Accounting and business suite
Zoho Spend is being marketed as a comprehensive spend management solution that goes well past what was already introduced with Zoho Expense. While the latter focuses specifically on travel and expense management, the newly released Zoho Spend is intended to be an all-in-one solution that includes procurement, AP automation, payroll, travel management and employee expense management so organizations can gain a holistic view of their entire spend.
Zoho Spend features procurement capacities covering the entire source-to-pay process, including digital vendor onboarding, requests for quotes, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, and bills, all from a single place. It also delivers vendor-level and category-level insights. It also sports accounts payable automation capacities with optical character recognition-based scanning, two-way and three-way matching, payment approval capabilities in both individual and batch payments, as well as automatic reconciliation. There are also expense management features allowing for the automation of the entire expense reporting process, from receipt capture to reimbursements. The solution also supports automated payroll processing set up for federal, state and local tax compliance, and can also handle employee benefits like health care, retirement and pensions. Finally, people can search for, compare and book travel arrangements on their own in ways fully compliant with company policies.
On those last two items, payroll and travel, Prashant Ganti, vice president of global product strategy, development and alliances for Zoho, said during a briefing that these two areas represent major pain points for organizations, which motivated their decision to focus on them.
"Why payroll? Because payroll is the largest recurring cost for a business. And similarly, travel [is] the largest variable expenditure for a business," he said.
Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition, meanwhile, is built to support companies as they scale, supporting 15 different country-specific editions compliant with regional tax regulations, and e-invoicing support for nine countries including Mexico, India and Germany.
The solution supports standard, project-based, subscription or usage-based billing. It also has automated workflow capacities, customer lifecycle management, revenue-recognition capacities in line with ASC 606 and IFRS 15, a role-based dashboard that provides teams with detailed insights on their billing operations, and integration with its Ask Zia AI model. Ask Zia acts as a finance assistant that answers questions and provides insights using AI-based revenue forecasting to identify risks and opportunities. Ganti said that while Zoho already has billing and finance products, this one is meant to be a comprehensive suite that serves large enterprises.
"We have a billing product already, and in fact we started Zoho Finance suite with Zoho Invoice. That was the genesis of the entire Zoho Finance suite that today encompasses over 12 different products. But today it's about Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition because this brings together lot of capabilities that cater to large enterprises like advanced customer lifestyle management, life cycle management, ability to bring complex pricing models to quickly respond to market needs coupled with at the same time addressing regulatory norms like, for example, continually changing tax regulations alongside revenue recognition regulations like IFRS 15 and ASC 606," he said.
AskZia is at the heart of Zoho's other AI enhancements, placed throughout its product suite. Beyond answering questions and providing insights, it can also provide the user with visibility into what the model is creating and working on, providing the ability to take control of the agent at any time. The agent is also able to create invoices, quotes, credit notes, sales orders and additional custom reports based on specific data sets for the user. It also offers automated suggestions across key fields like Expense, Income, Sales and other categories, predicts trends, and flags inconsistencies within transactions in real-time. Additional AI features include Generated Blueprints, AI Custom Fields, Invoicing Agent, AI Summary, and Write with Zia.
"The AI tools introduced today across Zoho's extensive Finance and Operations Platform serve as the perfect user assistant: providing deep insights and forecasting into company finances, flagging inconsistencies, and automating repetitive tasks—all within Zoho's own Zia LLM to ensure that a customer's data is never at risk," said Raju Vegesna, Zoho's global chief evangelist, in a statement.
