Zoho CRM

In Zoho CRM, you can now establish “Layout Rules” that will show or hide fields and/or sections and/or make fields mandatory based on criteria!  This will go a long way towards managing your module forms and making them easier for your users to use!

For example, let’s say you sell two “Types” of Services.  Based on the type of service you sell, you need to collect a different set of information for your Deal record.

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Did you know that you can use Zoho CRM to track your inventory?  Tracking your inventory involves the following modules:

• Products
• Quotes (optional)
• Sales Orders (optional)
• Invoices
• Pricebooks (optional)
• Vendors
• Purchase Orders

The Products module has the following fields for inventory tracking:

• Quantity in Stock
  • incremented by a delivered Purchase Order
  • decremented by invoice (on create)
• Quantity Ordered
  • incremented by a created Purchase Order
  • decremented by a delivered Purchase Order
• Quantity in Demand
  • incremented by a Created Sales Order
  • decremented by a converted Sales order
• Re-order Level – set to receive re-order alerts

Details on how it works:

• Initialize your Product records and enter your initial Quantity in Stock, and Pricing values
• PURCHASING
  • Create a Purchase Order and add a product as a line item with a quantity
    • zoho automatically adds the quantity listed in the purchase order to the Quantity Ordered field in the product record.
  • When the products are received, mark the Purchase Order as “Delivered”
    • zoho automatically subtracts the quantity form the Quantity Ordered field and adds it to the Quantity in Stock field
  • Set a Re-order level and get alerts when inventory dips below established levels.
• SELLING
  • Optional – Create a Quote Record, add the product(s) as line items with a quantity. (Quotes do NOT affect product inventory!)
  • Optional – Create a Sales Order Record (or convert a Quote to a Sales Order) with line items (products with prices and quantities)
    • zoho automatically increments the Quantity in Demand field by the quantity listed in the Sales Order for all products listed as line items in a Sales Order 
  • Create an invoice (or convert a Quote or Sales Order to an invoice)
    • zoho automatically decrements the Quantity in Stock field by the quantity listed in the invoice for all products listed as line items in Invoice

Using this part of Zoho CRM is a great compliment to Quickbooks Online (which does not have inventory tracking).  Simply push your invoices to Quickbooks online (through Zoho’s Quickbooks Connector) for billing and tracking.

Salespeople can use a variety of ways to log their interactions with Leads and Contacts.  Some put information in Notes, others log events or calls and others carry it all out in emails.  Now you can pull an “Interaction” report that will extract data from all three of these sources to see all sales activity in one report!

When selecting the data for your report (step one in report creation), choose, Activities, Notes and Emails as the three related modules, Choose tabular (or summary and group by Lead Owner if more than one salesperson), and select the following columns shown:

  Set the timeframe in the filters section to correspond with how frequently you plan on monitoring the activity.  If you’ll look at activity weekly, you can set the Lead last activity time to “Last week” and have the report delivered on Monday.

Before the 2016 release, you would set the ‘From’ field in the email template itself.  You could chose a specific user, or select from merge options (Record Owner, Current User).  In the new template interface, that field isn’t there anymore, so where do you define who the email is from when sending an email with a template?  … well it depends on how you’re sending it…

If you use workflow to send it, the From field can now be found in the Alert definition, just below the template selection:

If you’re sending it via the zoho email client, as before, you use the dropdown (present only if you have multiple email addresses associated with your account.