IFFCO's expense claim time reduced from days to minutes with Zoho Expense

About IFFCO

Established in 1975, IFFCO is an international group based in the United Arab Emirates. They manufacture and market a well-integrated range of mass-market food products, related derivatives, intermediates, and services.

IFFCO runs 80 operations in 35 countries, employs 12,000+ people, and has products reaching five continents. With a portfolio of 80+ brands, it has firmly established itself as one of the main and most diversified groups in the Middle East.

The Challenge

With IFFCO’s business and employees spread across the globe, communicating with the travel desk for travel bookings was an uphill task. Employees needed to get their trips approved by managers who were often in different locations or time zones leading to inadvertent delays. Due to this latency, the costs for travel booking shot up, and the travel team handled a huge volume of emails just for one travel booking.

A night and day change in travel & expense reporting

For any business to thrive, they need to keep a keen eye on the company's cash outflow, including employee spend and travel booking costs. Leveraging Zoho Expense's powerful integration with Zoho Analytics, IFFCO could now collate data from multiple sources including T&E, to gain data driven insights. Custom analytic dashboards were created in Zoho Analytics and built into Zoho Expense through web tabs. These dashboards could easily provide a bird's-eye view on the complete employee-related spend in their organization.

We found Zoho Expense to be a very powerful and flexible tool which allows us to accommodate many different expense policies and compliances in respect to many different countries' regulations. We started using Zoho Expense across our entire IFFCO group for travel and expense management as one of the key aspects to control spending.

The overall implementation for UAE, which included 1,000+ approvers, auditors, and employees, was completed in less than six months' time with a high rate of user adoption. IFFCO's implementation of Zoho Expense now ensured that employees could communicate with travel desk and submit expense claims easily; a process that usually took three to four days could now be completed within minutes.