What's New in Zoho - June 2026

00:00Hello, welcome to our What's New in Zoho July 2026 webinar. Today we're going to be focusing on three Zoho apps to cover the updates that have come out over the last 30 days or so. We're going to be focused on Zoho CRM, Zoho Forms and Zoho Books. There's obviously apps across the wider Zoho ecosystem as well but I wanted to try and keep today's webinar a little bit more concise and focused on what I think are some of the bigger more important changes that have come out over the last 30 days rather than sort of spitballing all sorts of different ideas. That said if you do want to see the full list of what's been released from Zoho over the last 30 days I recommend checking out our website. We've got a Zoho update section that lists all of the updates and changes that have come in from Zoho. So to get us started a quick introduction from me. So my name is Jake.

00:52I run a company called Limitless IT Consultancy. We've been operating now for actually coming up on four years, believe it or not, that time has flown by. We're a team of five UK-based Zoho specialists. We serve just over 20 clients in the UK currently, and most of our clients work with us on a really long-term basis. So we've got a, last year we actually had a renewal rate of 93% across our client base. This year so far we're at 100%. We're halfway through the year, so it might change a little bit, we don't know, but so far we're having a really strong year. So clients we work with really love working with us a lot of them are in the chat now and because continue working with us year on year and the way that looks is when we start working with a client we start normally with a process review to get to know them and then we kind of become their outsourced Zoho consultancy their outsourced Zoho team so whenever they need something new they're working on a new initiative they want a new report whatever it might be they come to us we get it built to them and we get it back to them and obviously our results speak for themselves but that's enough about me, let's get into the Zoho updates. So as discussed today, we're going to start with CRM.

02:02Everybody generally already has CRM, so it's a good one to start with. We're going to talk about Zoho Forms. And if you're not using Forms, there's a really big new feature around form tracking this month that I'm keen to show off. So if you don't know what Zoho Forms is or not used it, stick around for that because it's a really big deal. And then finally, Zoho Books. I don't often talk about Zoho Books, but actually most of our clients use Zoho Books for finance. And there's a really good update in there for approval processes in particular that I'm keen to show off as well.

02:32Finally, we'll have time for a Q&A. So any questions, just send them through. I'll try and keep an eye on the chat and the Q&A in the meantime as well. So if anybody has any questions, please do pop them in. So let's get straight on with it. So we'll start with the CRM. Now we've got two updates I want to show you today and then two updates that have been announced but aren't yet available in the UK but I want to talk about them anyway because they'll be coming really shortly. So starting with what's been announced. So the first new thing is being able to choose your sync history duration in the CRM. So if I slide across here into our test system you can see I've got my Zoho CRM here. Now if you've not already done this the first thing you should do in your Zoho is connect your emails. The reason you should do that is it means when you go into a lead, a contact or account, whoever it might be, what you'll see is when I open this up.

03:32Oh, you can't see my screen. Oh no, let me share my screen. That would help, wouldn't it? I'm showing you all these nice slides and you can't see them. Let me share my screen. Thank you guys. I appreciate you. Good thing we've got the chat. Hopefully you can now see my screen. Yeah, hopefully. Want to give me a thumbs up or something? That would be ideal. Yes. Okay, right. Let's get off to a slightly better start. Thank you, guys. Okay, so you find me in our test system here and I'm looking at our leads, but this is the same across contacts and deals, etc.

04:12Now, if I go into one of these, if I go into, say, a lead, for example, you'll see. We can see you, not the slides, can't see the screen. See yourself, not the CRM. Oh, no, we're having all sorts of screen sharing issues here, aren't we? Let's try that again. OK, let's try that. Can you now see the Zoho CRM? Yes, okay, we're off to a better start. Third time lucky, thankfully. You would have thought it's the first time I was doing one of these, but it's never going to happen. Okay, so let's get ourselves back on track. You finally find me in the test system for Zoho CRM.

04:59Now, all of the data in here is fake data, so don't worry about the fact that anything's being shared here. It's all completely fake generated. Now, if I go into one of my leads, if I go into Tommy here, you will see within the CRM, I've got this email section. And currently that's empty. The reason that's empty is one, because I might not have spoken to Tommy. But two, I've not connected my emails to the CRM. What that means is all that amazing conversation that may be living in my email inbox doesn't show here, which means if I look at Tommy, I don't see any of that history.

