How a high-volume last-mile logistics enterprise automated bulk bill approvals and travel reconciliation at scale with Catalyst
The Partner
Jeevika Impact Solutions Private Limited technology consulting firm with strong expertise in finance transformation, automation, and enterprise process optimization. As a Zoho Partner, Jeevika Impact Solutions Private Limited helps businesses extend Zoho applications with scalable, cloud-native solutions.
Key Expertise:
- Zoho Implementations
- Custom solutions and third party integrations
- Scalable, cloud-native architectures
- IT Managed Services
The Challenge
The Partner’s customer, a rapidly growing last-mile logistics company, was processing thousands of financial transactions every month across vendor billing and employee travel expenses. While Zoho Books and Zoho Expense formed the backbone of their finance operations, scale introduced complexity that existing workflows couldn’t handle.
With over 50 finance users and 20+ approvers, vendor bills were approved using a multi-level, criteria-based workflow. Approvers frequently cleared 100–200 bills in bulk, but the finance team needed the final approval date recorded accurately in a custom field to calculate credit periods.
The company used Zoho Expense to manage employee travel while an external travel agency handled bookings and issued consolidated invoices every 15 days. Since the ticketing module didn’t allow custom fields, finance teams couldn’t map vendor bills back to individual trips.
The solution
Jeevika Impact Solutions Private Limited partnered with Catalyst to design a cloud-native, event-driven solution that extended Zoho Books and Zoho Expense without modifying their core applications.
Using Catalyst Signals, Zoho Books was configured as an event publisher to capture bill approval events in real time. Only bills approved by the final approver were routed to serverless Catalyst functions, which asynchronously updated approval dates in Zoho Books, bypassing API throttling and constraints entirely.
Every transaction was tracked:
- Successfully updated bills were stored in a success data store.
- Failed updates were logged with detailed failure reasons.
- A scheduled job sent failed transactions daily to the finance head for review.
For travel expenses, Jeevika Impact Solutions Private Limited built a custom finance interface on Catalyst that pulled trip data directly from Zoho Expense and enabled finance teams to map external vendor bills to individual trips. The reconciled data was then synced to Zoho Analytics using scheduled jobs and advanced I/O functions.
Together, these workflows created a single, scalable finance automation framework capable of handling high transaction volumes with accuracy and visibility.
What makes it unique
- Event-driven finance automation: Real-time workflows without API bottlenecks
- Zero disruption: Extended Zoho apps without altering core modules
- Built-in exception handling: Full visibility into failures and root causes
- Scales effortlessly: Designed to handle any approval or reconciliation volume
Benefits and ROI
| Feature | Before Catalyst | After Catalyst |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk bill approvals | Frequent failures and manual fixes | Asynchronous, error-free updates |
| Credit period accuracy | Inconsistent and delayed | Accurate final approval dates |
| Travel bill reconciliation | Hours of manual effort | Completed in minutes |
| Failure visibility | No clear tracking | Centralized logs with reasons |
| Scalability | Limited by API constraints | Growth-ready and cloud-native |
- Eliminated API-related failures during bulk bill approvals
- Reduced reconciliation time from hours to minutes
- Improved MIS reporting speed and accuracy
- Enhanced finance team KPIs with clear exception visibility
- Enabled future growth without adding finance headcount
“Catalyst gave us the flexibility to design finance workflows that scale beyond traditional API limits. What was once a recurring operational bottleneck is now a reliable, automated system. Finance teams get accuracy, visibility, and confidence, and the business gets a platform ready for growth.”
Sunil Kuruvatti,Jeevika Impact Solutions Private Limited.
Looking forward
With a resilient automation framework in place, the logistics company is now focused on scaling operations, onboarding more vendors, handling higher transaction volumes, and driving deeper, analytical finance insights.
Jeevika Impact Solutions Private Limited continues to partner closely with the customer to expand Catalyst-led automation across additional finance and operational workflows, turning process efficiency into long-term business advantage.