SaaS: What Accountants Need to Know

P. Paul Lin, PhD

For accounting professionals, SAS stands for Statement on Auditing Standards, and for other business professionals, SAS stands for Statistical Analysis Systems, a software suite that many organizations use to analyze business data. SaaS, however, is not a typo but an acronym for the Software as a Service deployment model that has received much attention recently. Google's popular Gmail e-mail service is an example of a free SaaS. Users simply need a browser and Internet access to use Gmail to send and receive messages. Gmail maintains all the mail on its servers, which facilitates anytime, anywhere access. Similarly, businesses can adopt SaaS solutions (i.e., renting the service instead of buying the software) and use applications via a browser. SaaS is one of the delivery models for cloud computing, which allows subscribers to use a third party's systems to perform computing needs via the Internet. SaaS subscribers and users of cloud computing can be compared to utility customers who purchase the electricity they need rather than installing onpremise generators. The “power grid” for cloud computing is the Internet.