Global business software provider Zoho last week announced the launch of Zoho Spend, a spend management solution that includes payroll capabilities with accounts payable automation, travel, expense, and procurement onto one platform, as well as Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition, billing software that lets large businesses monetize their offerings with modern strategies, streamline their billing operations, and recognize revenue in real time.
The company also announced on Dec. 18 the implementation of new AI features within applications from Zoho’s Finance and Operations Platform, enabling companies and accounting and finance teams to automate day-to-day tasks, provide deeper financial and operational insights, uncover trends, and predict future outcomes.
Zoho said these features were designed with its customary focus on company data privacy in mind.
Zoho Spend
Zoho Spend is an all-in-one solution to manage procurement, AP automation, corporate travel, employee expenses, and payroll. With a comprehensive dashboard, the software provides a consolidated view into each of these critical areas, allowing finance leaders to take control of their budgets, strengthen governance, and curb maverick spend, converting spend management into a strategic advantage.
“A significant share of a company’s total spend includes procurement, payroll, travel, and employee expenses, yet many organizations rely on disconnected systems which limit full visibility and control. As a result, finance leaders lack 360-degree insights into company-wide expenses and purchases, managers can’t efficiently track approvals or compare budgeted versus actuals, and employees don’t have a unified way to track reimbursements or purchase requests. This siloed approach leads to fragmented oversight, compliance gaps, and unmanaged costs,” Zoho said in a media release. “Zoho Spend helps solve these challenges by bringing together every major spend category, including payroll, into a single platform, offering holistic visibility and tighter spend controls.”
Key features include:
- Procurement capabilities simplify the entire source-to-pay process, enables digital vendor onboarding, and helps manage request for quotes, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, and bills all from a single place. The solution also delivers vendor-level and category-level insights that strengthen negotiations and enhance procurement efficiency.
- AP automation capabilities help capture bills automatically with OCR-based scanning, streamline two-way and three-way matching, provide payment approvals to make individual or batch payments, and automate reconciliation.
- Streamlined travel booking through a self-booking tool providing seamless access to a global travel inventory, including 30-plus direct new distribution capability integrations along with corporate fares that businesses have negotiated. Employees can search, compare, and book flights on their own—fully compliant with travel policies—for guaranteed cost savings and zero delays.
- Expense management capabilities include automating the entire expense reporting process, from receipt-capture to reimbursements, while improving compliance with policies, per diem rules, tax, and mileage regulations.
- Automated payroll processing simplifies federal, state, and local tax compliance across all 50 states; the system can also handle employee benefits, including healthcare, retirement savings, paid time off, and employer-contributed accounts like 401(k), 403(b), health savings accounts (HSA), and flexible spending accounts (FSA). Businesses with branches in multiple states or employing personnel from different states can pay them all in a single run and automatically stay compliant with each state’s tax laws.
Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition
Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition offers businesses the flexibility to monetize using any modern revenue strategy, with the scalability to solve the most complex billing scenarios. The solution further supports businesses with market agility by helping them quickly adapt pricing models and monetize their offerings, Zoho said.
With 15 country-specific editions that are compliant with regional tax regulations, and e-invoicing support for nine countries, including Mexico, India, and Germany, the solution provides built-in support for a company’s ongoing growth, whether domestic or global.
Key features include:
- Flexible billing capabilities help businesses monetize their offerings through standard, project-based, subscription, or usage-based billing.
- Automated collection workflows allow businesses to reduce day sales outstanding or average number of days it takes to get paid and ensure timely payments.
- Customer lifecycle management capabilities streamline the customer’s subscription journey from trial, conversion, and plan changes to retention.
- Built-in revenue recognition that is in line with ASC 606 (GAAP) and IFRS 15, allowing accounting and finance teams to recognize revenue automatically, accelerate month-end close process, and gain real-time visibility into revenue performance.
- Role-based dashboard and reporting that provides accounting and finance teams with detailed insights on their billing operations.
Businesses also benefit from AI features inside of the Billing platform, Zoho said. Ask Zia serves as a finance assistant, helping the user with actionable insights on critical areas like billing efficiency, customer behavior, and overall business performance with a range of prompts. Zia Insights helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of key reports by identifying anomalies, tracking trends, and forecasting future performance. Finance leaders can leverage the AI-based revenue forecasting capability to identify risks and opportunities to make timely and strategic business decisions, the company said.
AI capabilities across the Finance and Operations Platform
Powered by Zia LLM, Zoho’s internally built large language model, the AI capabilities built into applications from Zoho’s Finance and Operations Platform improve operational efficiency while keeping sensitive information safe. Insights can be extracted to help with forecasting and improve decision-making capabilities. Zoho’s AI also allows users to view its actions, step by step, to catch any errors and interrupt when needed, improving human-machine collaboration.
“When it comes to AI and data privacy, there is no greater concern than the safety of a customer’s financial information,” Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s global chief evangelist, said in a statement. “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.”
Features available include:
- Ask Zia serves as a finance assistant, helping the customer to understand their business based on prompts that range from simple questions to complex commands.
- Co-Create Agent shows users what Zia is creating and working on, providing the user 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.
- Bank reconciliation offers automated suggestions across key fields like expense, income, sales, and other categories to help better categorize transactions with less manual input to decrease risk of errors and save time.
- Revenue forecasting utilizes AI-powered forecasting to predict trends and allow for better long-term financial planning based on past data.
- Anomaly detection flags inconsistencies within transactions in real-time to allow users to correct potential errors immediately.
- Additional AI features include Generated Blueprints, AI Custom Fields, Invoicing Agent, AI Summary, and Write with Zia.
Zoho Spend and Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition are available for use immediately. For more information around pricing and availability in different regions, please find them here: India, United Kingdom, and UAE.
For availability of AI features, reach out to support@zohobooks.com. More information can be found here.
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