Zoho Announces Major Updates to Billing and Spend Solutions for the Enterprise
Zoho’s December AI Forum session for analysts covered major product announcements on new AI capabilities infused across its Finance and Operations platform. Info-Tech has previously reported on Zoho marketing its latest releases at small businesses and solopreneurs, despite Zoho being capable of working with large enterprises. This time, Zoho was able to showcase new billing and spend products marketed for much bigger and complex organizations. These products included:
- Zoho Billing Enterprise Edition: This solution’s capabilities include advanced customer lifecycle management, support for complex pricing models, and adherence to regulatory norms like tax regulations and revenue recognition.
- Zoho Spend: A unified platform that addresses the outflow of money from a business. It unifies travel expense, payroll, procurement, and accounts payable automation into one single platform.
Zoho’s AI product, Zia, has also been updated to remove friction, automate manual work, and provide quicker interpretation across these finance solutions. Key features include:
- Automation and Control: Reducing clicks and context switching by allowing users to complete tasks like creating invoices, sending payment reminders, and checking outstanding invoices from a single interface. The system offers help but keeps the user in control to step in and adjust details.
- Insights and Predictions (Zia Insights): Focusing on the future by forecasting operating expenses, highlighting emerging trends based on historical patterns, and providing early warning signals for anomalies (e.g. tipping operating expenses).
- Natural Language Reporting: Generating complex, multilayered financial reports (involving multiple complex joins like invoices, sales orders, estimates, and customer details) based on simple natural language prompt.
- Reconciliation: A system that learns from past patterns to automatically categorize and code transactions (initially for bank accounts, with plans to expand to all general ledger accounts), reducing manual effort.
- “Ask Zia” and Quick Summary: Explaining complex items like pay slips in language a normal person can understand, offering tax advice, and providing quick financial snapshots (profit/loss, cash flow, balance sheet, receivables) to maintain accuracy while gaining speed.
- AI-Driven Customization: Using natural language prompts to create custom modules, custom fields, and blueprints (like asset tracking workflows), which infuse AI into the platform’s low-code/no-code environment.
Our Take
Zoho’s finance software updates are significant for maintaining its momentum appealing to large enterprise. For CIOs strategizing toward economical org-wide platforms (for finance, operations, service, and more), Zoho is an attractive vendor to shortlist. In a market dominated by costly platforms from ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Salesforce, Zoho stands out as a credible provider that also enables AI workflows throughout its system.
While competitors like Zuora (subscription billing) and SAP’s Concur (spend) have been in these markets for years, Zoho is not necessarily trying to beat them on feature parity. Instead, Zoho’s competitive advantage is its platform extensibility. For enterprises looking to establish a centralized financial operations platform that does not rely on point solution add-ons, Zoho is attractive. CFOs are suffering from “SaaS fatigue” and the “Integration Tax” that comes with stitching multiple tools together.
However, Zoho will still need to work hard to show its value proposition against incumbent finance software tools, given how deeply embedded these systems are across organizations. SoftwareReviews’ data shows that customers opting to stay with their current vendor were able to negotiate and receive a slightly higher discount (45% and 35%, respectively) than those who had been with a vendor for over six years. For better or worse, rip-and-replace may sometimes be more costly than simply renewing a long-standing relationship with SAP – that will be Zoho’s challenge to overcome. As part of any procurement due diligence with end-of-contract reviews, bring other vendors to the table (of which Zoho is well-placed to shortlist) rather than just automatically renewing your existing one.