Zoho Expense: Product Updates for April - June 2021

Hello users,

Happy July! We know it's been quite some time since we announced updates, as we've been working on the new Zoho Expense for you. Now that the all-new Zoho Expense is up and running, it's time to share some fresh announcements and hear your valuable feedback. With no further delay, let's run through the updates that we've made in the past three months.

Launch of the all-new Zoho Expense

We've revamped Zoho Expense with a refreshing new UI and useful new functions to make your expense reporting process even simpler. With the new UI, we focused on enhancing usability and providing a great user experience. Some of the notable features that we rolled out in the new version are: a role-based user interface, streamlined travel management, expense auditing and fraud control, effortless budgeting, cross-team collaboration, and powerful integrations. You can read about all of the new features in our blog.

Support for the Arabic Language

Zoho Expense now supports Arabic, and you can read your Zoho Expense application from right to left in the Arabic language. You can select the Arabic language while creating your organization or change it in the Organization Profile section.

Templates for Report PDFs

You can now customize the PDF layouts of the expense reports that will be downloaded by users across your organization. Zoho Expense comes with three predefined templates, and you can customize them or create new templates. You can also mark a template as the default, so that all the users in your organization export reports using the same template for a consistent reporting experience. Learn more about customizing PDF templates.

To customize templates: Switch to Admin View > Settings > PDF Templates.

Routespring Integration (US Edition)

Routespring is a booking engine that helps travelers, travel desks, and finance teams book transportation and hotels for business trips. You can now integrate with Routespring and save the time your users spend on submitting travel tickets and receipts to report their travel expenses. Once you integrate, every booking that is made in Routespring will be automatically added as an expense under the respective user’s account in Zoho Expense. This enables employees to add these expenses to reports and claim reimbursement quickly, and it helps the organization keep track of its employees’ trip expenses.

To integrate: Switch to Admin View > Settings > Travel > Routespring.

Merchant Blacklisting

You can now blacklist merchants, meaning that your employees are restricted from incurring business expenses with them. If a merchant verification rule is enabled in your policy, whenever a user submits an expense with a blacklisted merchant, the expense will be flagged as an audit violation.

To blacklist a merchant: Switch to Admin View > Settings > Merchants > Select the unwanted merchants and click Blacklist.

iOS App Updates

1) When you record mileage using GPS, you can now monitor the distance traveled right from your home screen.

2) Approvers can now view any audit violations in the expense report details before reviewing them.

3) Approvers can choose a template with which they would like to view report PDFs.

4) If you're using the Indian edition of Zoho Expense and have enabled the merchant-vendor sync with Zoho Books, every time you create an expense and select a merchant, the merchant's GSTIN will be auto-filled.