In today's digital landscape, it is crucial for businesses to utilize a robust and versatile accounting platform to ensure a streamlined and efficient accounting experience.
Zoho Books is not just a product with an array of comprehensive accounting features to meet the diverse needs of businesses, but a platform enabling an entire ecosystem around accounting.
What are platform features?
Zoho Books, as a platform, comes packed with powerful capabilities to help customize, automate, extend, and scale business processes for amazing efficiency. These powerful multi-functional platform features simplify complex financial processes, amplify productivity, and foster a more agile approach to financial management.
This blog post and the next one will delve into Zoho Books's platform feature capabilities, starting with customizable functions.
Wondering how to implement these features in your Zoho Books organization? Consider some real-life use cases for each feature.
Customization
Custom fields
In Zoho Books, users have the flexibility to create custom fields tailored to certain business needs within various modules. Unlike default fields, custom fields capture unique details, ensuring you can precisely cater to your organization's requirements.
For example, to gauge and track purchase intent of potential clients, you can add a dropdown custom field to your quotes. When raising a quote, the visitor's purchase intent can be recorded here. The custom dropdown allows you to select from the options "Engaged," "Interested," "Promising, "or "Potential" (indicating cold to hot leads). Recording this detail helps you tailor sales follow-up calls effectively.
Validation rules
Validation rules are powerful tools that maintain data accuracy and consistency by setting restrictions and validating recorded information. These rules define specific conditions that data must meet to be accepted into the system. If the data entered does not meet these predefined conditions, an alert message is triggered, preventing the transaction from proceeding until the data is corrected.
For example, in your business, you advise against procuring large quantities of raw materials. Despite this, vendors often push for bulk sales. To prevent the procurement team from succumbing to this pressure, you can implement a validation rule. This rule restricts the purchase order price, ensuring no single order exceeds a specified amount. By employing this system, you won't have to manually scrutinize every purchase order, effectively preventing the issuance of bulk orders.
Custom buttons
Custom buttons empower users to perform specific, business-tailored actions effortlessly. Designed to cater to unique business needs, these buttons can execute tasks exclusive to a company's operations.
For example, if you want your sales executives to personally call and follow up on prospective quotes to ensure quick sales closures, you can add a custom button for that action. To implement this, simply include a "Follow up" button in the quotes module. When you identify a quote that shows promise but needs a gentle push to encourage a purchase, click that custom button on the quote to alert the salesperson. This action creates a task to gently nudge the respective salesperson to call the prospect.
Custom link
Custom links help users open any external links from the application. With the help of a custom button, this can be configured to include specific links that connect to external websites or applications. The flexibility extends further as users can insert placeholders within these links, granting them access to detailed, context-specific information from external sources without leaving Zoho Books.
For example, your business involves reselling items with fluctuating prices, sometimes even dropshipping them. To maintain optimal margins, you establish a daily price-checking routine. Instead of manually navigating to the vendor's website and searching for items, you can streamline the process by implementing custom linking. By creating a custom button with the item code as a placeholder, you can easily access the specific item's details page on the vendor website with just one click.
Custom modules
Custom modules in Zoho Books are personalized sections users can create to manage specific data that might not be available in predefined modules.
For example, you operate a small goods transportation company. To monitor the transportation vehicles attached to invoices or projects, you can integrate a custom module called "Fleet." Within this module, you can include custom fields for the vehicle type, registration number, documents related to the vehicle, and service details. This would make tracking and vehicle maintenance a breeze.
Custom views
Custom views allow users to filter records in the various transaction modules, items module, and contact module based on specific criteria set by the user. These views help organize and access data more effectively, enabling users to focus on specific information relevant to their current tasks or objectives. By creating custom views, users can tailor their data management experience to suit their unique business requirements, ensuring workflow efficiency.
For example, if you'd like to simplify monitoring high-value invoices that are still in draft status or not sent, you can add a custom view filter in the invoice module. Now, you can easily filter out invoices carrying over a specific amount that haven't been sent to the customers.
Related lists
Related lists in Zoho Books are your gateway to seamlessly accessing data within the application as well as from external third-party services. This feature is particularly useful when you need to cross-reference data from different sources to gain a more holistic view of the information. By bringing relevant information where you need it, it simplifies decision-making and eliminates the hassle of toggling between different modules in Zoho Books or between other applications.
For example, say you run a hardware import business and procure goods in bulk. In your operations, you want to trace back the quotes, sales orders, and invoices to every import. To do so, you can create related lists under the Purchase Order module. Now, you can view all transactions associated with any import easily by looking it up from the respective purchase order.
Web tabs
With this feature, you can embed external webpages or applications within Zoho Books, instead of toggling between multiple tabs and windows, making it a centralized hub for all your essential business needs.
For example, in your business, you want to encourage all Zoho Books users to share major sales or customer acquisition updates on both their company's internal communication platform and on a public forum. To simplify this process for the users, you can add web tabs in Zoho Books where users can access recent company updates and post their own updates effortlessly.
As we come to the end of our exploration of the customization capabilities in Zoho Books, we hope these solutions will help you tailor your accounting experience. Stay tuned for our next blog, where we'll dive into the exciting world of automation.
Learn more about these features and others available in Zoho Books.
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