05:31But more importantly, it means if somebody else on the team looks at Tommy, he's not seeing that either. So it's a really important thing to make sure you've got that email sync set up. So to set up your email sync, you want to go into the top right into setup in the CRM, then channels and then email. And then you want to go into email again. Confusingly, you've got to click email twice. Once you're here, you can then hit get started and you'll choose what email service you're going to connect. Now, in our test system, we actually use Zoho Mail, but I know most of our clients use Office 365.

06:04So when you select that, what you'll get is the first thing you'll get is choose your protocol. Just leave this as it is. IMAP is great. Don't change it. The second thing you'll see is how far back do you want to sync emails? Now, up until now, it would always sync emails for all time. The problem with that is sometimes you might have emails from six years ago that are just not relevant. Maybe the business has changed quite a lot. But the other issue is that sync would take a really, really long time. Because if your business has been operating for a long time, If you suddenly try and sync 10 years worth of emails, that sync is going to take a while.

06:38Now you can come in and actually choose a start date. So if I say last two years, I can select that. I can then hit configure. And what it will at that point ask me to do is log in with my Microsoft account. It'll step me through that process and the sync will then begin. Once the sync has begun back on this screen, you'll actually see then a sync status and you'll see the sync is in progress. that sync is completed, you'll then be able to go into any leads or contacts and you'll be able to see any emails between you and that lead or that contact directly within the CRM. This is a really, really useful tool, as I say, particularly as the team grows, because it means if one salesperson has a conversation, another salesperson is able to go in and see that all in one place. It's also helpful if somebody's off sick or anything like that, because someone else is able to go into the CRM and see that conversation, you're able to understand where you're at. You can also, from an account level, if you've got multiple contacts, you can see those emails roll up to an account level as well.

07:38So from the account, you can see all of the emails to and from the contacts. So that's a really useful little tool there as well. So if you're doing account management, be able to see exactly what's happened from an account's point of view. Now slide back to my nice slides now that nobody's seen so far because I forgot to share the screen. The next thing on our list is the improved importing in Zoho CRM. So this is another big step forward to Zoho. Now historically if you've wanted to migrate into Zoho it was definitely possible but it could sometimes take a little while because a lot of different things to import and not everything was easy to import. Zoho has thankfully made that a lot better in one of their updates this month. So the first thing they've done is they've actually doubled the number of records you can import in a single go. So if you're using Zoho One for example previously you used to be able to import a maximum of 30,000 say contacts in a single import.

08:35They've now in fact over doubled that for Zoho One up to 100,000 in one go. That will make a huge difference in terms of how quickly we can get data in there. It's particularly useful for importing things like or migrating from other systems where you might have a huge history of data that needs to be moved in one go. They've also increased the speed of importing. Again, that's been a huge benefit for me in the last week. We did a system migration for a client from one system into Zoho and that speed actually was a huge improvement when we were able to get that data transfer done. The next big thing they've done is added import functionality to the inventory modules. So this is quotes, invoices, sales orders and purchase orders in the CRM. So if I go back into our test system here and I scroll down you'll see I have my quotes here. Previously there was no way to import quotes or sales orders, purchase orders etc into Zoho. So that meant if you wanted to use the quoting functionality you either had to start from scratch or you had to manually import that data into CRM. Thankfully from quotes you can now go in next to create quotes and you can now go into import quotes and the way the import works is you effectively import the quotes and then the line items of that quote. So let's say you've sent me a quote for I don't know web design services you'd have a line item for the quote that's imported which says quote number XYZ for Jake Harris for Limitless and then you would import the line items to that separately and that would come together to create your completed quote. So again it's made different migration options possible into the CRM. The final thing they've improved and this is going to be a big deal is the importing of dependencies. So this is where you have records in one part of the CRM linked to another part of the CRM. So for example if you want to import a load of contacts that are linked to existing accounts. Zoho's made that a lot smoother to manage with this update. So quite a few little things in there that's going to make functionality moving forward a lot easier for migrating systems.

10:41So not the jazziest feature, probably not the one that's going to make the biggest impact day to day, but important feature for using the CRM long term to ensure you can get data both in and out of the system effectively. Just before I go on to two of the announced features are actually a little bit more exciting. Phil, I can see you've got a question in here as well. Is there a filter capability for email. My MD may not want all of his mail migrated if there's been strategic messaging. Good question. So when you set up the email sync there's two ways to do email sync to the CRM.

