Zoho Expense Review: Pricing, Features & Alternatives 2023

The dashboard is available in the Admin view. Companies can delegate certain employees with the Admin role so that they can oversee everything in the expense reporting and reimbursement process. Only users with the Admin role can add Submitters, Approvers, or other Admins.

On the dashboard, you can see an overview of everything that’s happening, from pending trips to top violators. Overall, it provides managers with useful information about the business.

Zoho Admin View Dashboard

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Adding Users on Zoho Expense via Admin View

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The home screen welcomes users with a Drag & Drop Receipts feature. You can autoscan receipts, upload them from your computer or the cloud, or enter them manually. This screen will appear only to employees with a Submitter role. Being one of the best receipt scanner apps available today, Zoho Expense makes documentation easier and faster.

Zoho Expense home screen for submitters

When manually entering expenses, you can click New Expense, and a pop-up window will appear. You can attach receipts here as well. When enumerating expenses, you can either choose a single-expense mode or an itemized-expense mode. After filling up the fields, you can either click Save and Close or Save and New.

Expense tab showing all unreported expenses

When you visit the Expense tab, you’ll see all your expenses categorized as Unreported. To report expenses, click Add to Report, and a pop-up window will appear. If you want to add it to existing reports, click the report’s name from the dropbox.

Adding expenses with uploaded invoice

If you want to see all your expenses, click All Expenses to view all unreported and reported expenses.

If you want to add a new type of expense, you can create a new category by clicking the + button in the category dropbox. You can set the category name and make it a subcategory of an existing category. You can also add an account code and a description.

Adding New Categories while entering a new record

After creating a report, all reports will be categorized as Unsubmitted. By clicking the Submit button, a pop-up window will appear, prompting you to enter the approver’s name. Once submitted for approval, the approver will see the report on their end.

Report summary

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Adding Expenses to a report

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After viewing the report, the approver may reject the report and enter the reason for rejection in the pop-up textbox window. Once rejected, the report will be categorized as Rejected. The accountable person may re-submit the report after addressing the reason for rejection.

Submitting Reports and Selecting the Approver

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Approved Report window

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If the user doesn’t have a corporate card, the reimbursement will have to be made manually. Otherwise, all expenses charged to the corporate card will feed into Zoho Expense’s approval and reimbursements automatically.

Once the report is good to go, it can now be reimbursed by clicking Record Reimbursement. After clicking, the report’s status will be marked Reimbursed.

Reimbursement Screen

Zoho Expense also lets you create budgets for your expenses. Click the Budgets tab in the admin view of the dashboard, and it’ll show you how to create a new budget.

Budget screen

Apart from expenses, you can insert advances from employees. Advances use the same process as Expenses. After adding an Advance entry, it’ll appear in the Advances tab. You can then click Submit. If the user has existing unreported expenses, Zoho will ask to include unreported expenses automatically in a new report.

Once submitted and approved, the advance will offset the expense when the expense is incurred and submitted. After submitting, the report will be marked as Reimbursed.

Recording Advances made to employees

Zoho Expense can integrate with third-party software. It works well with accounting software and ERP software like Oracle, Sage, SAP, and Xero. However, it works best if you use it alongside Zoho Books. For travel, you can use ITILITE or GetThere for bookings and reservations. You can also integrate it with Uber and Lyft for ride-hailing apps. Other integrations include Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack.

Zoho Expense has a mobile app that can be downloaded from App Store or Google Play. The app contains the same features as the web version. Through the app, submitters can use mileage tracking to monitor travel expenses and submit payments and reports for faster reporting of expenses.

Zoho Expense includes secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption and multifactor authentication (MFA) to prevent unauthorized access. Additionally, you can set up permission access to control what employees within your organization can see and do. If your company is already using other Zoho apps, Zoho has an SSO feature. You only need to sign in to your Zoho account, and you will be logged in to all Zoho apps you’re subscribed to automatically.