Key Highlights of 2024: Recalling a Year of Progress and Advancements!

Key Highlights of 2024: Recalling a Year of Progress and Advancements!


As we step into 2025, we’re excited to share the progress and developments we’ve made to simplify and streamline your travel and expense management in the past year. Let’s take a look back at some of the key updates and enhancements that have helped us move forward in our journey together! 


Key Highlights of the Year


  1. Petty Cash Management: With the petty cash module, manage a branch or department's minor expenses smoothly and keep track of day-to -day expenditures with ease and maintain control over your organization's budget.

  2. Real-Time Feeds: Connect your corporate cards with Zoho Expense to fetch feeds instantly using real-time feeds. Fetch feeds into Zoho Expense instantly as soon as a transaction is made. This feature is available only for the US, UK, and Canada editions of Zoho Expense.

  3. Automatic Mileage Tracking: Employees can now automatically track their rides in Zoho Expense using mileage tracking. In the Mileage Log module, they can select rides to convert into expenses or exclude as needed. This feature is currently available for early access. Write to us at support@zohoexpense.com to enable it for your organization.

  4. New Per Diem Process: Configure per diem rates with ease: auto-fetch the official government per diem rates, import manually, set custom per diem rates, and add rates for a specific location, based on your business needs.

  5. New Edition - South Africa: Create an organization with South Africa as the business location, enable VAT, allow users to apply South Africa-specific VAT rates to their expenses and stay VAT compliant.


Now, let's take a look at the other product updates and enhancements we've designed to make your expense and travel management in Zoho Expense hassle-free!  

Enhanced Travel Management



  1. Emergency Contacts: Employees can now add emergency contacts to their Travel Profile, Ensuring that anyone with the necessary information can easily reach emergency contacts during travel emergencies.

  2. Loyalty Programs: Introducing Loyalty Programs for flights, hotels, and car rentals in Travel Details. Employees can now add their loyalty program details in Zoho Expense, which can be used while booking tickets, unlocking exclusive benefits, and making every trip more rewarding.

  3. Custom Fields in Ticket Details: Now, enable custom fields for the add ticket page that suit your business needs. This feature is currently in early access, you can reach out to support@zohoexpense.com with your requirements, and the team will enable the fields tailored to your needs.

  4. Travel Document Expiration Alerts: Send reminders to your employees now via email whenever their travel document expires or is about to expire. This feature is still in early access. If you want to enable it for your organization, write to support@zohoexpense.com

  5. myBiz Integration: Enable employees to plan and book their flight tickets and hotel reservations by themselves seamlessly while staying compliant with your organization's travel policy.



Customizations

  1. New Filters in Analytics: Introducing new filters in analytic reports. Now, select the parameters such as expenses, reports, expense date, etc by which you want to group a report. Additionally, you can set criteria and run a customized report seamlessly.

  2. New Notifications in Purchase Requests: Update employees instantly with email and in-app notifications when purchase requests are:

  • Put on hold

  • Marked as processed or when the processed status is reverted

  • Comments are added

  • Cancelled

Policies, Automations, and Currencies

  1. Audit Trial in Purchase Requests: Allow employees to view the activity logs of purchase requests, compare against previous versions of the edits, and track every change made to purchase requests, ensuring transparency and control.

  2. Incoming Webhooks: Using incoming webhooks, you can perform actions in Zoho Expense when it is triggered by an action in a third-party service.

  3. Manual Exchange Rate: In addition to the live exchange rates, you can also add the exchange rates manually, providing flexibility and accuracy for businesses and individuals dealing with multi-currency transactions. 

 


Effortless Reimbursements

  1. State Bank of India: Reimburse employees hassle-free with SBI integration. Select Via SBI from the Reimburse dropdown on the reports detail page, and once the transaction is approved, it will be processed. This feature is available only for the Indian edition of Zoho Expense.

  2. Batch Payments: Streamline employee reimbursements with bulk batch payments. Add all approved reports to a batch, export them along with bank details, and upload them to your reimbursement bank portal. The bank will directly deposit the funds into employees' accounts, saving you time and effort.

Expense and Advance Handling

  1. Merchant Category Codes: Enable auto categorising of card expenses, easily track the employees' spending, and make smarter financial decisions.

  2. Recording Payments for Advances: When you record an advance payment, you can now attach a copy of the payment receipt, verifying payment details more easily.

  3. Managing Advances: You can now export an advance in the CSV, XLS, and XLSX formats, print, and mark it as void, ensuring accurate financial records while retaining the history of the transaction.

  4. Track Your Spending: Easily monitor your spending with a detailed, itemized list of expenses, each expense item linked to the date it was incurred. Stay organized and in control of your financial timeline.

  5. File Size for Attachments: The file size limit for attachment of documents and receipts uploaded has been increased from 7 MB to 10 MB.

Streamlined Budget Management


  1. View Budget vs Actuals: For the budgets shared with you, easily track the actual spending of your business and compare it with the budget set by switching the View Budgets vs Actuals toggle.

  2. Budgets in My View: Introducing budgets in My Settings, enabling employees to track their actual spending and monitor their balance.

  3. Assets and Liabilities in Budgets: Budgets are categorized into asset and liability, enabling you to create and manage them efficiently while ensuring better visibility and easier navigation.


Mobile App Updates


  1. When you record a mileage expense, view the location details tracked by GPS along with the route map. This feature is available only in the Premium plans and above in Zoho Expense.  

  2. Now, view receipts and expenses uploaded offline, receipts being scanned, and receipts that failed to scan, under separate headers on the expense list page.

  3. Introducing a new edition: South Africa. You can create and manage expenses while ensuring VAT compliance.

  4. Included support for Canadian French in addition to the other languages in the Zoho Expense mobile apps.

  5. You can view expense receipts directly from the expense list page for quick access.

  6. Introducing the Cards module in the Android app, enabling you to match card transactions with expenses effortlessly and view all transactions linked to each card.


Customer Testimonials



Zoho Expense automates a variety of expense management-related operations and helps users record their transactions quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, it simplifies, digitizes, and improves the expense claims and reporting process across all WSB support centers. We have saved almost 90 to 95% of our time in terms of speedy reporting and easy approval.

Dhamayanthi Karuppiah,
Accounting Manager, World Scout Bureau
 

I can very well say that all the people, especially the salespeople who are traveling frequently these days as part of their job, have found this product quite interesting. It's something that can be done on the fly as everything is available on the app, and everything related to scanning the documentation demands the least effort in submitting the expense report. From the timing perspective, yes, that also has helped, especially during month-end. I generally push for all people to submit their expenses on time and get them approved on time, and I think, by far, we have been quite good at that. Through Zoho Expense, the entire process has become seamless.

Murali Kumar, Head of Finance,
Palsgaard Pvt. Ltd.


We thank you for your support throughout our journey. Wishing you a successful 2025!