Inventya improves policy compliance by 90%, saving days of manual checks with Zoho Expense

The company

Founded in 2010, Inventya is a UK-based innovation management consultancy that helps businesses turn groundbreaking ideas into market-ready solutions. Its team supports clients with everything from market intelligence and grant funding to commercialization strategies and investor guidance. Working across sectors like science, healthcare, clean tech, and high-value manufacturing, Inventya has built a reputation on reducing risk and accelerating time-to-market for innovators.

The challenge

With Inventya’s rapid growth since 2019, managing corporate expenses became complex. What once worked for a small team—employees taking photos of receipts, emailing them to finance, and manually tagging projects in spreadsheets—quickly became unmanageable as the team grew and projects multiplied.

"If everyone needs to click a picture of a receipt and send it to finance directly, then it will be chaos—a recipe for disaster."

Viney Chauhan, Managing Director, Inventya

Finance and compliance teams faced multiple pain points: delayed expense report processing, inconsistent reimbursements, and limited visibility into project and client expenses. Enforcing expense policies was difficult, and valuable time that could have been spent on supporting innovation was instead being lost to manual reconciliation.

The solution

Instead of juggling emails and spreadsheets, Inventya’s staff now just takes a photo of each receipt. Zoho Expense’s automated expense tracking instantly links them to the right project and client. Predefined workflows guide each expense through a clear approval path, automatically checking for policy compliance, flagging any discrepancies, and reducing the need for manual verification.

"That’s where we started to use Zoho Expense—a very simple expense management app where everything is pretty much predefined. Staff just click a picture of the receipt, and it automatically gets attached against a project name, against a client."

Viney Chauhan, Managing Director, Inventya

The tasks that once consumed hours, like preparing monthly expense reports, are now handled in just a few clicks. The finance and compliance teams have clear visibility over spending across projects, clients, and funders. Reimbursement cycles became predictable and more streamlined, while reducing administrative burden on finance.

The Benefits and ROI

Zoho Expense delivered:

• A 90% improvement in policy compliance, significantly reducing flagged violations and ensuring that expenses were aligned with company policies.
• Automated workflows that saved substantial time for both staff and finance teams, allowing staff to focus on client-facing work and the finance team to focus on strategic priorities.
• Predictable reimbursement cycles that have significantly improved employee satisfaction.
• Almost-instant reporting, giving management real-time insights into expenses by project, client, and funder.

"That simple use of one app has made a massive difference in terms of time, in terms of cost, and more importantly, in terms of the use of technology with Zoho Expense. It brings everyone on the same page in quite an intuitive manner."

Viney Chauhan, Managing Director, Inventya

These changes didn’t just save time; they gave Inventya’s finance team the breathing room to focus on strategic work. The platform enabled Inventya to scale operations without adding administrative overhead, allowing the company to focus on its core mission: helping innovators succeed.