11:19Option one is you sync the inbox in which case it will bring everything across from your inbox into Zoho provided there is a lead or a contact with that email address. So for example if you've got emails back and forth as an accountant provided that accountant doesn't exist in the CRM they'll never come through. The other way you can do it is you can for select people have them just share specific emails into the CRM. Sometimes for managing director that might be a better fit because very few of their emails may be sales related so it might just be the odd sales email they want to basically forward into the CRM. The middle ground option is to use Zoho CRM's email sync and add excluded domains. So excluded domains allow you to say, okay, I'm going to sync all of my emails, but any emails to any of these domains, so that might be your own work domain, it might be your accountant's domain, your solicitor's domain, never sync those emails.

12:16Even if a contact is created or a lead is created with that email, you cannot sync it because that domain is blocked from syncing. That's how I would manage that email. So it depends on the specific use case but one of those three options would probably be the best fit there. Okay so going back into our slides here. So we've got our criteria based cadence follow-up. So this isn't a feature I'm really excited about. So how many of you know about cadences in the CRM very quickly? If you want to give me some thumbs up or thumbs down to tell me whether you know about cadences. See if anything comes through. I'm not seeing very much. I'm assuming cadences might be no. I can see thumbs up from one person at the very least. Okay, so I'm getting some thumbs down.

13:01That's fine. So cadences are a way of creating email sequences directly in the CRM. So let's say a new lead comes into the CRM. You automatically want an email to be sent to that lead. Then based on if they reply to that email, you either want to send one follow-up or a different follow-up. So effectively it's a way of building a sequence of emails and tasks within the CRM. Now the big update here is that you can now build cadences based on a criteria. So this is where you send that initial email and instead of it simply being okay if they open the email do this, if they don't open the email do this, what I can now do is set a specific criteria. So what I can now do is say okay I'm going to send the email then one day later depending on this criteria so in this case if the priority is set to high and the close time is empty is not empty then we're going to send this follow-up. Another example here is somebody's done a call and they've then set a criteria to say okay one day after the call if the call result was interested and the duration of the call was over 600 seconds. In that case, I want you to send this scheduler demo email. So it allows you to automate email sending and email sequencing based on a criteria. And I'll show you this very quickly.

14:24I can't show you all of the new stuff just because it's not all live in the UK system yet. It is coming. It should literally be here in the next week or two, which is why I wanted to cover it. But this is a really important new feature, I think. So if I go into our test system, I'm going to go into settings. I'm going to search for cadences and open it up. I'm then going to create a cadence. And I'm going to give it a name. So I'm going to call this demo for webinar. I'm going to say this is going to be a lead cadence. I'm then going to say this is going to be for only leads I manually enter into the cadence.

15:00So that might be that this is a manual. It's a nurture campaign, but you're going to manually trigger it. I'm going to select that and hit next. when I do that you can then see I get this nice screen with the different columns and I'm going to start off with an initial follow-up so this is going to be the first action so when someone's first put into the cadence what happens and that can be an email a task a call or a whatsapp now the whatsapp is limited to business whatsapp but it's a very useful tool in there to be able to mix in whatsapp messaging as well as emails so let's say I do email one so I'm going to say immediately we're going to send this and it's going to be I'm just going to call it email one to the lead hit save and associate oh I just need to select my template so I've already got a template in here called email one hit save what I can now do is choose what happens after email one so after email one I can say I'm going to send another email I'm going to send this email that's say seven days after and I'm going to do seven days after the email, the previous email is, and I've got lots of different options in here. I've got opened, clicked, bounced, etc. In this case, I'm going to say seven days after not opened. So that'll be, I've sent the first email, seven days later, if they've not opened it, I'm going to send a different email. So I'm going to call this email two. I'm going to send it to the lead.

16:23And I'm going to choose my template. I'm going to send that to, send the email to. Now I can branch this as well. So actually I can say I'm also going to have another branch here and say, well, also seven days later, if they, let's say, open but not replied, in that case, I'm actually going to send them email three. So I'm going to call this email three. And then I'm going to select my template for email three. So now you can start to see how that flow might work. So I enroll them in the cadence, they immediately get email one. Seven days later, if they've not opened email one, they're going to get email two. If they have opened email one, but they've not replied, they're going to get email three. And I can continue building out this sequence and add multiple branches. So it might be on email two, I'm going to go in and say, okay, on email two, I'm going to say, okay, after another seven days, if they've still not opened, I'm then going to do email three as a last resort.

17:29And I can have as many different versions of emails in here as I want. Hit save associate. And again, you can see how that might branch out again and again. So this allows you to build nurturing campaigns and email campaigns directly in Zoho CRM without the need for any other systems involved. The benefit of this is it's all tracked within Zoho. They're really easy to build. And actually you can make them quite quickly because you're not having to worry about setting up different segments and things like that. You can just build them directly in the CRM.

