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About Us
About
Us
01- The Zahara Story
It's no ordinary name...
The Arabic word Zahara means ‘beautiful flower’. In Swahili – ‘to blossom’. But for founder Martin Peirce, Zahara means growth, simplicity, and perseverance. Martin named his company after a Moorish town in the hills of Andalusia. Every summer he would take his family travelling through Spain to visit the friends he had there. On route he’d mull over local place names as names for potential products. Zahara stuck. If only he’d picked a town that didn’t leave us at the bottom of any alphabetical list...
A message from Martin
Zahara’s vision for the future of AP Automation Software is one where every bill or expense claim can be created, read, approved and paid on the due date – no intervention needed. At Zahara we have the tools and capability to set the finance and accounts-payable teams free from the mundane work of endless keying and collating. Using AI, we help our customers’ teams fully automate functions like paying bills and reconciling statements.
As our software works in real-time, the rush to get the month, quarter or year-end figures done will be consigned to history. Your freed-up finance teams will then be able to concentrate on things that matter most to the growth of your business: supplier relations, cost savings and analysis.
02- Our Mission
Our passion is to make beautiful software that finance teams love to use.
03- Our Standout Goals
We want to make it easier for Teams to control costs and pay their supplier bills more easily, with less effort.
04- Our Core Values
We have five core values that drive Zahara.
Zahara’s vision for the future of AP Automation Software
Zahara has a vision where every bill or expense claim can be easily created in Zahara, read and routed for approval and then paid on the due date. Without any intervention. We have the tools and capability to set the finance and more particularly the accounts payable team free from the mundane tasks of keying and collating. Using the next level AI we can help our customers’ teams fully automate functions like paying bills and reconciling statements. This sets them free to concentrate on supplier relations, cost savings and analysis. The rush to get the month, quarter or year-end figures done will be consigned to history as everything works in real-time.
How does selling AP Software help pay the bills?
Zahara has a vision where every bill or expense claim can be easily created in Zahara, read and routed for approval and then paid on the due date. Without any intervention. We have the tools and capability to set the finance and more particularly the accounts payable team free from the mundane tasks of keying and collating. Using the next level AI we can help our customers’ teams fully automate functions like paying bills and reconciling statements. This sets them free to concentrate on supplier relations, cost savings and analysis. The rush to get the month, quarter or year-end figures done will be consigned to history as everything works in real-time.
The AP Software we Provide
Zahara’s core product of invoice processing, approval workflows and purchase orders can be expanded with payments and third-party integrations. We try to include as much as possible in the core product but have a quota approach, so you only pay for the parts of Zahara you use.
Our AP Services Explained
In addition to the software we sell, we also provide pre-sales consultancy to understand your requirements fully, and a turn-key onboarding solution so you can get to cost savings faster, knowing your Zahara build is the most elegant and efficient possible.
The Team That Keeps Us Going
Zahara is a UK based team with colleagues working across Europe and Australia. The business is a team run on Teams with our senior leadership team based in the beautiful city of Bath. This includes our founder Martin Peirce, and Jonathan Lee who has an extensive history working as a finance director. Martin comes up with the ideas and Jonathan makes them happen. The directors are supported by Ruth Whittaker who leads support and customer success, Anthony Brooks our head of product, Nick Hedley-Harper on all things technical and Drew Murray heading up sales. And finally, Paul Droguet is our territory manager, based in Brisbane looking after the Asia Pac region.
While Zahara has registered offices in the UK and Australia, we are spread out with developers in Poland and Ukraine, testing in Scotland and various other home workers spreading us far and wide.
A few Testimonials...
Ryan Burke - Financial Controller - Lush
“I can 100% recommend Zahara. The beauty of it is you can set the coding and workflow and Zahara takes care of all authorisations. As a result, we’re now paying 95% of suppliers on time”
Claire Bentley, Managing Director - British Airways Holidays
“I’m really pleased with how easy it is to approve costs using Zahara. The software has helped us control our spending.”
Hollie Evans, Finance Assistant - Shift Active Media
“The people at Zahara have been very helpful at explaining the software. Whenever we have an issue, we know we can get a prompt response which gives us the security we need when dealing with urgent and large amounts of money.”
How do your payments work?
Once enabled, you wll have an account with Currencies Direct. You can upload your domestic currency from your existing bank into any number of currency wallets effectively buying currencies. From here, invoices in Zahara are selected for payment approvals and then paid from your chosen wallet. This functionality gives you easier payments, great rate currency conversions and smarter batch payments.How does your AP Automation software streamline the accounts payable process?
If your existing process relies on paper, spreadsheets or any form of manual intervention, you will find Zahara adds a huge amount of value to the AP Process. Every purchase is available in the Zahara online portal, where you will see the history grow from requisition to payment. There will be less waste, more speed and a smoother trackable process.Can your software integrate with our existing ERP or accounting system?
If your finance or ERP system has any form of input for purchase invoices, we can integrate. We have full-integrations with many systems as shown above on this page, but we also make it easy to get the key-data you need out of Zahara and into your system. This could be fully-automated or simply you downloading data from our web-based software. We will work with you to design the best process.What security measures are in place to protect sensitive financial data?
Zahara runs on Azure - Microsoft's cloud-platform. This is a robust scalable platform. We take security very seriously - as you'd expect and offer two factor authentication, including Login with Microsoft. All of our data is encrypted at rest. We are Cyber Essentials Plus certified and we have external tests of Zahara every year for security weaknesses. In summary we are as good as we can be.How does the software handle multi-currency and multi-language invoices?
Each business unit has a base currency and orders and invoices can be created in any other currency. Our invoice recognition picks up different currencies and recognises most European languages competently. Our reporting api offers all data as well as currency exchange rates by date for more meaningful reports in tools like PowerBI.Schedule your exclusive software overview today!Book a Demo