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. 

• Topic Participants

• Geethanjali R K

  

• Recent Topics

• What does "Tickets for Review" do?

  What is the purpose of the va nilla view " Tickets for Review?"

• Set same ticket Threshold for Agent-Level Thresholds

  I am creating Agent-Level Thresholds for agents to auto-assign tickets in a Load-based Round Robin rule. I am unable to set the same number of Open tickets for agents when setting their Thresholds. For exampel: Agent 1 = 10 Agent 2 = 25 Agent 3 = SHOULD

• Zoho Mail MCP connector

  Issue: Zoho Mail MCP connector (https://mail-organization-930963415.zohomcp.com/mcp/.../message) — OAuth authorization completes successfully in-browser ("Authentication successful"), but the issued token is rejected when the MCP client reconnects to

• Zoho Books | Product updates | October 2026

  Hello users, October brings a range of new features and enhancements to Zoho Books, designed to simplify compliance, streamline accounting workflows, and improve inventory management. From the launch of the Nigeria Edition and France’s e-invoicing capabilities

• Multiple criteria in searchRecords

  Hi, is it possible to search with multiple criteria in zoho.crm.searchRecords? I have tried several variations of the following without much success. CustomerRecord = zoho.crm.searchRecords("Contacts", "(First Name|=| lee)" && "(Last Name|=| spencer)"); Thanks. Chris

• Plans to make "Generate Presentation with Zia AI" available as API endpoint?

  This 'Generate Presentation with Zia' feature has great potential, and we would like to be able to trigger it automatically from a workflow. https://show.zoho.com/home/ziaai/generate Is there already a way to trigger this via API? If not, is there any

• How to setup noreply@ example.com

  How do I setup noreply@example.com so the mail never gets delivered. I currently have a catchall setup aswell.

• Pleas unblock E-Mail-Adress service@montana-energie.de / kontakt@montana-energie.de

  Dear Zoho Support, Could you please unblock service@montana-energie.de / kontakt@montana-energie.de which belongs to a regular customer with whom we are having frequent business-related conversations. Thank you very much in advance, Erdem Kar homewise

• Unable to change alias in the from field on the ZOHO mac app

  I have 1 main mail address, and 3 alias's. on the web mailbox when I create a new email, I can select the alias's from the dropdown in the from field. On the app no dropdown is available.

• Zmail mobile application

  ho do i remove people from this app

• My allies email (info@xxxx.com) was been deleted by system, and I can not build the same info allies email now

  Dear Zoho Mail Support Team, I am the super administrator of the Zoho organization 【Organization Name, as shown in Admin Console】. I am writing to report an urgent issue with two of our custom-domain email addresses and to request your help restoring

• Cannot create mail account

  Hi, i have a problem, i can't create a mail account every time i try the error massage like this Oops! Something went wrong during mailbox creation. Please try again please help

• Amazon.it always ends up in spam

  Emails from amazon.it always end up in the spam folder, even though I have added the domain and the various individual Amazon addresses for shipping, payments, and other matters to the trusted lists at the user administrator level. What should I che

• Your Authenticate email domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is bad to say the least

  How about actual instructions rather than vague generalities? There is no way to complete this with what is provided. Please provide specific verifiable steps.

• Generate a Zoho Sign link

  From time to time I get a response "I never received your you e-document for electronic signature" is there a way to generate a Zoho Sign link to share.

• ChatGPT Plugin / MCP Server auth error

  Hi all I'm trying to connect the ChatGPT plugin for Zoho CRM but after username stage of the auth process, I get this error from the URL https://mcp.zoho.eu/mcp-client/ {"error_description":"Invalid request url, Request is not as per defined in oauth

• Zeptomail in the blacklists

  Hello, I noticed some hard bounces while sending emails, and upon checking the details, I see that we have been added to the blacklists of certain spam lists: Bounce category: Policy failure Reason: ip-issues Message: 5.7.1 Service unavailable; client

• Zoho Desk training for administrators in EU and US region

  Hello Everyone, Get ready for the certified Virtual Classroom training for our Zoho Desk users in Europe and the US. Our in-house Zoho Desk expert, @Dheeraj | Zoho Desk, will conduct the virtual classroom training. This training focuses on simplifying

• Possible to reorder Pipelines position?

  I have multiple Pipelines and want to reorder their positions, so that in the Deals module record for the Pipeline field, I have them ordered in a certain way. Is there a way to reorder the position of the Pipelines without deleting existing Pipelines

• Categorize Items with Item Headers

  Hello customers, Did you ever want to classify items based on specific categories to help your customers understand your invoice better? With the new Item Header feature, you can easily categorize items in your invoices and estimates and give them a common title.  Item Headers are available in the Invoices, the Recurring Invoices and the Estimates module. It can be carried forward from estimates to invoices at the time of converting the estimates.  To add an item header: Go to the Estimates, Invoices

• Gettting "You are Offline" Messages all the time

  Al of a sudden, a few days ago, I suddenly began getting a message on the bottom left side of the Mail App saying "You are Offline". Why? Does it mean I'm not getting incoming mails now? why is has started?

