What do you like best about Zoho Expense?
Honestly, what I love most about Zoho Expense is how solid the mobile experience is and how easy it is to tag every expense to a specific property or leasing deal. I’m Violeta Andina, Commercial Real Estate Operations Manager at North Texas Commercial Advisors here in Dallas. We cover office, retail, and light industrial leasing all over the DFW metro, and our brokers are constantly on the road touring spaces, meeting tenants, and checking out new investment properties. I spend a ton of time testing SaaS tools for leasing pipelines, tenant files, and team coordination, so mobile functionality and clean deal tagging matter a whole lot to us.
A great example was last month, when we were running tours for a new retail lease deal out in Fort Worth. Our broker was bouncing between three different properties that day, paying for parking, quick client lunches, and printing marketing flyers on the go. Before Zoho Expense, he’d stuff all those receipts in his folder or truck glove box, and often forget to sort them out until weeks later. Now he just snaps a photo of each receipt right in the Zoho Expense app. The OCR reads the amount, date, and merchant automatically, then he picks the correct property and leasing deal tag in a couple taps. No typing everything in by hand. We also use the built-in GPS mileage tracker for all those property drives around the metroplex, which saves us from guessing or manually logging miles later.
I also really appreciate the customizable approval workflows. We can set it so any expense tied to an active lease deal routes straight to me first, and bigger marketing or renovation-related spend goes to our principal broker for a second sign-off. That keeps everything compliant without slowing the brokers down when they’re out running tours. And since it lives inside the Zoho ecosystem, it plays nicely with Zoho CRM where we track our leasing pipeline and tenant contacts. We can mark certain charges as billable to the property owner, so those expenses feed right into the deal record instead of floating somewhere separate.
Our team is only 11–50 people, we don’t have a dedicated finance clerk just for expense reports. Zoho Expense cuts down the back-and-forth chasing receipts and reconciling messy spreadsheets every month. It’s not overloaded with features we’ll never touch. It’s built so our road-heavy brokerage team can log spend fast, and I get a clear view of what each lease, property, and client deal is costing us. That frees up my time to focus on tweaking our leasing workflows and testing new property management tools instead of sorting piles of paper receipts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Zoho Expense?
To be transparent, Zoho Expense works okay for our day-to-day broker expenses, but there are a few consistent pain points that slow us down, especially when we’re juggling multiple leasing and property deals across DFW.
My biggest issue is its CSV bulk import. A couple weeks back, I needed to bring in a batch of historical expense records for three of our light industrial properties. We pulled that old data out of our legacy spreadsheet log, and the import kept failing. The error messages are super vague; it never tells me which row, column, or entry is causing the problem. I spent close to an hour cleaning up stray special characters, reworking date formatting, and splitting the file into smaller chunks just to hunt down one bad line. We don’t have a dedicated finance person on our small team, so that was time I should’ve spent updating our leasing pipeline or prepping tenant paperwork. Other expense tools I’ve tested flag the problematic rows right away, so this part felt really clunky.
I also wish the permission settings were way more granular. Right now the access levels are pretty broad, and that creates a tricky situation for us. Our leasing brokers need to submit their own expenses and view their own deal-related charges, but they shouldn’t be able to see sensitive compensation details, owner reimbursement rates, or the full expense totals for other brokers’ deals. Zoho Expense doesn’t let me lock down specific fields on an expense record. My only two options are to give them access to way more financial data than they need, or create completely separate organizations or workspaces for different brokers. Splitting everything up is messy, it breaks our property-level reporting, and it makes it harder for me to get a single consolidated view of spend across all our DFW listings.
There’s another small but recurring frustration too. The reporting filters for property and deal tagging are limited. We often need to pull a clean report showing only billable expenses for a specific landlord, separate from our internal operational costs. Even though we tag every expense to a deal or property, building that exact report takes extra manual filtering and exporting to a spreadsheet. It’s not a total dealbreaker, but it adds extra clicks every time we’re putting together owner statements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
