On your mobile device, navigate to the App Store or Google play and search for Zoho expense and install it. The first time you run it of course you will need to login using your Zoho password.

Zoho Expense was built around the idea that people usually have more than one expense that will be incurred before a batch of expenses would be submitted for reimbursement. Take the Discover Healing, Inc. company party as an example. You may have  separate expenses for fuel, mileage, hotel, and more that you would want to be reimbursed for.  Rather than submitting each expense by itself, we will create a report that will contain all these expenses, including receipts, and submit the report and it's attached expenses all at once, making it easier and more streamlined. Think of a Report like a hat that you are going to throw all your receipts and expenses into for safe keeping.

Let's use the Company Party as our example. We know we are going to be be incurring some reimbursable expenses, so we will go ahead and create a Report to hold those expenses for us. (Note that you can create a report at any time, but creating a report beforehand makes it easier.)

Give the report a title that makes sense, and if it is logical to do so, modify the dates, as well as stating a business purpose for this report, so that 100 years from now, it will still make sense to your grandkids.

The company party is going to take a few days, so we will change the dates to reflect that and click done.

Click to save the report.

From the home screen, we can see that we now have one unsubmitted report. Let's click the red + at the top right.

Let's choose Mileage and add the miles we have driven to the Company Party.

Who we can add the expense date and the distance that we have traveled in miles or we can use the odometer reading, by the way.

To get to the company party, we traveled 187 miles. Using a standard mileage rate of $.58 per mile, the app calculates a reimbursable expense of $108.46. This makes sense, so we will click on save expense at the bottom right.

We can now see that total showing up in our draft report for the company party.We can now see that total showing up in our draft report for the company party.

If we tap the report, we can see the details.

One of the really great features about Zoho expense is its ability to scan and decipher receipts. From the homepage, let's scan a receipt by clicking on the camera icon as you see below.

Place your receipt on a flat surface and hold the camera so that you can see the receipt. As soon as the camera gets a good view of the receipt, a photo will be taken of it. If the photo looks okay, click on "Autoscan."

It may take anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute for the app to do an optical character scan of the receipt and recognize who the receipt is from and how much the receipt is for. Once that is done, it will appear as shown below.

Tapping on the scan receipt will bring up the details than pulled from the receipt by the app.Tapping on the scanned receipt will bring up the details than pulled from the receipt by the app. It's incredible how accurate this is, but you should always check to make sure that it got things right. If not, you can click on the edit button and make any changes that you need to make. Otherwise, you can click on the "Add to report" button.

Since we already created a report as a placeholder for these expenses that we knew were coming, we can choose the report as shown below. If we have an already created a report, that's OK, too. We can simply click the + and add the report on the fly.

Our parking expense of $10 is not associated with the company party report, so when we submit the report for reimbursement the expense will be included!Our parking expense of $10 is not associated with the company party report, so when we submit the report for reimbursement the expense will be included!

If we return to the homepage, we can see that we have one unsubmitted report. Since we don't have any other expenses that need to be thrown into the hat, let's go ahead and submit this report for reimbursement. Tap the report to open it up.

If everything looks good about the report and there's nothing else to add, click submit at the bottom of the page.

Dorene Nelson is the person responsible for approving all expense reimbursements.

After choosing the approving person, click Submit.

Once you've submitted this report, you can see that it is awaiting approval.

To view a report as a PDF we can click on the button as shown.To view our report as a PDF we can click on the button as shown.

To download a copy of the report tap on the download button as shown below.

One of the great advantages of using Zoho expense is the expense reports that it creates. Notice that included in this expense report is the receipt that we  scanned!