18:00So once I've built this and published it, I can then go back into the CRM. I can go into my leads. And let's say this lead here I want to follow up with. You can see on the sidebar here I've got cadences. I can enroll him in my cadence. So here's my demo for webinar. hit and roll and now immediately he's going to get that first email and he's then going to enter that flow that we've just set up so he's going to get that first email a week later if he's opened that but not replied he'll get email three if he's not opened it he'll get emailed two and he'll go through that sequence so it's a really good way to build sequences and as I say the new thing that's been added here is this ability to do these criteria. So instead of it simply being they've opened an email, I can say, well, they've opened an email and their account score is, I don't know, over 100 and they've previously done this activity. So I can really fine tune now what those follow-ups look like. One of the clients on this call at the moment actually was the client that sprung to mind when I seen this because I was thinking about the different way that their system works. And thinking we could do with this is you get say a form submission. So let's say somebody fills in a brochure on the website. That comes through into the CRM so we can see someone's filled in a brochure. That could then automatically enter them into a cadence and then depending on the brochure they requested could send them down a slightly different path. Now one of the things this particular client asks for is what industry does that person work in and they ask for that as they're requesting the brochure. So again, what they could do is based on the industry, they could have different branching paths through the cadence. So it's one cadence, but it's fine tuned for the type of person receiving it. So I think this is going to be quite a powerful new feature. I actually think it's going to make a big difference. Cadences up until now, I've not used a lot in real production systems because they've been a little bit too limited. I think this is going to be the difference now that's going to make it much easier to use. The other part of cadences, they've updated, and you've actually seen this in my demo, is you can now do follow-up actions based on not opened, not clicked, not replied, and opened, not replied. Previously, you could only do follow-ups based on kind of, I guess, positive actions. So they've clicked, they've opened, they've replied, but now we can do the reverse of that. And I think it's actually the reverse is more powerful.

20:33And as I've shown in this screenshot, although I sent, when I built our demo, it was all email-based, The cadence steps can include creating tasks, calls and sending WhatsApps as well. So in this case, I've done it as a task. So I've said three days after an email is sent, if it's not opened, I'm going to create a task. And that might be for my salesperson to actually give that lead a call and see if we can move them forward in the pipeline. Does that all make sense before I move on to the next CRM element? I know there's a lot to cover there if you were new to cadences, but hopefully that was helpful.

21:07quick introduction to cadences. Yeah. What I recommend is if you'd like to know more about cadences on our website, we actually have a webinar. Which one is it? Here it is. On how to build your first cadences. I'll pop this in the chat now. So if you want to take a look at a more detailed, I think this is about an hour and a half going through cadences in a lot more detail. I'd recommend starting there because that'll give you a lot more information about how to make use of cadences going forward. But obviously know that obviously there's a couple of new features in there now. I'll probably re-record that at some point but it's still a great place to get started.

21:51Perfect. Okay so next CRM feature that isn't quite live in the UK yet but will be anytime soon. I'll tell you a secret. This feature here wasn't live when I was finalizing this literally last night. So that's how soon I mean with rolling these things out. They're coming really quickly. So may well be that this is live now and I've just not seen it yet. So they are coming very soon. But the next new feature are expandable and filterable related lists. So if you're relatively new to the CRM, you might not have noticed this before. But if I go into any records, if I go, let's say into a let's go into an account if I go into an account here let me search for an account with contacts they should all have contacts in theory but let's have a quick look hit apply filter there we go they do so I'm going to open this account here and you can see this account has got one contact so that's easy to see in that list so I can go into the account I can see the contact what tends to happen over time is you'll get related lists that contain a lot more than one record. For an example, if you're tracking, if you have a related list for deals like we do here, currently one deal here. But if you're selling, say, services where people are buying it frequently or often, you may end up with lots and lots and lots of deals over time. So you may have not one deal in that list, you may have 200 deals in that list. All of a sudden, this view becomes a little bit unmanageable because you can only see 10 things at a time. So you have to keep clicking through page after page after page to try and find the deal that you're looking for.

23:29I'll give you an example of a client. Again, they're on this call. They track form submissions. So whenever somebody fills in a form on their website, be it a brochure, pricing calculator, a newsletter, they all come through into a related list called form activity. So you can see everything that person's done on the website. Now, because of the long sales nature of that client's business over say three years they might be tens hundreds even of form activities of all these different things a person's done on the website. This happens in our own CRM people register for webinars over time people let register for more and more webinars and that list becomes longer and longer. It becomes impossible to actually see the data that you want to see.

