I had a great online meeting with the folks at Zoho to learn about how they adjusted their business and offerings during the pandemic. It was a fascinating discussion with LSP Chandrashekar from Zoho Canada. As you may or may not know, I use Zoho One to run my business so I'm always trying to stay on top of the latest developments. Below is the latest new for Zoho Expense. As business travel starts up again, they figured out a system to streamline expense reports post-pandemic:
Zoho Expense Aims to Help Mid-Market Businesses on Their Road to Recovery
With the addition of seamless travel management and increased cost control capabilities, Zoho Expense enables businesses to maximize their bottom line.
Austin, TX - May 12 -- Today, Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company announced a new version of its expense reporting software, Zoho Expense, that includes advanced capabilities to help mid-market businesses bring about efficiency in its T&E process, and control costs while recovering from the effects of COVID-19 .With
the new version of Zoho Expense, businesses can seamlessly manage their travel, gain more visibility and control of their company's global spend from a single place.
Business travel has been significantly reduced due to Covid-19 while remote working has become a global norm. More than ever, companies require the right processes and tools to improve collaboration, ensure compliance of all regulations, and optimize company costs until revenue is normalized. The new version of Zoho Expense is specifically designed to provide complete visibility on all costs incurred by the company across offices.
With a chat bar built into the system, teams can communicate in real-time during the T&E process. Zoho Expense also allows businesses to have the flexibility to quickly implement changes in their travel and expense policy with customizable approval workflows. This means that businesses can rest assured that their compliance obligations are fulfilled in the event of an audit.
"As businesses continue to combat the effects of the pandemic, there is an increasing need for a central tool that provides visibility of their overall business spend, simplifies travel management, streamlines approvals, prevents fraud, and maintains compliance." says Kevin Permenter, Research Manager of Enterprise Applications, IDC. "With all these capabilities, Zoho Expense is helping businesses enforce company policies for T&E according to their country’s regulatory requirements. The system’s integrated travel management, budgeting, low-code extensibility and expense auditing features make this solution primed for rapid adoption in the mid-market segment."
"When it comes to travel and expense management, large organizations are typically stuck with legacy solutions. With these solutions, businesses are having to compromise on end-user experience, and on the features they need. The new version of Zoho Expense is built specifically to address this problem - a solution that is both feature-rich, and intuitive to use. With end-to-end travel management, artificial intelligence-based fraud prevention, automation, customizable policies, advanced budget management, and a lot more, the software helps organizations easily control costs and manage compliance. Powerful mobile app, collaboration-rich features combined with ease of use, make this solution indispensable for both administrators and employees making expense claims", says Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, Vice President, Zoho.
Key benefits of the new version of Zoho Expense:
Increased Control and Compliance
- Businesses can create budgets and track them with the help of a dashboard. Customizable alerts can be set which will notify users when the budget limit is exceeded, the system can also automatically block further expense report submission and expense approval.
- With the rule engine, businesses can set specific spend limits based on hierarchy and expense categories to ensure compliance. The fraud detection capability saves time and money for businesses by automatically identifying and flagging fake receipts, duplicate entries, fraudulent data modifications, and mismatches between receipts and claims.
- Businesses can set a fully customizable approval flow, and can reject, or approve every purchase made within the organization. This adds an extra layer of control on spend before it happens.
All your travel in one place
- Businesses can book, organize and manage all their corporate travel end-to-end both offline and online from a single place. Zoho Expense integrates seamlessly with Sabre's GetThere, a powerful travel management solution, allowing employees to book their own travel online based on the cost approval flows, and other rules that the organization sets.
Effortless Collaboration for Remote Workforce
- The new version of Zoho Expense makes collaboration and communication intrinsic to employees' travel process. The built-in chat bar, a functionality unique in the T&E segment, allows users to collaborate with the relevant stakeholders contextually in real time.
AI-powered virtual assistant
- Zoho's AI-powered virtual assistant, Zia will automatically remind users about their pending tasks such as incomplete trip requests, unsubmitted reports, and expenses. It will also help the users adhere to the policy by notifying them about failed receipt scanning and non-compliant expense claims.
Advanced customization capabilities
- Businesses can customize the functions of Zoho Expense according to their needs, creating a system that is fully tailored to the organization's processes and scales as the business grows.
Customer Statements:
"Established in 1975, IFFCO is an international group that manufactures and market a well-integrated range of mass-market food products, related derivatives, intermediates and services. With our business spread across 33 countries, it was a challenge to manage employee spend and expense reporting across our multiple office locations with disparate solutions. We found Zoho Expense to be a very powerful and flexible tool which allowed us to accommodate many different expense policies and compliances according to each country's regulation. We started using Zoho Expense across our whole IFFCO group for Travel and Expense Management and as one of the key aspects to keep control on spend. The Trips module has allowed us to manage travel requests easily and the associated costs. We were able to easily integrate Zoho Expense with the existing ERP system that we were using. This made the whole process of expense and reimbursement fully automated. We started saving a significant amount of time compiling reports using the informative dashboard, which gave us a detailed breakdown of our global spending." - Jaroslaw Pietraszko, Director ERP & Digital Transformation,
IFFCO Group
"Having spent a lot of resources on manual recording of employee expenses, MakeMyTrip began the hunt to look for an application to manage our T&E process more effectively. We always wanted a tool with a better user experience. We came across Zoho Expense which provided us with custom solutions for all our business requirements like the custom limits and approval flow. It’s been 2 years since we started using Zoho Expense, and it has always excelled in offering a seamless expense reporting experience for our employees. The new version of Zoho Expense has a revamped dashboard that offers powerful insights on the data we need for our expense reporting process which has helped us optimize our spend." - Sony Thomas, Manager- HR, MakeMyTrip
Pricing and Availability
The new version of Zoho Expense is available immediately. Zoho Expense offers three subscription plans: the Free plan, Premium, and the Enterprise plan.
For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/
