No Gmail integration though, which is a bit discouraging to Google Apps clients (though they do support Google Contacts).

Without playing with it too much, the Saasu API looks robust and helpful for developers wanting to integrate Saasu with their own systems. 9/10 for integrations.

Price = 9/10

Saasu’s pricing is competitive. For $25/mo – roughly the same as Freshbooks – you get unlimited users and access to almost all of Saasu’s functionality. $10 more a month buys automated recurring billing, international currencies, time tracking,  and phone support. $90/mo, their top plan, buys all that plus inventory serialization, a few more reports, and unlimited payroll (the other plans  are limited to payroll for <25 employees). Not bad for an application that covers most of accounting’s bases. It’s marginally more expensive than Xero, Kashflow and Quickbooks, but only for small numbers of users – generally speaking,  Saasu  cheaper for companies with more than 10 employees. 9/10.

Support = 9/10

Help is only a click away with Saasu – par for the course, perhaps, but their help center, which includes a knowledge base and user forum, is generally quite helpful. We were impressed. An inquiry about bank feeds was responded to the next day, which is pretty good, especially considering that they’re based in Australia. 9/10.

Conclusions

All in all, Saasu is a formidable cloud accounting tool: it’s mature, fully featured, and adequate in most of the categories we analyze. That said, it’s clear that Saasu isn’t keen on the US space, and there’s a few features that could push it from “ok” to “exceptional” (Gmail integration, Android app, UX, US tax). We like Saasu, enough to give it a great score – it’s just not “top” enough to get our “VM Approved” award.  Here’s hoping it keeps getting better!

The Quick and Dirty Verdict

Nutshell is a promising but immature product that we don’t advise adopting (yet). We’re giving it a 67/100, a D by our scale, with the caveat that it’s probably going to improve, perhaps drastically. The potential is certainly there. For now, however, we recommend looking elsewhere (try Capsule for sales-heavy work or Solve360 for project heavy collaboration).

The details

Functionality = 22/30 points

Nutshell has some powerful sales management features but it misses some key functions as well.

• Dashboard: On the plus side, the Nutshell dashboard is relatively customizable and includes a nice actual and projected sales project, delivery a clear snapshot of the state of sales. On the downside, the upcoming activities list gets very long and can’t be filtered by date, activity type, etc. That makes it awkward for real use.
• Lead/Sales Management: Nutshell organizes relationships into leads, accounts and contacts. There are ups and downs to this approach. It lends itself to repetitious sales-heavy workflows, providing a functional snapshot of where each lead stands in the sales process, and an easy means of moving them down the pipe. On the flip side, it’s downright awkward if you don’t sell product: the hourly rate system is confusing and inflexible. There’s no project management either, meaning once you’ve won a deal you then… have to use some other software. Oh well.
• Reports: Reports are a strong point here, and predictably so: well defined sales milestones means you can report on them easily. There’s a nice custom report tool which makes it easy to build custom datasets, a welcome feature. We’d like to see some integration with Google Spreadsheets.

Usability = 13/20 points

The Nutshell UX is a bit underwhelming. On the one hand, it’s always easy to create new leads, accounts and contacts from just about any page. On the other hand, it’s difficult to do everything else. Check out the screenshot below – that’s six call to actions, just to add a lead! As a user, where am I? What am I doing? What is this? Also, it’s pretty unclear what the obvious steps in a workflow are: do I add the contact first? Or a lead first? And then an account? This needs to be obvious in a CRM that’s catering toward sales-driven businesses, but it’s obscure in Nutshell.

Security = 10/20 points

Nutshell has no security information on its public website, which is concerning. When you visit the homepages of more mature systems, there’s typically a security page to display their (ostensibly) powerful security systems. Since Nutshell is such a young product we’re not removing all 20 points for this section, but we’re not happy with it. Businesses have enough concerns about cloud computing already.

Integrations = 5/10 points

We like most of Nutshell’s integration features. There’s a strong integration between Nutshell and Google Apps, including a Gmail gadget that lets users add and update Nutshell contacts from inside Gmail. That’s nice. Ditto for saving emails, and for a few other notable integrations (Mailchimp, Wufoo, Twitter). There’s also an integration with MS exchange – we haven’t seen that before, nor did we test it, but we suspect there are a few old-timers out there who’d love that.