24:09So what this new update does is it adds a new expand related list button as you can see here on screen and that will actually open up a full page so you'll be able to see in this case I'm looking at John Williams and I've clicked the expand so it's brought a full page of John Williams deals up so instead of seeing 10 at a time in this case you can see I can see 100 at a time so it makes it much easier to see all that detail. What's more you can then filter that so if you've then got lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of different deals all related to the one person you can filter it down just to see the ones you're interested in. So again I think this is going to be a really useful tool particularly for those businesses that have lots of deals in particular but to be able to narrow down that data to see exactly what they want to see.

24:55And I think that covers it for the CRM today. I think the CRM for me the most exciting update this month is that cadence bit we just spoke about. There's more coming I've seen some previews of stuff coming in the next month or two that I think is going to be really exciting but I always want to cover CRM even if there's not as much in CRM because I know it's a thing that people use most frequently so it's always important to cover. So just a quick pause for a moment before we get into the rest of the update. If all of this is sounding useful to you guys and you want to know more we do introduction calls, they're available pretty much all the time, we can book them for our website it's normally about 30 minutes and most of the time it's more of a chat around how you're currently using Zoho and how you could potentially get more out of it. It's not so much a sales call as it is a get to know you call. So if you're sort of questioning in your mind whether or not you're getting the most from Zoho, I'd recommend booking one of these 30 minute calls and we'll be able to talk you through and see if there's some quick wins that we can help you uncover. I'll give you an example. We had a sales call or an introduction call in the last week. A client came to us, they were paying for CRM Plus, the Zoho CRM Plus package.

26:09Turns out for the particular business, they could have switched to Zoho One. And actually, with the amount of users they had, it was going to save them literally tens of thousands of pounds per year. And it gave them more Zoho apps. So that 30-minute conversation for them saved them tens of thousands of pounds and gave them more functionality. So it's well worth doing. I'll drop a link into the chat now if anybody is interested. but we are more than happy to help and have that initial conversation. Perfect. So back on with the updates. So our next update today is Zoho Forms. Now Zoho Forms has a load of cool stuff in here.

26:48One in particular, I'm excited. There's a couple of clients in here that I know have been asking for this. I'm excited to show them. So if you've not used Zoho Forms before, Zoho Forms is kind of where it says on the tin, it's a form builder within Zoho that's designed to connect to all of your different Zoho apps. So the idea is you'll design your form in Zoho Forms, pop it on your website for someone to fill in as like a contact us form type thing. And then you'll route that information to come into your CRM where you'll then let your sales team manage it, deal with it, etc. But the form builder tool over the years has gone from a simple contact us form type builder to a really quite powerful, quite complex form builder that allows you to a lot of the bespoke things. So I'm going to swipe across and I'm going to switch into Zoho Forms now. By the way this is included in Zoho One so if you're a Zoho One subscriber Zoho Forms is free, it's included in what you're already paying for. Now I'm in the form builder here, I'm not going to do a whole demo of the app today, I'm sure we'll do that another day, but I'm going to go in and create a new form. The first new thing you're going to notice is there's now a new type of form called spotlight form and the way this works, I'm going to create a form called demo, is it creates a really simple interface where if I just add a couple of fields where if I go in to access the form it highlights the different fields and then as you tab through it moves the screen through to kind of guide the user through. So it gives you a new way to be able to visualize and put in, put these forms together. Now they've also added as part of this, the ability to switch your form type. It used to be that when you created a form, you were stuck with the type you selected.

28:36You can now switch between, so you can have your spotlight form or if you want, you can switch it to a card form. And if you've not used the card form before, this is where it is. Each input is a page. I know marketeers quite like these types of forms sometimes because they hide how long the form is so it makes it harder for people to see how long it is so they don't drop off before they've even started. But you can go through and it'll page through. The styling is obviously all customizable but it's just another type of form you've got in there. So that's your first update, that's your first new thing is your spotlight form. So a new way to visualize the form where you tab through the different layers. The next big thing they've added is a load of new fields types.

29:23So if I go back a moment to our main screen, a little bit too far, you will see I have made here a demo form and I'm going to go into edit. And I made this in preparation for today just so I can show you the different fields types. I'm actually going to change this into a standard form and hit access form. So the first new thing you've got in here are now heading sections. You can now split your form into more easily manageable sections with headings. You've then got a new large drop down list and the idea of the large drop down list is one it's searchable but two you can also have subcategories. So I've got a large drop down list here of job titles so I can work in here. I don't know. I'm not a veterinary technician, but I'm going to go for it.