• Zoho CRM Quotes – Subform and PDF/Writer Limitations

  Hello, I am encountering the following limitations in Zoho CRM Quotes: Custom product images cannot be uploaded in the subform – the image upload field cannot be added; only the file upload field is available. File upload placeholders cannot be used in

• Invoice Only Shipped Items

  Dear Zoho, We are a company that deals with sales orders with 600-1000 lines We need to be able to do partial invoicing based on shipped items Right now when we click convert to invoice we can not only select items that have een shipped It takes hours

• Alias Email Id already exists

  Hi, I just verified my domain sesque (dot) com and now I am trying to create the admin account using admin (at) sesque (dot) com, but I am getting an error saying "Alias Email Id already exists". I used to have another Zoho account with this email address,

• Allow widgets to be placed between native sections in the Ticket Properties panel

  One of our biggest frustrations with the Tickets module is how rigid the Ticket Properties panel is. Every section there is built only from native Zoho Desk fields. We can add sections, rearrange fields, and pick layouts, but we can’t put anything custom

• Show backordered items on packing slip

  We send out a lot of large orders, and often there are one or two things backordered. How can I fix the packing slips to show quantity ordered  & quantity packed There should also be the ability to "ship" 0 of an item so the receiver knows that things

• Deleted Module

  I accidentally deleted a module and its fields. Im trying to get it back. Thanks to Youtubers flooding the internet with out of date videos I can't find how to get deleted modules back. The Recycle Bin doesn't have modules. Anyone know how to do thi

• Set department automatically for incoming calls

  Is it possible, when receiving an incoming call through Zoho Desk (using Twilio integration), for the department to be auto-selected based on the phone line being called? Currently, we have to manually select the department from the dropdown menu when

• Make better hiring decisions with Compare Applications and Zia Insights (Beta)

  When multiple candidates apply for different job openings, evaluating each application against the right job requirements can take time. Reviewing resumes, candidate details, and interview feedback separately can make it harder to assess role fit and

• Support Plan: Recuring Issue

  Hi Zoho Team, Could you please look into this recurring alert and provide clarification on why this restriction is still in place? This issue has become a bottleneck in our workflow, significantly limiting our automation capabilities. We are unable to

• mail sent to gmail goes directly to spam

  Hi TKIM and SPF are configured and verified. E-mails coming from zoho to my personal gmail account are going directly to the spam folder. How can I solve this? I can send you guys the headers privately if you need to.

• Creating packages according to actual shipping processes

  Hi community. I would like to ask a question to see if there's a better method or workflow for the creation of packages in Zoho Inventory. There is a little confusion in some of Zoho's language relating to the use of term Packing Slip when connected to

• mail

  We want our tracked links in campaign and journey emails to use our own domain instead of the shared maillist-manage.net domain. We have already created the CNAME links.rexven.com → customer-campaign.zoho.com (DNS only). Does our plan support a custom

• Zoho Webinar - Sharing System Audio (NOT AVAILABLE)

  Hi, We are having a serious problem with Zoho Webinar. In the webinars we run, we very often share the audio from a video we are streaming directly from YouTube or other applications. Until recently we were using Zoom, but as we use other Zoho applications

• Ad-hoc approvals are now available in CRM approval processes

  Released for all DCs. Hello everyone, We've introduced ad-hoc approvals in CRM approval processes. This enhancement lets approvers add additional approvers when needed, without changing the configured approval workflow. How the approval process works

• Introducing PRM: Build, manage, and scale your partner ecosystem

  Growing a partner ecosystem is a good problem to have. What starts as a handful of partners can quickly turn into a maze of spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected processes. More partners mean more opportunities, greater reach, and new ways to grow

• Data Subject Requests in Zoho Mail: Retrieve and export email data for legal and compliance needs

  Organizations are often required to retrieve specific email communication data in response to legal investigations or compliance audits. The Data Subject Requests (DSR) feature in the Zoho Mail Admin Console allows administrators to search for all email

• Introducing live chat for Zoho CommunitySpaces

  Hello everyone, We’re happy to announce that your community members now have a direct line to you. Zoho CommunitySpaces now has a live chat widget, powered by Zoho SalesIQ, so a member can open a chat from your community and get a quick one-to-one answer

• Moving software

  I need someone to customize zoho for my moving business I need to do the following . 1. Quote comes in from ezemove website or we enter customer details into the system 2. Email quote to customer based on hourly rate 3. Customer accepts quote deposit is taken 4. We convert the quote into a confirmation email and add job to the diary and assign resources to the job 5. Job gets completed and we enter invoice amount into the system and email the invoice Budget : neg | Duration : 1 month To leave a private

• How To Create a Report with Subforms from Two Modules

  I want to create a report based on data in subforms over 2 separate modules. Can this be done? I tried to do it in Analytics, but one is a date field that needs to be grouped by month, and it doesn't look like Analytics can do this.

• Next Page