What's New in Zoho Expense: Integrated Business Travel and AI-Powered Expense Management

This release brings a wide range of updates across Zoho Expense, including new AI-powered capabilities, enhancements to corporate cards, expense management, audits, and more. Keep reading to know how the new updates can transform your travel and expense management, stay compliant with policies, and get better visibility into your organization's spending.

AI Features
We now offer a suite of AI-powered capabilities designed to reduce manual effort, gain better visibility into analytics, and streamline policy compliance.

Zoho Expense MCP
The Zoho MCP server uses this open standard to connect your Zoho Expense data and workflows with AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. When you give your AI assistant a prompt, it sends the request to the Zoho MCP server, which securely communicates with Zoho Expense to retrieve information or perform the requested action. Learn more.

Report Forecasting, Anomaly Detection, and Zia Insights
Forecast, Zia Insights, and Anomaly Detection are available in the Expense Details, Reimbursement Details, and Trip Expense Summary reports. In each of these reports, you can:

* View Forecast: Predicts future expenses or reimbursements over a selected period based on historical data, helping you plan and make informed decisions.

* View Anomaly: Spots unusual patterns or errors in the report data.

* Zia Insights: Provides a descriptive analysis of your report data.

Ask Zia
You can now ask Zia questions about trips, expenses, reports, advance payments, and analytics, and receive instant answers, without navigating through reports or filters manually. Learn more.

Policy Assistant (Early Access)
An AI-powered assistant that helps employees quickly understand their organization's policies without having to read lengthy policy documents. Simply ask a question about your organization's policy, and the bot provides answers based on the relevant rules, limits, and guidelines configured in the organization policies. Learn more.

Write with ZIA
You can now create and refine your Email Templates using AI-powered prompts. Whether you're drafting content from scratch or improving an existing draft, you can use prompts to rewrite text, fix grammar, adjust the tone, summarize content, or expand it directly from Zoho Expense. Learn more.

Travel Management

Online Booking
Employees can now self-book their itineraries online directly from Zoho Expense. Submit a request to enable online booking for your organization. Once enabled, employees can search, compare, and book travel options while staying compliant with your travel policy.

Approvals for Online Bookings
You can now set up a custom approval process specifically for online bookings, define criteria to determine when approvals are triggered, and configure an approval window.

Travel Arrangers
A Travel Arranger is a user who plans, books, and manages online business travel on behalf of employees. Rather than having every employee book their own trips, designated travel arrangers can coordinate the entire travel process, creating and managing bookings, accessing traveler itineraries, and booking flights and  hotels as needed.

Note: This feature is available only to Zoho Expense users in the US, CA, UK, EU, and AU regions.

Guest Booking
Guest booking lets travel arrangers book travel for people outside the organization, such as clients, vendors, or external guests, directly from Zoho Expense.

Note: This feature is available only to Zoho Expense users in the US, CA, UK, EU, and AU regions.

Corporate Cards

Introducing Zoho Prepaid Mastercard® to Manage Business Spend
Businesses in the US can now use Zoho Cards to manage their business spend. Admins can assign physical and virtual Zoho Cards to employees using card policies or custom controls such as spending limits, frequency, per-transaction limits, and restricted MCCs.

Introducing User-Paid Corporate Cards
A User-Paid Corporate Card is a company-issued card billed to the employee, where the organization retains full visibility into spending and employees are reimbursed for approved business expenses. You can convert an existing Corporate Card to a User-Paid Corporate Card, or vice versa. Learn more.

Card Mapping for Corporate Cards (Early Access)
You can now map multiple corporate cards in Zoho Expense to a single card in Zoho Books. Transactions from all mapped cards are posted to the corresponding card in Zoho Books, reducing reconciliation effort significantly. 

Expense Management

Enhancement in Attendee Management (Early Access)
When an attendee expense exceeds the maximum share amount in your policy, Zoho Expense automatically raises a violation. Additionally, employees can split expenses among attendees in any proportion and mark no-shows when needed.

Enhancements in Approvals
Custom Approval now supports parallel approvals, where a transaction is sent to multiple approvers at the same time, reducing overall approval time. You can also create approval groups and set the minimum number of approvers required to move the transaction to the next level.

Activity Logs for Admin Actions
Changes made to the configurations of Expense Policies, Expenses, Reports, Trips, and Advances are now recorded in the Activity Logs report, making it easier to track administrative actions across your organization. Learn more.

Create Custom Analytics Reports That Work for You: You can now create custom reports by modifying an existing report or building one from scratch. Customize your new reports by selecting the required modules and configuring filters, columns, layouts, and groupings to display the data you need. Learn more. 

Team Dashboard (Early Access)
Users with reportees in your organization can now access a Team Dashboard in My View. It provides a consolidated view of their direct and indirect reportees' trips, reports, and advances. Learn more. 

User Language Support (Early Access)
Zoho Expense allows employees to select their preferred language for viewing the app, which can differ from the organization's default language. However, certain inputs like Categories, Tags, Violation Messages, Custom Modules, and Custom Fields are not translated by default. To make these available in an employee's preferred language, you can add entries to the translation file, export it, fill in the translated content, and upload it. Once uploaded, employees will see these inputs in their preferred language as well. Learn more.

Audit Enhancements

Receipt Item-Level Audit Violation
When an uploaded receipt contains non-compliant items such as alcohol or tobacco, Zoho Expense automatically raises an audit violation. Admins can configure this in the audit settings. Learn more.

Restrict Expenses by Merchant Category Code 
You can now restrict merchant category codes (MCCs) to automatically flag non-compliant  expenses. When an expense is submitted from a restricted MCC, Zoho Expense triggers an audit violation, helping approvers and admins identify policy breaches without manual review. Learn more.

Note: This feature is available only for organizations using Direct Feed Integration and Real-time card feeds.

Audit Dashboard

The Admin Dashboard now includes an Audit Insights section, giving you a consolidated view of audit violations across your organization. It covers violation breakdowns, top violated categories, violation summaries, expense mode distribution, and more.

Other Updates

Associate Multiple Users with a Petty Cash Account
You can now associate users with a petty cash account, allowing them to record their petty cash expenses and view their own expense reports. Additionally, you can allow account users to add/request, edit, or delete their petty cash top-ups. Learn more.

Note: This feature is available only for organizations using the India edition of Zoho Expense.

Custom Dashboards (Early Access)
You can create dashboards to track the metrics that matter most to your organization. Add widgets to display data from reports, custom reports, and key metrics, and resize or reorder them to prioritize what you see first. Learn more.

Blueprints (Early Access)
Blueprints let you design process flows using states and transitions. You can define how records in a custom module move from one state to another, validate required information at each step, and automate actions like sending notifications or updating related records. Learn more.

Sandbox (Early Access)
You can now test and verify changes such as custom fields, custom buttons and links, custom modules, custom views, workflow rules and actions (excluding report automation), schedules, incoming webhooks, web tabs, signals, email templates, page layouts, and widgets before applying them to your production (live) organization in the sandbox environment. Learn more.

Try out all the new features and let us know what you think in the comments below. If you have any inquiries, please write to us at support@zohoexpense.com. 

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