Meet the new Zoho Expense: Integrated business travel with native AI across every layer

In short: Zoho Expense brings together travel booking, expense management, and corporate cards in a single platform. This release introduces native online travel booking, Zoho Prepaid Mastercard®, enhanced manager and audit controls, a refreshed mobile experience, and a deeper intelligence layer through Zia that works across every stage of business spend.

Watch a glimpse of the new Zoho Expense

Expense reporting was never the hardest part.

The harder work always happened before a report existed: deciding where employees could book, ensuring spending stayed within policy, reconciling card transactions, answering policy questions, approving expenses, and preparing for audit. Finance teams don’t manage expenses anymore. They manage every decision that eventually becomes one.

Those decisions have traditionally been spread across different systems. Yet they all belong to the same operational process.

That’s the shift behind this new release. What began as expense management has evolved into an autonomous travel & expense platform, bringing those workflows together with native intelligence in one system. Instead of recording spend after it happens, Zoho Expense helps businesses plan, govern, automate, and understand spend from the moment it begins.

Introducing native online travel booking in Zoho Expense

Flights are booked, hotels are reserved, budgets are allocated, and policy decisions are made before the first expense is ever submitted. 

Native online travel booking within Zoho Expense lets employees search and book flights, hotels, and cabs from a global inventory spanning GDSs, direct NDC integrations, low-cost carriers, and direct airline connections. Policies are enforced at the point of booking and not after the spend is already incurred, and every itinerary includes emissions data for sustainability reporting.

Once a booking is confirmed, finance shouldn’t have to reconstruct how it happened. Budgets, policies, approvals, emissions data, guest travel, and booking details stay part of the same travel record from planning through reimbursement. Every trip arrives with its operational context intact, making approvals, expense reporting, and reconciliation faster because the information is already where it belongs.

Travel Arranger extends that model further by allowing assistants, travel coordinators, or admins to book and manage travel on behalf of employees while approvals, policy enforcement, and spend visibility remain connected in the same workflow.



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Enhanced spend control across every workflow

Submitting an expense report was never the most time-consuming part of expense management. The real work happened around it, capturing receipts, matching card transactions, applying policies, routing approvals, and giving managers the context they need to make decisions.

Zoho Expense keeps those activities moving without requiring employees and finance teams to coordinate every handoff manually. Receipts are read and categorized in 38+ languages, card transactions are captured in real time, policies are evaluated as spend occurs, and reports can assemble and route themselves automatically.

With these new capabilities, the same approach extends to governance. Team dashboards give managers a structured view of trips, expenses, and reports so they can track spend across teams with clarity. Parallel approvals allow multiple reviewers to approve expenses at the same time, reducing delays without compromising oversight. Attendee management automatically splits and attributes shared expenses across participants, while policy cloning helps finance teams roll out consistent policies across teams, and organization without rebuilding them from scratch. Advanced custom reporting lets organizations analyze spend using reports tailored to their business.



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Launching Zoho Prepaid Mastercard®: Corporate cards for smart business spending

Corporate cards shouldn’t introduce another approval path, another reconciliation process, or another system for finance to manage. They should become another governed source of business spend, operating under the same policies, approvals, and reporting as every other expense.

Zoho Expense already connects with existing corporate card programs and captures transactions in real time. With this release, that experience extends to Zoho Prepaid Mastercard® for US organizations. Available as physical and virtual cards with digital wallet support, it allows finance teams to issue cards, define spend limits, restrict merchant categories, apply usage rules, and monitor transactions as they happen, all within Zoho Expense.

A corporate card stops being a separate payment method to reconcile later. They become another trusted source of spend that already belongs to the same workflow.



Explore corporate card management →

Introducing Zia AI agents: From automated to autonomous expense management

Once travel, expenses, and corporate cards operate as one system, intelligence can move from assisting people to operating within the workflow itself.

Employees don’t need to search policy documents before booking travel. Managers don’t need to manually review every compliant expense. Finance teams don’t need to assemble recurring reports or sift through thousands of transactions looking for the few that deserve attention.

Instead, intelligence becomes part of the work itself.

Ask Zia answers policy questions in context. Approval Agent evaluates receipts, policy compliance, and anomalies before managers review them. Reporting Agent collates expenses and submits reports automatically. Finance leaders benefit from the same shift. Forecasting, anomaly detection, and AI-generated summaries provide a clearer view of spending patterns, policy risks, approvals, and emerging exceptions.

The same intelligence isn’t limited to Zoho Expense. With MCP, organizations can securely connect enterprise tools, AI systems, and automated workflows so those decisions extend across the broader finance ecosystem.


 

Travel & Expense, operating as one system

For years, businesses have managed travel, expenses, corporate cards as separate parts of the same process.

Zoho Expense changes that model.

It now helps businesses control employee spend where it happens with policies enforced while travel is being booked, expenses tracked as card transactions occur, better accounting with shared expenses automatically split across attendees, and smarter visibility through team and custom dashboards.

Know more: https://www.zoho.com/expense/v3/