Forty applications that integrate. One that does not have to.

The short version

• Zoho does not run Australian or New Zealand payroll. Zoho's own documentation lists Zoho Payroll as available in the USA, the UAE and India. Its published advice everywhere else is to record salaries as manual journal entries.
• A suite is not a system. Books, CRM, Desk, Campaigns, Projects and People are separate products joined by sync — and sync is a thing that runs, which means it is a thing that stops. In Allwis a customer is one record: the deal, the invoice, the ticket, the job and the timesheet point at it directly, and there is no state in which they disagree.
• One permission model, not six. Access is defined once per module and enforced at the database with row-level security.

Side by side

Your model, your infrastructureThe assistant is table stakes. Where it runs is not.

Every system here has an AI assistant now. None of them will tell you which model just read your payroll file.

Allwis is model-agnostic by design. Point it at OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, Mistral, GLM or Meta — your key, your account, your bill. Route different jobs to different models: a cheap one for categorising bank lines, a strong one for auditing a bill. Or do not send it out at all.

Run the model on your own hardware — Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, anything speaking OpenAI's chat-completions format. A small connector beside your model dials out to us over HTTPS. No inbound port, no firewall change, works behind NAT. Your model never becomes something on the internet.

Then switch on self-hosted-only mode, and turn off the shared fallback so a request fails rather than leaves your network. Benchmark your own model against the cloud providers on the same tasks first, so it is a measured decision rather than a leap.

And govern it: a monthly AI budget with a hard stop, individual AI tasks switched off, PII masking forced per task, token caps, and a log of every call with the model that made it, its reasoning and what it cost.

Excel & Google SheetsAccountants live in Excel. We stopped fighting it.

Allwis for Excel puts your live statements in your own workbook — profit & loss, balance sheet, trial balance, cash flow, aged receivables, aged payables and any custom report you have built, with comparison periods, multiple entities and your budget as a column beside actuals. Press refresh and the figures are current. Build your own schedules around them; they survive the refresh.

Install it from the Microsoft 365 admin centre for the whole firm, or sideload it yourself in a minute. On every plan — not the top tier.

And spreadsheets inside Allwis too — depreciation schedules, workpapers, the calculations behind a journal — attached to the record they support, versioned, and frozen once attached, so the workpaper behind a posted entry cannot quietly change.

Where Zoho is the better choice

No product is the right answer for everyone, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Here is where we would tell you to stay.

What switching looks like

Allwis imports from Zoho Books directly — chart of accounts, contacts, invoices and bills. Contacts and organisations come in from any CSV or Excel export, with the columns detected and mapped for you and a review step before import.