30:12It looks quite similar to the old list, but it just gives you a little bit more flexibility. If I go into the editor, you can go into here and you can see that I can also choose pre-made lists as well. So if I, for example, with job titles, if I'm using that across multiple different forms, I can save that as a pre-made list. So I haven't got to re-enter my long list of job titles on every form that I start. So it's a good little bit of functionality there to be able to make use of. And if I go into edit that, if I choose occupations and go into, oh sorry, if I go into create new, you can see in here I can actually upload lists as well. So if you've got a CSV with a large list, you can upload one as well and give it a name and then you can reselect that.

30:57And you can actually see in here, you can have up to a thousand choices in that list as well. So you've got a huge amount of options in there for what you can do for that large drop down list. So useful little field, quite similar to what you've already got, but good to know that you can now can do that longer one. The next thing you've got then is a new image slider. So if you want to be able to display like a carousel of images within your forms, you can do that as well. So I've just uploaded some Zoho logos in here. Again, if I edit this, you can change how that looks.

31:30You can have all sorts of different versions in there as well. You can choose the transition style and things like that. So again, a lot of different options in terms of how that looks. And I promise I've still not got to the exciting stuff, just you wait. Next one is the PDF embed. So this allows you to put a PDF within your form. So if you've got, in this case, I've got like the ultimate guide to Zoho CRM for Enterprise. It's actually quite an old document but I've embedded that PDF directly within my form. So it's again useful for maybe if you've got onboarding guides and things like that.

32:02And I can make this bigger if I want to as well. So if I want to make the box bigger so someone has more room to read it I can do that as well. So again a lot of customisation in what I can do with those forms. Where I think that might also be helpful is if you've got T's and C's in PDFs. you can upload the PDF to the form and then they can actually see the full PDF within the form itself as they're using it. So like I've got here. Next thing I've got in here is the Zoho's assigned field. But before I get that, I'm just going to show you one other thing.

32:34If I go in and enter my details, you'll see I've now got this verify button on here. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to quickly go into Zoho Mail. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my Zoho Mail account here. So this is my test email and pop that in there. Now before submitting the form, if I try and hit submit, it's going to tell me my email isn't verified. So I now need to hit verify. And in this case, I've asked it to do a verification code. So they have to do the test here to make sure they're not a robot. I'm hoping I'm going to get this right as I'm sharing my screen.

33:11Oh, I didn't get it right. Let's try again. 6-2-R-J. I need to focus on this. There we go. What that's going to do is now send an email to the user's email address where they then have to put in the code to submit the form. So if you want to be able to verify people's emails, this is a great way to do it. And you can actually do that on SMS as well. So if you ask someone to enter a phone number, you can also have it text them a code they have to fill in. Now, this is quite customizable. So if I go into edit here, I've done it so that if I scroll down, there we go.

33:47If I edit the OTP, you can edit the email content. You can choose how long to expire, how long the expiry is and also choose whether or not it does the capture beforehand. So you probably would turn off the capture just so it reduces the hurdles people are filling in the form for. But you've got all of that option in there as well. You can also, and I recommend looking at this, you can also now do domain validation as well. This has been here for a little while. This isn't in the last 30 days, but it's worth knowing. So if you've got web forms and you want to block, say, Gmail email addresses, this is something we do because we want to work with businesses.

34:23We want you to use your business email. You can actually restrict them. And that way, if someone tries to fill in a Gmail email, it'll actually pop up and say, hey, we don't allow that. Can you put in your work email? So again, a good way to make sure people are using the details that you want them to. So if I go back into here, the final field then is the Zoho sign field. And where this is different, as you may be aware, there's already a signature field in here. And now we've also got Zoho sign field. Where the Zoho sign field is different is this is integrating with Zoho sign.

