Home / Approvals / Customizable Approvals

Create custom approval flows

Design approval processes that suit your requirements. Customize approvals based on your chosen criteria and ensure transactions are routed to the right people.

Set up criteria-based approval

Don't prefer rigid, hierarchical approvals? No stress. Zoho Expense allows you to create approval flows with custom criteria based on and/or logic. For example, whenever an expense report has more than five policy violations and a total less than $1000, you assign the project head to be the approver.

Screen showing criteria based custom approval

Create multi-stage approval flows

Zoho Expense gives you the option to create multiple levels of approval for a transaction. This ensures that no approval request goes without the appropriate vetting. You can add up to 10 levels of approval.

Screenshot of multi-level approval flows

Choose your approval method

For these multiple levels, you can choose different people to approve as well. With options like project and department heads, and even choosing the approver manually, Zoho Expense gives you the flexibility of setting up your preferred approval methods.

Screen showing the different approval methods

Automate approvals

If you don't want to manually approve every routine request or report, you can choose to automate the approval. For example, reports with amounts less than $10 and without any policy violations can be automatically approved. Furthermore, you can choose to auto-reject transactions as well.

Mobile screens showing the approvals on the iOS and Android apps of Zoho Expense

Approve on the move

With our fully functional mobile applications for iOS and Android, approvals don't have to be bound to your desktop. Save time, and approve transactions from anywhere you are.

Testimonials

One of my responsibilities is to oversee the AP function, and expense reporting is by far one of the most tedious aspects. Zoho Expense helps alleviate a bit of that headache with their online and mobile app platforms that allow users to upload and submit information electronically. Moreover, Zoho Expense has the capability to export their information in far more detailed fashions than other desktop and mobile applications including AMEX and Citi. I also like the approver and reminder functionality the app enables for the management team.

Brittany Cisneros

AVP Finance, Impact Floors of Texas LP

I believe, the most convenient feature for our employees is the easy-to-use mobile version of the tool. You click a picture of the bill you just spent on, select the relevant expense head and hit submit. Additionally, scanned copies of bills/ receipts, expenses, approvals, comments are now available in one report which forms the basis for any reimbursement claim posted to our accounting software.

Janani

Director of Finance, Exotel

In the past, I spent a ton of time chasing down our company credit card users because they often did not provide me with the receipt or even notation of their spending, so when the statement came, I had no idea which budget areas to pay the invoice from. Now, they each have a Zoho Expense account to track their spending in, and since getting the receipts into the account is so easy, and they can see their own bank feeds, it is working tickety-boo!

Becky Retzlaff

Financial Manager, Lakeside Lutheran High School

Not just for all business teams, Zoho has helped the accounting team as well. Expense related reports are all available at one place. A remarkable thing about the Zoho experience, is the constant support they give us, for every little query. Zoho has made life easier for us.

Hector Beverages Paperboat

Expense reporting has been so easy after we started using Zoho Expense. The efficiency of expense reporting and reimbursement has improved multifold.

Razorpay

Zoho expense is a good tool. It is helping us to manage expense records in a seamless manner. In our line of business where international business travel is routine, Zoho Expense has helped us to create a paperless and fully traceable process. It is great value for money and extremely user-friendly!

Ms. Sushama Telang

COO, Sarla Advantech Pvt. Ltd

Customize and automate approvals without a hitch

Other Features

Receipt Management

Managing receipts shouldn't have to be tedious. With features that allow you to autoscan receipts, forward them automatically, import in bulk, or even import from other cloud applications, Zoho Expense ensures that no receipt goes untracked. The best part? Receipts are digitally stored in your Zoho Expense account, so you never have to worry about losing paper copies.

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Expense Management

Manage expenses more efficiently with Zoho Expense. We support multiple methods for uploading expenses, no matter the currency. They can be itemized, split, added as per diem allowances, or consolidated under one expense type. As an admin, edit the expense creation forms to suit your organization's requirements and choose what fields employees must fill in while submitting expenses.

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Mileage Tracking

Tracking business mileage is an important part of managing your organizational spending. Zoho Expense offers 100% accuracy when it comes to mileage tracking. Add mileage expenses through 4 different methods using your Android, iPhone, or even Apple Watch.

