Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, announced that starting today, its online invoicing solution, Zoho Invoice, will be completely free of cost to further extend the company’s support for small and medium-sized enterprises.
In the last four years, Zoho Invoice‘s revenue growth has rapidly increased, demonstrating the need for a comprehensive invoicing solution to aid businesses from any industry to shift from manual to digital. Due to the pandemic, SMEs have decided to modernize their invoicing processes at an accelerated rate. To continue its support of the SME community, Zoho Invoice offers advanced capabilities such as time tracking, auto recording of expenses, project billing, and 30+ real time reports to help freelancers and small businesses easily navigate the billing and payment collection process, without the concerns of cost.
According to McKinsey SMEs across South Africa represent more than 98% of businesses, employ between 50 and 60% of the country’s workforce across all sectors, and are responsible for a quarter of job growth in the private sector. Due to the pandemic, however, they are experiencing a decline in revenue and profitability.
For small and medium-sized enterprises billing and payment collection has continued to be a challenge due to administrative costs, limited staff, and insufficient time resources. Additionally, businesses need the ability to access data remotely, which has caused a shift from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions.
According to an Analysys Mason study, SME spending on on-premise solutions for invoice management will be stagnant between 2019 and 2025, while spending on cloud-based invoicing solutions will increase from USD 0.9 billion to USD 2.1 billion. Fully cloud-based, Zoho Invoice enables businesses to create and send fully-customized, professional invoices in less than a minute, follow up for payments automatically, and get paid online to achieve efficiency in their invoice process.
Zoho has supported SMEs for over 20 years, and Zoho Invoice has helped businesses with their invoicing needs for 13 of those years. Zoho Invoice‘s free offering will continue to help businesses streamline their billing and payment collection process through streamlined payment collection, simplified billing, tax handling, and more. Invoice integrates with Zoho applications, and also integrates with third-party applications so that businesses can use the solution to contextually sync their AR information to relevant systems.
“We launched Zoho Invoice in 2008, with the goal of providing a fully customizable invoicing solution for businesses of all sizes. Since then we’ve grown to millions of users worldwide. Through the migration from paper-based invoicing to digital invoicing we’ve seen the need for simplified billing to fit the customized needs of the SME community,” said Andrew Bourne, Regional Manager, Africa. “Our roots are centered around helping the SME community which has supported Zoho from the beginning, and we understand the challenges that SME’s have had to undergo that were onset from the global pandemic. We hope offering Zoho Invoice for free continues to help businesses rebuild and grow amongst challenging times that they face today and for the future.”
Key benefits of Zoho Invoice include:
- Simplified billing: Businesses can create and send fully customized, professional invoices within minutes. Invoices can be sent automatically if they are recurring in nature.
- Tax Handling: Businesses can track the tax levied on every transaction with tax summary reports to assist with tax filing.
- Streamlined payment collection: Payments can be collected quickly and securely online through Debit/Credit Cards and PayPal.
- Automated payment reminders: Based on customizable settings, the system will automatically send payment reminders to customers through email.
- Effortless expense tracking: Expenses can be recorded automatically by scanning the bill or receipt using the Zoho Invoice mobile app.
- Client portal: Businesses can allow their customers to keep track of all relevant invoices, projects and make payments through the client portal.
- Time tracking: Businesses can manage multiple projects, track time and accurately bill their customers.
- Instant reports: Businesses have access to 30+, real-time reports that provide insights into key financial metrics such as best-selling products, invoice statuses, pending payments, and more.
- Mobile apps: Zoho Invoice is available on the web or as a fully functional, downloadable mobile app available for all devices.
Andrew Bourne, Regional Manager, Africa
