Coupa vs. Zoho Expense

I am new to customer-supplier portals in my career. I use several different ones in my current role, including Ariba and Tipalti. To be honest, I don't really enjoy the user experience of any of them. I can see how larger companies may benefit from their services but for my current role submitting invoices on them and filling out vendor information requests seems somewhat clunky to me. When I'm in Coupa, the easiest, most non-clunky process for me is when I'm successfully connected with a customer who has successfully created their purchase order and I can easily upload my invoice to said PO. To me, emailing customer invoices directly to the customer from our invoicing system seems like the easier route of delivering an invoice. I suppose it is helpful and reassuring to know that an invoice has been successfully uploaded into a company's system rather than waiting to find out if your emailed invoice made it to the correct department for payment processing.

Zoho Expense is wonderful when you have a distributed or remote team or workforce that needs to submit expenses reports throughout the month into a single software and approval system. Zoho Expense does make it easy to train, onboard, and use all of the end-user features for submitting and generating expense reports.

Incentivized

• Coupa is easy to use, however, we had to teach our end users about procurement. They are not used to conducting an RFP, onboarding a supplier, or preparing a PO. This is the change management that our employees had to be prepared to understand. The Shelby Group helped us with the implementation.
• The hardest part was the integration between NetSuite and Coupa. We wanted to have a dynamic tight integration between the two solutions. If we adjusted the chart of accounts or added a new supplier we wanted it to be able to done in both systems and be available immediately in both systems. We used a partner called SuiteSkies to accomplish this dynamic integration.
• We’ve been able to manage the implementation and maintenance with a very lean IT group.

Incentivized

• The program will notify users if they have entered a duplicate charge.
• Once the end-users understood that receipts were mandatory, attaching those receipts has become second-nature. The app makes it very easy to do so.

Incentivized

• Support Team - A little slow in responding. I think the tool is so configurable that they struggle with figuring out what is causing certain issues that are being submitted on the portal.
• I'd love for the Sourcing Module to be able to support larger events. There seems to be a limit on the number of lines each event can support and as a growing retailer, our store count dictates we have room to grow and that each store is represented in the bid process.
• Would like to see the ability to issue multiple POs for a single item to multiple locations. The tool may do this but I know I can't and it may be due to how we interface with our ERP.

Incentivized

• Could have more default options. Instead of making my users select payment method, allow us to default it to one of the options.
• More room for customization by department. My service department needs different categories of expenses then my sales department.

Incentivized

Probably the easiest Zoho Application to setup, which is to say quite easy. No user has complained about it being difficult. Admin staff like it as well.

Incentivized

The only reason I give Zoho a 9 is because of the issue with the Chart of Accounts skewing every time I export/import. I believe this is due to the fact that I use sub-accounts and Zoho cannot differentiate. Still hoping. :)

Incentivized

Concur was a lot easier and more user friendly for employees doing expense reports on their phone. That is not the case with Coupa. You must use your laptop to do expenses and our managers don't always have enough time to do that while out in the field working. This has caused some issues.

Incentivized

I've used Concur in the past for managing and submitting expenses. When comparing what I know about Zoho to Concur, Zoho seems to be a more simplified tool focused on simply managing expenses, inputting, tracking, submitting and getting reimbursed. Based on what I know, Zoho gets the job done with no frills.

• It has allowed for proper processing of expenses tied directly to the proper LOB and GL Codes
• Has taken the guesswork away and allowed for the proper budgets to be hit and reconciled
• Ease of use has led to mass adoption and more prompt processing of expenses

Incentivized

• We have had some issues with the credit card reconciliation process which has made our monthly accounting / close process. This has been a negative
• Positive ROI is that team members spend less time on expense reports due to the ease of reporting
• Positive ROI is that substantial training and onboarding is not needed due to the features and simplicity.

Incentivized