Global tech company Zoho has announced the launch of Zoho Practice, an end-to-end practice management solution for accountants.
The company also expanded its Zoho Finance Platform with the launch of 230+ extensions in Marketplace together with a dedicated developer portal.
In a presser, Zoho further announced that the platform has achieved 102 per cent year-on-year growth in new Kenyan customers.
The growth was attributed to Zoho Books, the company's flagship VAT-compliant accounting solution that integrates with Tax Invoice Management Systems (TIMS).
Zoho Kenya country head Veerakumar Natarajan said the new additions will further strengthen its ecosystem by offering Kenyan businesses the ability to tailor their applications according to their business needs.
"Zoho has been committed to serving its customers and the business community in Kenya,” he said.
“With the launch of Zoho Practice, we aim to help accountants streamline their firm’s day-to-day operations, thereby saving them time so that they can focus more on providing exceptional client experience.”
Natarajan added that the Zoho Finance Platform has evolved over the course of 15 years, from a single invoicing product to a full-fledged finance and operations suite.
This is with the addition of a wide variety of integration partners, system integrators, implementation and accounting partners, making it evolve into a comprehensive platform with a rapidly growing ecosystem.
“The Platform saw a 50 per cent increase in new customers in the MEA (Middle East and Africa) region and also grew its global accounting partner network by 63 per cent last year,” he said.
While still maintaining the same momentum, the company also launched an enterprise-grade Developer Portal where 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.
Today, accountants are expected to go beyond providing traditional services like day-to-day accounting, bookkeeping, financial reporting, auditing, and tax filing. Clients also expect business insights from their accountants like how to curb organisational spend, identifying additional revenue sources, and strategies for accelerating business growth.
Natarajan noted, however, that to provide these bespoke services, accountants need a holistic view of their clients' businesses, in addition to managing their own firm's operations.
Zoho Practice comes with client management, document management, task management, timesheet, and billing capabilities.
The application also seeks to offer 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 has AI-driven anomaly detection to identify inconsistencies in client’s transactions, to allow a quick fix of the issue.
The practice management solution comes pre-integrated with Zoho Books and Expense with aim of providing a comprehensive central repository while enabling seamless interoperability between an accountant's practice and their client’s finance and operations.
This empowers the accountants to grow their firms by offering more value-added services.
