Varun Mittal

The company: Teachmint

Teachmint is a rapidly growing EdTech product company, founded in 2020, focused on manufacturing and selling interactive flat panels with Inbuilt CPU and other educational products to customers. As a lean, fast-scaling startup, Teachmint's mission extends beyond product innovation to optimizing every aspect of its operations, including a robust and efficient financial backbone.

As the Director of Business Finance at Teachmint, Varun Mittal is responsible for setting up and streamlining financial processes, ensuring coherence between business operations and financial reporting. His team works cross-functionally with sales, marketing, and supply chain to optimize financial metrics.

The challenge: Outgrowing manual methods and siloed systems

Before Zoho Books, Teachmint relied on Tally Prime for its accounting needs, software used since the company's inception three and a half years prior. While functional for basic accounting, Tally presented significant roadblocks to Teachmint's ambitious growth plans.

Manual data entry nightmare

Tally, being a standalone software, lacked integrations with other critical business tools like inventory management, sales, or CRM. This necessitated a mountain of manual work. Tasks like uploading invoices, creating transactions, and managing ledgers for provisions and inventory had to be laboriously replicated, consuming an exorbitant amount of time for the finance team.

Lack of real-time visibility and decision making

Financial data, once entered into Tally, became a static record. Analyzing this data, extracting real-time insights, or making quick decisions was a herculean task. Essential information like customer advances, receivables, and vendor balances were not readily accessible to founders, sales teams, or other stakeholders, creating heavy dependency on a few finance executives.

Hindrance to lean operations

As a startup, Teachmint was acutely focused on maintaining lean operations and minimizing costs. The extensive manual intervention required by Tally directly contradicted this goal, threatening to slow down their rapid scaling.

Compliance and audit concerns

A critical turning point arrived when Teachmint's auditors remarked on Tally's then insufficient system for tracking changes (audit logs) in line with MCA compliance. This highlighted an immediate need for a more robust and compliant accounting solution.

The solution: A seamless transition to the Zoho ecosystem

The decision to switch was driven by a need for a more systemic, automated, and integrated accounting solution. Teachmint's existing successful adoption of Zoho Inventory and Zoho CRM made Zoho Books a natural and "easy choice." The promise of effortless integration within a unified platform was a major draw, eliminating the need for complex custom integrations.

While the migration itself took around two and a half to three months—longer than an initial estimate of 15 to 20 days—Mittal emphasized that it was not technically complex, but rather required many sequential data uploads. He noted that more exhaustive direct import functionalities from Tally could have further streamlined this process. Teachmint's team performed the migration themselves, recognizing later that a dedicated Zoho Migration Partner could have accelerated the process.

Benefits and ROI: Unlocking efficiency, insight, and scalability

Since implementing Zoho Books (and leveraging its deep integration with Zoho Inventory and Zoho CRM), Teachmint has witnessed a transformative impact on its financial operations.

Dramatic time savings and operational efficiency

For Teachmint, a product company, revenue is recognized only upon delivery. Zoho Books' direct integration with courier partner aggregators now automatically syncs delivery data, ensuring accurate, real-time revenue recognition without manual mapping to supply chain trackers. This eliminated a significant month-end activity and provided crucial real-time revenue visibility for target chasing.

Zoho Books' ability to fetch bank statements and apply payments to customers and invoices using "smart rules" has been a "big plus." This highly automated process reduced the workload for the AR team by 20–30% of the original effort. This also vastly improved customer experience by ensuring swift and accurate payment acknowledgment.

The seamless flow of customer and inventory data across Zoho CRM, Inventory, and Books has dramatically reduced instances of "wrong invoicing." Automated checks for missing fields or credit limits prevent errors upfront, eliminating the need for credit notes and manual back-and-forths with customers, which previously added 20–30% to the daily workload.

For service-based revenue, Zoho Books consolidated data previously scattered across three to four sources (invoice data, period sheets, Tally data). Now, all information, including invoice terms and revenue recognition periods, is in one place, reducing activity time for the AR team from nearly two days to just half a day per month.

Unprecedented scalability with leaner teams

Perhaps the most compelling result is that Teachmint has grown four times over in top-line revenue since implementing Zoho Books. Over the same period (~1.5 years), their finance team has naturally reduced from about 12 members to about 8 members through organic attrition—nearly a 35% change.

Real-time financial visibility for strategic decisions

Live dashboards for customer advances and debtors now provide micro-level, real-time data. This newfound visibility empowers Teachmint to proactively manage receivables, push customers at the right time, and make informed decisions on vendor advances, significantly improving cash flow management and identifying potential losses.

Streamlined financial reporting

Zoho Books' built-in, customizable Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet templates have transformed monthly reporting. What was once a largely manual Excel-based exercise across three different reporting levels is now significantly automated. This allows Teachmint to quickly generate detailed reports for internal meetings, founders, and statutory auditors, saving considerable time.

While global entity consolidation remains a manual process (currently not real-time within Zoho Books for multiple entities, something Teachmint is exploring with Zoho Analytics), the core Indian entity's reporting is highly efficient.

Looking ahead: Deeper integrations for continued growth

Teachmint envisions Zoho Books as a long-term strategic partner, especially due to its strong ties with Zoho Inventory, a crucial tool for their product-based business model. Mittal is keen to explore deeper integrations within Zoho Books, such as:

Enhanced payment gateway accounting - Automated mapping of payment gateway charges directly at the time of transaction integration.

More detailed courier partner and spend management tool integrations - Further automation for end-to-end financial workflows.

Teachmint believes that as Zoho continues to deepen these integrations, their internal systems will become even more robust and easier to operate, enabling sustained rapid growth.

Varun's recommendation: The smart choice for lean, automated growth

Varun Mittal strongly recommends Zoho Books for companies aiming to make their processes "less people dependent, and more systems and automations led," without the heavy investment and multi-year implementation time required by large ERPs like SAP or Oracle.

In essence, Zoho Books has provided Teachmint with the agility, real-time insights, and automation necessary to manage exponential growth, allowing them to remain lean, efficient, and focused on their core mission of transforming education.