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Corporate Card Reconciliation

Connect your corporate cards to Zoho Expense and speed up the reconciliation process. Associate cards with specific employees and fetch card feeds instantly. Weed out any personal spending, and then automatically match and reconcile your business expenses. Our dashboard also gives you a complete reconciliation overview for your convenience.

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Direct Feed Integration

If you're worried about the safety of using third-party channels to import corporate card feeds into Zoho Expense, we're here to reassure you. With Direct Feed Integration (DFI), you can fetch corporate card feeds directly from Visa, Mastercard, and Amex (American Express), eliminating the need for a middleman.

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Expense Report Management

Make expense reporting for employees a cinch. They can create expense reports with all the important details they need. Apply cash advances, download expense report PDFs, and streamline the reporting process with report types.

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Expense Report Automation

Tired of creating reports manually? Or maybe you keep forgetting to add your expenses and submit the report online? With expense report automation, you can put the whole process on autopilot. Zoho Expense will automatically add expenses to a report and submit it for you.

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Trips

Provide ticket options, set up approval for trips and ticket costs, manage itineraries, handle expenses, and make the travel and expense management process easier with Zoho Expense.

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Purchase requests

Use Zoho Expense to manage your purchase requests and make your ordering process easy and problem-free.

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Simplified Approvals

If you're from an organization that follows a linear, hierarchical approval flow for your expense reporting, you can set up default approvals using Zoho Expense. You can configure out-of-office approvers and reminders for approvals as well.

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Expense Auditing

Stay notified about policy violations or possible duplicate entries, run audit trail reports, detect fraudulent behavior, ensure expenses have digital records, and back up data instantly. Zoho Expense makes sure you are audit-ready for the tax season.

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Compliance

Zoho Expense is GDPR compliant and ISO certified. In addition to a global edition, Zoho Expense has 8 dedicated editions for the US, the UK, India, Canada, Australia, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Never worry about local compliance laws again.

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Reimbursement

Process expense reimbursements in a faster, more efficient manner. Sync settlements with payroll and ERP software. Make employees happier with quicker expense reimbursements, delivered directly to their accounts.

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Policies

Set up policies for different branches, departments, or cost centers, and ensure no employee expense is outside the policy limits. If there are violations, you can be notified instantly. Create mileage and per diem rates for different policies as well.

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Expense Rules

Set up limit rules based on fixed amounts, expense count, mileage limit and more. Choose to warn or entirely block employees from submitting expense reports when a rule is broken. Set up daily, monthly, or yearly expense limits, or place a rule for a custom duration as well.

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Budgets

Create budgets for expense categories or expense types and put a lid on the spending. Warn or block employees from creating an expense when it exceeds the budget. Get analytics on the actual spending vs the budget initially set and stay on top of your spending.

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Automation

Historically, expense reporting has been a manual process predominantly. But, with amazing automation features from Zoho Expense, you don't have to carry out mundane expense reporting tasks anymore.

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Collaboration

Quit sending back and forth emails about expense reports. Collaborate with employees contextually and without delay.

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Customization

Set up custom components, customize what employees see when they use Zoho Expense, and personalize your expense management process.

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Here's what our customers are saying about us

Puma has been using Zoho Expense in Oceania for over 3 years and our users have found the web interface and the phone apps to be feature rich and always improving.The look and feel is modern and pleasing to the eye. Puma has recently expanded the usage of Zoho Expense to multiple new regions around the globe, and throughout, the Zoho team has been extremely supportive to the unique requirements of each region and helped to make the onboarding experience painless.

Mark Hawkins

Director, Operations PUMA SEA

We started using Zoho Expense across our whole IFFCO group for Travel and Expense Management as one of the key aspects to keep control on spends. It was a challenge to manage employee spend and expense reporting across our multiple office locations with disparate solutions. We found Zoho Expense as a very powerful and flexible tool which allows us to accommodate many different expense policies and compliances in respect to many different countries' regulations.

Jaroslaw Pietraszko

Director ERP & Digital Transformation, IFFCO Group

The Zoho Expense team has provided us with the best features—especially the receipt auto-scan, which eases our expense reporting journey with its mobile functionality. Our employees use Zoho Expense and its features extensively, particularly the mobile app. Above all, with the Zoho Analytics integration, we always get the insights we need with multiple dashboards to analyze our business spend. We’re one of those happy customers who are looking forward to seeing many new features and integrations within the application.

Amit Rai

CHRO, Tata Play Fiber

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