34:54But once you submit, instead of it just having a signature saved as an image, it actually adds a signature document to the form output. So we'll give it a minute to prepare the document and you'll see what I mean. Just takes a second for it to do this. Hopefully not too long. So now you'll see what it's done is it's outputted the form. You can see we've got our different fields here. We've got the name, email, but it's actually put the signature on a document with that. And it's at this point then the customer must confirm and agree. And that then uses all of Zoho Sign's digital signature capabilities to confirm that that's a legitimate signature, rather than it just being an image on a form. So it gives you a lot more credence to back up that that signature is on the thing that they filled in. So where I see this being really useful is we have got an onboarding form that one of our clients uses, and it's got a load of details in there it's got things like what the payment details are, what the contract details are and all of that and at the moment they're just using the signature field and the signature field's okay but the problem is it just produces an image of that signature and it's hard then when you're justifying back well no you sign this off when all you've got is an image. What this now gives is a PDF output with a signature on and the version you've just seen that's out of the box you can customize that as well. So you can even make the output look like a contract if you wanted to and then have that all signed as part of the flow. I think I'm going to be using this a lot with sales teams in particular where there's big contracts to get signed as part of the sales process because I think it'll really streamline that route without you having to have a form and then a separate signing stage. It can all be built into one. Now the next thing on our list is the big one, the form analytics. So people have been asking me for this for a long, long time. I can see some of my clients are on the call.

36:58They are 100% going to want this. I guarantee it. So within Zoho Forms, if I go down the sidebar, you'll now see I have this analytics tab. What this analytics tab gives us is gold dust in terms of information. So Zoho Forms can now track the number of times the form has been started, the number of times it's been viewed, and the number of times it's been submitted to give you a conversion rate for that form. What that means is if a form is embedded on a website and let's say that website gets I don't know 100 visits a day but it only gets 10 form fills directly from the form you can now see well your conversion rate is 10 because 100 people have seen that form but only 10 have actually completed it. What's even more powerful now with the fact that contract starts is we can now see field levels drop off.

37:50So if I go into here, I can now see in these examples I've got here, given this is very low data, my drop offs are currently coming from the drop down old field. But you can imagine if you've got this embedded on your website, you're getting lots of traffic, you're getting lots of partial form fills. This now gives you the ability to see exactly where people are dropping off, exactly where people are disengaging in the form for you to be able to edit that and make improvements. I suspect it's not here yet but I would suspect the next obvious step here is going to be built in A-B testing. Zoho has that in other apps as well so my anticipation is that they will add that here as well but already this is a huge step up. You can see it also does stuff like form view so you can see the breakdown between desktop and mobile and the breakdown geographically. You can also change the months so you can compare month or month if you want to and you can also compare months and years as well. I think this is probably the biggest update there's been to Zoho Forms since I've been using it because actually the insight this is going to give you going forward is absolutely huge in terms of all the more, all the data it's going to give you and as I said I can see there's clients on this call that 100% are going to ask me about this after this call because they're going to want this on their website on their forms because it's really, really critical. Now, most of this is turned on by default.

39:17But if I come out of here, if I just go back to all forms, let me just pick up one I've done differently. So let's do this. I don't know. Let's do this test five form down here. If I go to edit. So this is just an old form that we built for doing testing at some point. If I go to analytics, by default, you have everything on apart from the start and the drop So to get these you need to click on here and enable advanced tracking. The reason you need to enable the advanced tracking is because you may need to amend your privacy policy to let the client know, the end user know that you're tracking those additional details.

39:54But once that's enabled the starts and drop offs will be counted from there. So I recommend going into all of your forms and getting that enabled. Depending on your number of your traffic levels it may take a couple of weeks for you to start for seeing that data in a useful capacity. But the sooner you get it turned on, the sooner you can start tracking it. So yeah, I think this is a no-brainer. I think everybody should be using this because the insights this is gonna give you on your forms is absolutely huge. This also, for me, answers that question that I've been asked a million times.

40:26Why use Zoho forms over the forms built into the CRM? This is now the 100% the best answer is because of the tracking, because this tracking is night and day better than what you can do in the CRM right now. So this is the form builder you should be using. And if you're not using Zoho Forms already, just so you know, connecting it to CRM is as simple as going to integrations, selecting CRM, integrate, choosing where you want the data to go. So I want it to go to the Garden Skyline CRM, choosing which modules, so in this case leads, and then filling out the fields from there. So I can say last name maps here, first name maps here, etc. So definitely should be looking at those new forms. Then the final bit and this kind of comes along with the form analytics is the advanced tracking. So if I go into share and this is where you can share the form onto your website your embed options now have this additional step of advanced iframe with referrer tracking. So ordinary most of the time when you embed this form on your website you take this iframe link, you paste it into WordPress or Squarespace or Wix or whatever you're using to build your website and then your form is embedded within your website.

