Handy Andy Media - Blog #Zoho

#ZohoDay22 in Austin, Texas

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 20:24:52 +0000

I went to Austin Texas for ZohoDay22. This is an annual event put on by Zoho that is attended by industry analysts, Zoho customers, employees, and influencers.

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Zoho announces new apps and services for Zoho One

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 03:11:27 +0000

Austin, Texas — October 19th, 2021 — Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today introduced new apps and services in Zoho One, the operating system for business. The new release empowers businesses to solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos, so organizations can become more productive, adapt more quickly to changing business conditions, and become poised for growth.

"The experience that employees, customers, partners, and suppliers get when dealing with businesses is typically a reflection of how that business and its systems are structured internally. Today, the majority of systems are disconnected as a result of siloed solutions offered by vendors," said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. "Unification of a business requires unification of the underlying systems, which can then provide a truly unified experience, internally and externally, along with unified insights. Zoho One was created with this vision and keeps expanding its unbeatable value with new additions and improvements year over year."

Zoho One aims to resolve operational, digitization, and retention challenges that businesses encounter. Enhancement categories include:

Unified, Real-time Insights for Critical Business Decisions

Businesses now have stronger real-time, organization-wide analytics, connecting the dots between data previously lost across departments, teams, and accounts. Powered by Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, and Zoho's BI and Analytics Platform, Zoho One allows users to predict and provide insights across the organization enabling confident decision-making. New innovations include:

Embedded and Conversational BI: Zoho One now features embedded and conversational analytics enabling decision makers to drill down into their data and glean cross-departmental insights, all through natural language commands using Zia Insights. By providing 1,500+ pre-built analytics reports and dashboards, critical business decisions can be made with greater precision and speed.
Data Preparation: This self-service data preparation and management tool is now available in Zoho One. Whether users are preparing data from third-party apps or other sources, DataPrep, powered by machine learning, can help business users integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalog data, as well as integrate with Analytics or a third party for new-found insights.

Work Graph: Zoho's new back-end service, an industry-first for business software, maps interactions between people, resources, systems and processes by studying signals and their strength across the board to build a business-wide work graph that is specific to each individual within the organization. The result of a work graph will be seen in the day-to-day productivity of users across various apps.
Enterprise Search: Zoho's actionable, organization-wide search, which is powered by Zia, can now understand natural language requests. Natural language powered search will lead to more accurate data discovery across teams and functions.

Scale and Manage Operations More Effectively in Unpredictable Climates

Global health and economic crises have accelerated the need for digital solutions that support varying workplace and business models. Operations have become more complex, making employee data and security a priority. The addition of Mobile Application Management and Zoho Commerce aim to help businesses better manage operations:

Mobile Application Management (MAM): With remote work now persistent, Zoho One now includes enterprise-grade Mobile App Management capabilities. Admins can easily add and manage all of their users' devices for better insight and control of provisioning, specific app permissions and policies, locking and wiping devices remotely, and more, to support employee mobility and flexibility.
Zoho Commerce: Businesses need to digitize faster than ever. The addition of Zoho Commerce enables retailers to easily build online shops with the tools needed to construct a website, accept orders, track inventory, process payments, manage shipping, market their brand, and analyze data. Zoho Commerce also integrates with third party payment gateways.

Build Strong Employee Experiences, From Anywhere

To help close the distance between employees, employers, and teams, which has widened with remote work, Zoho One delivers solutions that promote stronger collaboration and employee experience to support any mode of work:

Zoho Learn: Organizations now have a learning management tool that enables interactive training programs and assessments with Zoho's course builder. Online centralization of company information, training programs, and more, gives businesses a better way to nurture employee growth.
Zoho Lens: To facilitate better communication and collaboration in a remote-work environment, Zoho Lens provides remote assistance and guidance to employees through augmented reality (AR) via real-time AR annotation, VoIP and text chat, and more.
TeamInbox: Teams use this shared email inbox to eliminate task duplication and streamline email conversations in one central location.
Org Dictionary: Another industry-first, this new organization-wide service offers a central dictionary for the entire organization. It automatically incorporates the organization's employee name and other sources offering a central, consistent diction across various Zoho applications and users.

Unified and Personalized Experience with Context

Zoho One's enhanced user experience allows easy customization and personalization of workspaces:

Unified Console, Dashboards, and Smart-Stack UI: Employees are now able to see their apps, services, and dashboards in one view with centralization across calendars, dashboards, navigation, and more.
Customizable Dashboard with Pre-Built Widgets: Widgets encapsulating data across the organization can be aggregated together in a custom dashboard. This provides users visibility across the organization in a single view with the ability to drill down just one click away.

“The combination of software that we were using wasn’t cutting it. None of it was integrated, so there was a lot of double work and wasted time,” said Avi Levinson, vice president at Royal York Property Management. “It would have been absolute chaos to manage this many clients the way we were before. The decision to make the switch to Zoho One came about because we needed to find a system that was going to unify all of our customer service in one place. We knew exactly how we wanted to use the software and had specific goals in mind when implementing it, so understanding our business process and knowing how we wanted to use the software made the adoption of Zoho feel really logical and intuitive,” said Levinson.

A Deep Ecosystem that Extends and Integrates

Recognizing that businesses value flexibility in choosing apps that serve their specific needs, the Zoho One platform already integrates with 1,000+ third party solutions on Zoho Marketplace and now extends integration with 100+ telephony providers to enable seamless communications between stakeholders. Zoho One also includes a comprehensive platform for developers and business users to create, extend, and integrate. The platform includes newly released no-code tool, Canvas, low-code tool, Zoho Creator, and pro-code platform, Catalyst.

Zoho Pricing: Pricing starts at $50 CAD per employee. For comprehensive pricing information, please go to: https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. More than 70 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html

About Zoho

With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back-office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho

Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies.

Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 10,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/

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New Zoho Expense features for Post-Pandemic Travel

Fri, 28 May 2021 16:07:04 +0000

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/expense/.

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