Zoho Books was launched with the ambitious idea of solving the challenges that businesses faced in finance and accounting. What started as an easy-to-use online accounting tool has evolved from serving small businesses to solving the complex financial challenges of enterprises.
Constantly evolving to meet challenges
From the start, the biggest motivation in building Zoho Books has been our passion to solve the common problems in business finance. It has defined our strategy and driven our innovation. One of the challenges we’ve taken on is the problems of financial data being locked up in silos and unavailable for collaboration with employees from other departments or accountants from outside the organization. So we opened up Zoho Books, allowing businesses to add users from across their organization and external accountants with customized access permissions. This enabled users to access Zoho Books when and where they need it, while ensuring that they see only the data that they need to see.
To bridge the gap between businesses and their customers and vendors, we launched the Client Portal and Vendor Portal, which allow your customers and vendors to view their transactions, negotiate deals, and make payments. This has enabled businesses to collaborate with each other online and collect payments quickly and easily.
Bringing accounting and banking closer together
Accounting and banking are central to managing a business’s finances, but they haven’t typically worked together as one. Traditionally, to get bank statements into an accounting solution, businesses needed to either import them manually or connect the two functions through a third party, and reconciliation was often manual as well.
While Zoho Books supported this standard process, we wanted to go beyond and make the whole thing more seamless for businesses. So we partnered directly with banks such as ICICI Bank (India), SCB (India), and Mashreq (UAE) to bring accounting and banking together on a single platform. That gave businesses direct bank feeds, automatic transaction matching, and a much simpler reconciliation process.
These partnerships also enable businesses to collect payments from their customers faster and make payments to their vendors from within Zoho Books, without having to log in to their bank websites. Businesses going through a cash crunch can even quickly receive capital by applying for a loan from a partner bank from within Zoho Books. As we celebrate our anniversary, we reaffirm our commitment to providing you a smooth, synchronized banking experience.
Adding advanced features, solving complex problems
As we continue to add features that solve challenges for businesses, Zoho Books has evolved from accounting software to a financial platform. We’ve added advanced features such as custom fields, custom filters, custom buttons, and custom views, enabling businesses to fine-tune Zoho Books for their specific needs. We’ve also allowed businesses to automate recurring tasks using custom functions and workflow automation, and connect their accounts with other services using the open API and webhooks.
The advanced platform capabilities that we have added over time have helped us move up-market and serve the needs of larger businesses. For instance, integrating Zoho Books with Zoho Analytics allows businesses to create a powerful financial dashboard that displays Key Performance Indicators, and pull data from multiple sources to create customized reports. Our budgeting feature in Zoho Books enables businesses to budget their accounts and compare their actuals with set budgets.
Accreditations and accolades
Over the years, customers from all over the globe have trusted Zoho Books with their business finances, and we have been focused on helping businesses to stay compliant with local tax laws and digital tax processes.
Zoho Books is available in 12 different editions to ensure that businesses remain compliant with their local tax laws. In the UK, Zoho Books is HMRC approved, ICB certified, and MTD compliant. In India, Zoho Books is a GST Suvidha Provider (GSP), enabling businesses to create GST-compliant invoices, calculate GST on transactions, and file their GST returns directly from Zoho Books. Zoho Books even enables businesses to generate e-invoices and report them to the Invoice Registration Portal directly. In the UAE, it is accredited by the Federal Tax Authority (FTA), and in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it is approved by the General Authority of Zakat and Tax (GAZT).
Over the years, Zoho Books has garnered accolades from various corners, most notably from the Government of India as the winner of the AatmaNirbhar App Innovation Challenge. We are working towards adding even more new editions of Zoho Books that will make local tax-specific features available to businesses in other regions.
Staying grounded, serving small businesses
Small businesses have been the backbone of Zoho Books, and they have supported us ever since we launched. Although we’ve grown to serve larger businesses, we are as committed as ever to meeting the needs of the small business owners. With that in mind, we will be introducing free plans for small businesses shortly.
As we celebrate our 10-year anniversary, we celebrate our customers and partners, without whom we wouldn’t have come this far. We are deeply grateful for your support and feedback that has shaped Zoho Books to be the product it is today.
Read what some of our customers have to say:
“For the last ten years, Zoho Books has been there with us as a very sturdy and reliable software for our 400 employees worldwide. It is a fantastic product. I want to congratulate the entire development and product management team of Zoho Books. We are looking forward to the innovations and features that Zoho Books will roll out in the coming years!”
– Julian Weber
“Ten years back, I came across Zoho Books on the internet while searching for an accounting tool, and since then, I have never looked back. In our journey with Zoho Books, we have never faced any downtime, data integrity issue, or any security issue with Zoho Books!”
– Saji P
We are young, we are growing, and we are deeply committed to solving the accounting challenges of businesses. We look forward to many more years of serving businesses, small or big.
If you haven’t tried Zoho Books yet, explore the online accounting software with a free trial now.
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