Zoho launches a new version of its expense reporting software, Zoho Expense. It includes advanced capabilities to help mid-market businesses achieve efficiency in its travel and expense (T&E) process, and control costs while recovering from the effects of Covid-19. With an updated version of Zoho Expense, businesses can seamlessly manage their travel, gain more visibility and control of their company's spending from a single place.

Business travel has significantly declined due to Covid-19 while remote working has become a global norm. Now, companies require the right processes and tools to improve collaboration, ensure compliance of all regulations, and optimise company costs until revenue is normalised. The new version of Zoho Expense is 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 customisable approval workflows. This means that “businesses can rest assured that their compliance obligations are fulfilled in the event of an audit.”

Kevin Permenter, research manager of Enterprise Applications, IDC, explains: "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.”

Permenter says, “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, claims Permenter, “primed for rapid adoption in the mid-market segment."

Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, vice president, Zoho, reports that “when it comes to T&E management, large organisations are typically stuck with legacy solutions.”

Iswaran explains how Zoho Expense is primed for businesses. “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.”

He then outlines its features which are helpful for enterprises. “With end-to-end travel management, artificial intelligence-based fraud prevention, automation, customisable policies, advanced budget management, and a lot more, the software helps organisations 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 Iswaran.

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. Customisable 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 by automatically identifying and flagging fake receipts, duplicate entries, fraudulent data modifications, and mismatches between receipts and claims.

Businesses can set a fully customisable approval flow, and can reject, or approve every purchase made within the organisation. This adds an extra layer of control on spend before it happens.

All your travel in one place
Businesses can book, organise, 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 organisation 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 customisation capabilities
Businesses can customise the functions of Zoho Expense according to their needs, creating a system that is fully tailored to the organisation's processes and scales as the business grows.

Steve Lockyer, managing director, Inform Ag, expressed his satisfaction when he used Zoho Expense.

"When we first moved to Zoho One, we were using Zoho Forms as a tool for our team to book travel requests. We've since bypassed that and are making use of the trips feature in Zoho Expense. We are delighted with it and it has saved us a lot of pain and suffering. Our only regret is not having access to it sooner”, he says.