That said, it’s strange that Nutshell doesn’t integrate with any accounting or project management solutions. They’re targeting SMB, yet there’s no easy means for SMBs to use this product and invoice customers, or manage deals once they’ve won them. That’s a major oversight and one we hope they rectify soon.

Price = 8/10

Nutshell is competitively priced, with a tiered structure starting at 5 users for $49/month, then $99/month for up to 15 users and $149/month for up to 25 users. Not the best deal for businesses with, say, 6 employees, but that’s par for course.

Support = 9/10 points

Nutshells has a quite nice support page and knowledge base, and their support staff were responsive when we entered a request. The developer’s page is adequate as well. That said, it’d be nice to see a user forum here, both for developers and customers – we dig transparency.

Cloud Computing: What It Really Means for Your Business
Monday, December 12, 2011 from 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM
Buy your tickets here.

Having worked for years in the exciting space between business and cloud computing, we’re happy to announce a new class on the subject at New York City’s General Assembly. We’re teaching, meaning all of our readers are invited to attend (naturally). Buy your tickets here and get 25% off with the discount code 753UWX!

The class will cover what cloud computing is and why business owners should care. More specifically, we’ll discuss the different layers of cloud computing (Iaas, Paas, and Saas), and we’ll examine some of the core benefits (and disadvantages) they offer businesses of all sizes. It should also be a great time to connect with fellow business owners, trade thoughts on specific services, and receive feedback on the approach your business takes.

Don’t miss it! Here’s the link again for buying tickets.

Register for the webinar and receive expert insights into the best ways to engage, serve, and create long-lasting relationships with your customers.

Sign up today to reserve your spot!

As regular readers know, we review dozens of SaaS applications every month. Our intent? Finding the best the web has to offer, particularly for small to medium sized businesses. It’s our job to find the real gems, the applications and services that make business better.

Hence today’s announcement: “VM Approved,” an award we’re handing out to SaaS applications that get an “A” on our SaaS scorecard, detailed below. VM Approved recipients are secure, easy to use, highly functional services that provide real business value to business customers. They’re the services we recommend to clients, the best of the best, and they represent the cutting edge of business technology. Recipients are highlighted on our blog and receive a “A+ Re viewed and Approved” graphic they can display on their website. Look for it!

The details

So what does the VM Approved award actually signify? Below are the details on our scoring system. For details pertaining to specific SaaS applications, see their original review on our blog.

Every reviewed application is assessed on 6 main categories: functionality, usability, security, integrations, price, and support. Every category has a certain number of possible points, for a total of 100. “A+” recipients – to whom we give the VM Approved Award – must score between 90 and 100 points. “B” recipients receive between 70 and 89 points. Everyone else is a “C” (boooo!).

Here are the questions we ask of each category:

Functionality (30 possible points)

• Does the application serve its stated purpose?
• Is the approach substantially different from leading competitors? If so, is it innovation for innovation’s sake, or do its differences serve a purpose? If it’s similar, is it more or less functional than the competition?
• Is the feature set robust? Is the pipeline for upcoming features exciting?

Usability (20 possible points)

• Is the user interface intuitive?
• Is it “fun”? Nice to look at and work with?
• Are features readily accessible?
• Are call to actions obvious and helpful, or overwhelming?

Security (20 possible points)

• Are there strong authentication controls for verifying users? Multi-factor authentication options?
• Authorization controls for deciding who has access to what?
• Information is encrypted?
• Highly available, redundant infrastructure? Real time replication, multiple connections, alternate power sources, emergency response systems?

Integrations (10 possible points)

• Open API for custom development?
• Native integrations with complementary services? Do they provide real value or only lip-service value?

Price (10 possible points)

• Is price competitive given target customers?
• Does it scale relative to value it provides, or arbitrarily?

Support (10 possible points)

• Is there a supportive ecosystem?
• Are CSR reps responsive and transparent?
• During past interruptions in service, has the company been transparent and honest?

Look for the VM Approved award when you choosing applications for your business, knowing it satisfies high standards of quality and business value. Don’t settle for anything less!

VM Associates is a cloud computing consultancy firm that specializes in mapping unique business processes into next-generation solutions.