Zoho, the Chennai-headquartered global technology company, today launched Zoho Practice, a free end-to-end practice management solution for chartered accountants (CAs). The software provides accountants a one-stop solution to streamline their firm's workflows, and seamlessly collaborate internally and with their clients. This empowers them to offer more value-added services and grow their own firms.
"Over the last 15 years, we have gone from offering an invoicing solution to a suite of products, and now we have evolved into a comprehensive Finance Platform, powered by a strong ecosystem. As we have grown, working closely with various stakeholders, we have also broadened our understanding of the financial ecosystem. This has enabled us to not just expand geographically, but also innovate and launch new solutions. Today, we have launched Zoho Practice to serve one of the most critical stakeholders in the financial ecosystem—the Chartered Accountants. Our aim is to help them increase productivity and achieve operational efficiency, so that they can focus on growing their firm," said Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, Global Head, Zoho Finance and Operations Suite.
Zoho Practice, a Modern Solution for Accountants
CAs are pressed for time as client requests have become more complex and unique. They also have to stay up-to-date with the constantly evolving tax and regulatory compliance landscape, while providing routine tasks such as day-to-day accounting, bookkeeping, financial reporting, auditing, and tax filing. They may soon be expected to provide future-oriented business insights, not just historical analysis. This warrants a comprehensive solution, which helps track and manage client requests, while providing a holistic view of the business, in addition to managing their own firm's operations.
Zoho Practice, a one-stop solution for CAs, comes with client management, document management, task management, timesheet, and billing capabilities. The application also offers a few industry-first capabilities, built from the ground up for distributed firms, like advanced collaboration through chat, voice or video call, and documents sharing. It also offers AI-driven anomaly detection to identify inconsistencies in transactions, so that the issue can be rectified quickly. The practice management solution comes pre-integrated with Zoho Books (accounting app), Zoho Expense (travel and expense management app), and Zoho Payroll (payroll management app), providing a comprehensive central repository while enabling seamless interoperability between an accountant's practice and their client’s finance and operations.
CA Sanjib Sanghi, Chairman EICASA and, Vice Chairman EIRC of ICAI said, "Today, CAs have to spend a lot of time providing important services like accounting, auditing, consulting and tax filing for clients. Additionally, they must also manage clients, track services they request, and have their related documents organised. Zoho Practice is a complete solution that consolidates all these important aspects, simplifying a CA firm’s day-to-day operations, equipping them with the insights needed to provide exemplary services, and helping them manage their team efficiently."
Continued Growth of Zoho Finance Platform
The Finance Platform is seeing 65% y-o-y growth in new customers in India. This growth is being driven by Zoho Books, the company's flagship GST-compliant accounting solution, that supports 17 languages including Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, and Marathi. The finance platform ecosystem also saw an increase of 63% in the global accounting partner network last year.
Continuing on this momentum, the company also launched an enterprise-grade Developer Portal using which third-party developers can easily build solutions to customise specific functions of their finance applications, automate routine processes, and publish the extensions in Zoho Marketplace. Additionally, businesses can also use the portal to build their own extensions and use them within their organisations.
Zoho's Finance Platform also added 230+ extensions to Zoho Marketplace. These extensions go beyond the native functionalities and help solve advanced requirements. Some of the most common uses of the extensions include:
Connections to local payment gateways to offer convenient payment methods to customers.
Verifying a contact's email address, and their bank account details to ensure data accuracy.
Syncing financial data automatically with other business intelligence and forecasting apps.
Adding pin location within a map while recording customer or vendor addresses.
Pricing
Zoho Practice is available for use immediately, and is free for accounting firms with up to 3 users. Additional users can be added by purchasing the add-on which works up to ₹150 monthly, per user. Customers of Zoho Finance Platform can install the extensions offered in the Zoho Marketplace from within the applications. The extensions are priced by their respective developers.
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