Zoho Books Aims to Capture Mid-Market with E-Invoicing

Zoho launched a new edition of its GST-compliant online accounting software Zoho Books for mid-market businesses. With Zoho Books Ultimate, companies that have a turnover of ₹500 crore or more can generate e-invoices for every sales transaction and report them to the Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) starting from October. Businesses can also customize the underlying system to suit their needs, gain visibility into the performance of multiple branches, manage multiple GSTINs, simplify collaboration with suppliers, and get real-time business reports in a single place.

With e-invoicing being introduced as a mandatory requirement, mid-market and large businesses will need a system that seamlessly integrates with the government portal, provide additional fields to capture QR code in addition to managing different aspects of their financial operations. Typically, to address these challenges, businesses have to invest heavily in implementing and customising their ERP systems. This is not only expensive and time-consuming but also complicated. With the capabilities launched today, Zoho Books offers a single, flexible, scalable accounting platform that is built to take care of compliance automatically.

"When we launched our GST compliant accounting solution in 2017, we brought a new dimension to accounting software in India with a consumer-grade interface for finance functions and connected banking. With the new edition of Zoho Books, businesses in the mid-market space and beyond can bring innovative products and services to the market quickly. It addresses the latest e-invoicing requirements, allows businesses to manage their billing and finances remotely, streamlines collaboration with vendors, provides embedded analytics and customisation. These advanced capabilities push the envelope on what accounting software can do while helping businesses future-proof their accounting and financial operations," said Prashant Ganti, Head of Product Management, Global Tax, Accounting, and Payroll solutions, Zoho Corp.

The highlights of this edition are: 

• E-invoicing and new GST returns: Businesses can generate e-invoices and automatically report them to the IRP. They can also generate e-way bill and new GST returns (Sahaj and Sugam).
• Multiple GSTIN support: Businesses with multiple branches and multiple GSTINs can manage their accounting, generate GST returns and ensure GST compliance for each branch with a single account.
• Low-code customization platform: Businesses can customize Zoho Books according to their needs. This ensures that the system scales as the business grows.
• Supplier collaboration made easy: With the supplier portal, businesses can streamline collaboration by allowing suppliers to track purchase orders, invoices and payments from a single place. When both business owners and their suppliers use Zoho Books, they work from the same virtual network enabling automatic document exchange. This eliminates error-prone, manual data entry.
• Advanced business analytics: This edition comes with advanced business analytics that provides 75+ reports. Businesses can also create custom dashboards and interactive cross-functional reports with their sales, financial and operational data to gain quick insights for faster decision-making.
• In-built order management capabilities: Businesses will have access to advanced inventory management features which enable them to integrate and process orders from Shopify, manage their sales transactions, orders, warehousing, fulfilment and product returns from Zoho Books. They can also sync sales from multiple channels, handle backorders and dropshipping.
• Streamlined employee payroll processing: Businesses can choose Zoho Payroll as an add-on to streamline their payroll processing, and automate the corresponding accounting entries in Zoho Books.

Built in India, Zoho Books recently won the best app in the "Business" category in AtmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge conducted by the government. All Zoho apps, including Zoho Books, are committed to protecting the data of its users, and therefore adhere to strict privacy and security standards. The data of Zoho's Indian users is stored in the company's data centres within the country.

Pricing and availability

Zoho Books Ultimate, priced at ₹7999 per month excluding GST, is available immediately. The e-Invoicing feature will be available from the 1st of October. Queries can be sent to support.india@zohobooks.com.