OATS processed 1 million invoices with Zoho Desk

Overview

Offshore Accounting and Taxation Services (OATS) , a Pune-based accounting outsourcing firm, implemented Zoho Desk to bring structure and measurability to their large-scale accounts payable operations. What began as a self-taught implementation has since grown into a million-ticket operation, consistently delivering 99–100% SLA compliance for their clients.

The company

OATS (Offshore Accounting & Taxation Services Private Limited) is a Pune-based professional services firm established in 2006 that specializes in comprehensive finance, accounting, payroll and compliance outsourcing for domestic and international businesses. Led by a team of over 200 experts, including Chartered Accountants and CPAs, the company provides end-to-end back-office solutions ranging from accounts payable and receivable management to payroll processing, tax compliance (GST/TDS), and virtual CFO advisory.

By leveraging modern technologies like RPA and OCR, OATS helps organizations across sectors such as IT, manufacturing, and real estate streamline their financial operations, maintain regulatory standards, and navigate business incorporation in India, positioning itself as a strategic partner for companies looking to scale without the overhead of an in-house finance department.

The challenge

As the firm grew, it took on large-scale business process outsourcing for accounts payable and began processing thousands of vendor invoices per month for enterprise clients. Their existing approach based on email and shared-drive access began to show serious cracks.

No visibility into team activity: With invoices arriving via email and being stored on shared drives like Google Drive, there was no way to track which team member was working on which invoice, how long it was taking, what were the issues or whether any invoice had been missed. Managers had no real-time view of workload distribution.

Inability to track SLAs: For accounts payable outsourcing clients, SLA adherence is critical. Under the old system, calculating SLA compliance meant manually logging receipt timestamps and processing timestamps in Excel—a tedious and error-prone process that made it nearly impossible to promise or prove SLA targets to customers.

Lack of communication in workflows: When discrepancies were found in invoices, there was no structured way to escalate, communicate back to the vendor, or track the resolution. Communication threads were scattered across inboxes with no accountability trail.

Limited scalability: As clients with 3,000 to 5,000 invoices per month were onboarded, the limitations of email-based tracking became a hard blocker. Without a proper system, the firm could not confidently take on or service large enterprise clients.

The solution

The firm began exploring Zoho Desk initially as a task tracking tool. During this evaluation, they discovered that the ticketing functionality was far more powerful for their needs. They decided to implement Zoho Desk as the central engine for their accounts payable processing workflow and later expanded it to track other complex processes as well.

Ease of implementation with Zoho Desk

The entire implementation was carried out internally. The team relied on Zoho Desk's help documentation and email-based support, with responses typically coming within one working day, to navigate the setup process independently.

"I'm not an IT person, but I can configure Zoho Desk for any use case you give me." remarked OATS Director Shreyans Chhallani.

The process unfolded in two phases. The basic setup was completed in approximately 4–5 days and rolled out immediately. From there, the more advanced configurations, such as blueprints, workflow rules, field dependencies, assignment rules, and custom views, were built out progressively over the following two weeks as new use cases and requirements emerged from the business.

Google script integration for invoice ingestion

The team leveraged the API capabilities of Zoho Desk to build a custom workflow for vendor invoice processing, demonstrating the platform’s flexibility beyond traditional support use cases. While Zoho Desk natively enables ticket creation via email and help center, its open APIs allowed the team to extend functionality using Google Drive and Google Apps Script.

Through this setup, invoices are automatically pulled from a designated folder in Google Drive and converted into individual tickets in Zoho Desk, each with the relevant document attached. This ensures complete traceability and structured tracking of every invoice as a separate case.

By using Zoho Desk as a centralized platform, the team is able to efficiently manage high volumes of vendor invoices, especially for enterprise clients operating on systems like SAP and NetSuite.

Structured SLA management with proactive monitoring

OATS configured SLA policies to align with business commitments, processing regular invoices within two working days and urgent cases within one day. Instead of relying solely on automated escalations, the team uses daily reports to proactively track tickets approaching SLA breaches. This enables better prioritisation and ensures consistent SLA adherence.

Automated ticket assignment rules

Custom assignment rules automatically route tickets to the appropriate teams at OATS based on customer identifiers such as email domain, subject, or content. Each team is aligned to specific customers, ensuring ownership clarity and eliminating manual effort in ticket distribution. Each team handles 5 to 10 customers.

Blueprints for process enforcement

Two blueprints were implemented to streamline key processes. The Accounts Payable Blueprint tracks each invoice through structured stages—Maker (entry), Checker (verification and approval), and Escalation where required. In parallel, the Order-to-Cash Blueprint manages the complete sales order lifecycle, from order receipt and ERP entry to MIGO processing, invoice generation, dispatch, vehicle tracking, and final delivery confirmation.

Workflow automation for efficiency

• Auto-reply emails were automatically closed to prevent unnecessary ticket re-openings.
• Customer names were auto-populated based on detection in the email subject or body.
• Tickets with “urgent” in the subject were classified as high priority with a 1-working-day SLA.
• Standard invoices were assigned a 2-working-day SLA.

Field dependencies and validation rules

Extensive field dependencies were implemented to manage large vendor master data. For example, selecting a location dynamically filters the vendor dropdown to display only relevant options. In addition, validation rules were applied across key fields to ensure data accuracy at the point of entry.

Custom reports and daily SLA management

Each morning, managers pulled customized reports, including aging bucket reports, SLA risk reports, and ticket volume reports, to identify tickets at risk of breaching SLAs that day. Based on these insights, resources were dynamically reallocated, with more team members assigned to at-risk tickets and spare capacity utilized for other tasks during low-volume periods.

Radar app for manager oversight

Help center portal for vendor access

Select clients' vendors were given access to the Zoho Desk Help Center portal to directly upload invoices, which auto-created tickets in the system, removing email dependency for invoice submission and ensuring a clean, traceable intake process.

Customer happiness ratings

Customer happiness ratings were enabled on closed tickets and used internally to recognize team members based on positive client feedback.

Benefits & ROI

SLA adherence: From 0% tracked to 99%: Before Zoho Desk, SLA tracking was not possible. After implementation, the firm consistently achieves 98–100% SLA compliance. New customers start at around 50–60% in month one and reach 99% within three to four months.

Milestone: 1 million+ tickets processed: The firm has crossed one million tickets processed, a volume entirely unmanageable under their previous email-based approach.

Business growth through credibility: Detailed MIS reports on SLA performance, team activity, aging analysis, and issue resolution gave the firm a competitive edge in winning new enterprise accounts payable clients.

Reduced manual reporting effort: What once required manual Excel calculations for SLA compliance is now pulled as a report in seconds from Zoho Desk.

Effective resource utilization: Daily aging reports allowed managers to dynamically reallocate team capacity based on real-time ticket inflow and SLA risk.