Zoho Expense began life as an expense management tool, but it has grown into a full Travel and Expense (T&E) platform that now covers business travel bookings, expense management, and corporate cards. This release brings native online travel booking, the Zoho Prepaid Mastercard, stronger manager and audit controls, a refreshed mobile app, and a deeper layer of Zia AI running across the entire expense process.
Business travel and expenses have always been closely connected. A trip typically begins with a booking, moves through expenses and card transactions, then approvals, and finally reconciliation and reporting. Until now, many businesses had to piece this journey together across several separate systems.
With this release, native online travel booking becomes part of Zoho Expense itself. Employees can search for and book flights, hotels, and cabs, with travel policies and budgets applied automatically at the point of booking. Organisations gain access to a broad, pre-negotiated global travel inventory spanning GDSs, direct NDC connections, low-cost carriers, and their own contracted rates, all through a single booking experience. Travel Arrangers can also book and manage trips on behalf of other employees.
On the expense side, new capabilities include parallel approvals, attendee management, policy cloning, team dashboards, and more advanced custom reporting, alongside continued improvements to the core expense workflow. Receipts can now be read in more than 38 languages, card transactions are captured in real time, and expense reports can be assembled and routed for approval automatically.
Expense management now extends into corporate cards through the Zoho Prepaid Mastercard, available to organisations in the US. Finance teams can issue both physical and virtual cards, set spending limits and usage rules, and monitor card transactions as they happen.
As Zoho Expense has broadened across the whole T&E lifecycle, Zia's role within it has grown too. Ask Zia can answer policy questions in context, an Approval Agent can check expenses for compliance issues and anomalies, and a Reporting Agent can collate expenses and submit reports automatically.
This reflects a broader shift in the product. Zoho Expense is no longer just recording and managing spend after it has happened. It is now positioned to help control employee spend at the point it occurs, with policies enforced during travel booking, expenses tracked as card transactions happen, shared costs automatically split across attendees for cleaner accounting, and greater visibility through team and custom dashboards.
Zoho Expense 3.0 represents the evolution of an expense management tool into a complete Travel and Expense platform, with intelligence embedded directly into the workflows that manage business spend.