Zoho Tackles The Headache Of Expense Management

Expense management and reporting is largely seen as a headache by employees today, with some describing it as a “necessary evil” in one recent survey. In its effort to provide digital ways to streamline various day-to-day activities for businesses – from sales and finance management to email and human resources – software firm Zoho has now introduced a new way to automate expense reporting and alleviate some of the pain of the process.

Zoho announced last week the launch of Zoho Expense, a tool the company said was built with the acknowledgement that “expense reports are a pain for everybody involved,” according to Zoho president Raj Sabhlok.

The new tool is available as both a Web and mobile application for employees, managers, finance departments and sales reps. The tool integrates into Zoho’s existing CRM tools, Zoho Books and Zoho CRM, to offer an end-to-end solution for expense reporting.

Among its features include automated expense reporting without manual data entry, the integration of bank accounts with Zoho expense to manage credit card statements, and integration with Google for Work as well as Android, iOS and Windows mobile phone devices. The mobile apps include GPS-integrated tools that let managers track mileage of their traveling employees, as well as the option to remotely submit an expense report.

For managers, Zoho Expense automatically alerts them of the filing of expense reports as well as notifies these managers of any violation in corporate spending policies, the company said.

Additionally, Sabhlok said, Zoho Expense provides data analytics to help businesses manage corporate spending. According to the executive, Zoho is the only SaaS provider to offer a trifecta of expense report management, accounting solutions and CRM tools.

The emergence of new, mobile-ready tools to ease friction in expense management follows recent research released last month by EU travel and expense management provider KDS. The study revealed that nearly half of workers in the U.K. still produce expense reports by manually entering data into a spreadsheet; the process takes up time and money, according to KDS, which found that processing a single expense report manually costs businesses an average of $26.63.