41:40What this new code does below is it tracks additional details and what it's tracking is marketing tracking parameters. So if you're doing marketing and you've got what are usually referred to as UTM parameters, you might have a UTM source, UTM campaign, UTM term, i.e. where did the contact come from? Which ad did they come from? Which marketing campaign did they come from? If you use this new tracking script, Zoho will automatically track that additional marketing data for you. Again, I've got clients on the call where historically we've had to work with the web developers to do this all manually. And it's certainly been possible manually, but it's an extra thing that you've got to maintain and worry about. It's now built into Zoho form, so it can give you that additional tracking and again if you're not using that I'd probably recommend switching over to it because if you've not already got that data it's going to be a big bonus being able to see well where are your form fills coming from are they coming from a certain advertising campaign are they coming from a certain referral source are they coming directly from your email newsletters etc it's going to be give you a lot of data in terms of where those form fills are coming from. Does that all make sense on Zoho Forums before we move on to our sort of last piece, our last app of the day? Are there any questions on Zoho Forums?

43:00The form analytics in particular, as I say, I think is going to be the most impactful part. I can see thumbs up, so that is good news. Okay, so let's move on to Zoho Books. So final couple of updates here, some big updates for Zoho Books. And I can see on the stream that my webcam seems to be struggling with quality today, but hopefully everyone's able to follow. So on Zoho Books, four big updates I'm going to talk about today. So the first is being able to add what Zoho calls annexures, but I don't think I've ever heard that word before Zoho. So I don't know if that's something Zoho's made up or it is a real word, but it's the word they're using, but able to attach annexures to PDF templates, custom approval processes, which has been a must of mine for a long, long time. Lots of clients have asked for this. Payment terms in settings and then associated price lists with location. So we'll go from each of these today. So if we swipe across here and switch into Zoho Books, again, if you're not familiar with Zoho Books, Zoho Books is Zoho's financial package. It's the equivalent of something like Xero or Sage or QuickBooks, but it integrates with the rest of your Zoho platform. So if you're not something you've looked at or not something you've considered before, certainly worth thinking about because it's a really powerful app. And again, it's included in Zoho One. So if you're paying for Zoho One, you get this for free. So again, it's a no brainer to at least take a look at it.

44:37we've got quite complex manufacturing and construction clients that use Zoho Books in comparison with Zoho Inventory, their stock management app, to run their entire business. So it's not just for small, simple businesses. It can also support complex businesses that might have been more used to something like a complex ERP system in the past actually can be done in Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory as well. But anyway, we'll get straight into Zoho Books. So first thing we're going to look at are the nextures. So I've got a load of fake things in here. So I'm going to go in and open up my fake invoice here. This is one I've created. It's for garden design services. It was a thousand pound plus fat. If I turn this into a PDF to send to my customer, you will see I get this PDF. This is just out of the box, by the way, not only branding, but obviously if you wanted to use our books, you can brand this to look how you want it to. But currently, we've just got these long T's and C's in here that are not very easy to use. And I'll show you how that's edited. If I go into settings and I go into my templates, PDF templates, and I go into invoices and go to edit. If I show you this, you'll probably laugh because of the craziness of this. If I go into other details, a next year, and you'll see update and extra content. This is how we used to have to deal with adding T's and C's and documents to the bottom of a template. You had this tiny, tiny, tiny window with next to no formatting control whatsoever. I'll be honest, it was an absolute nightmare. This here is actually, you can see this, I've done this for one of our clients, they've got testimonials on their website, they'll be happy for me to share this for a client called Raft. Now this is their invoice T's and C's, their quoting T's and C's are even longer, they're actually multiple pages and it would take hours to input it in here and get it all lined up and splitting over pages correctly. It was a nightmare. Now though thankfully I can clear all of that because what I can now do is in the annexure I can actually just give it a pdf and I just literally found the pdf online. I took a site in t's and c's and it gave me this pdf here and I can now use a pdf and hit save and what that does is now when I go back into my invoice and go into PDF. Now, if I scroll down, you will see I now just have that whole PDF just attached to the end. By the way, I don't know why the first thing that came up was the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. I didn't even know that was a thing, but I've now got a document of their terms and services. But the point is, you can now just upload that PDF. So any businesses with complex T's and C's and complex additions they need to have to whether it's quotes, invoices, purchase orders, etc. We can now do that all in just a Word document or a Google sheet, save it as a PDF and just attach it and then it's automatically appended to every transaction that goes out from the system. So it means you don't have to worry about your sales team or your finance team remembering to attach the T's and C's, it's just on the invoice. So definitely something that's going to make life a lot easier for those businesses that need this kind of functionality.

47:58so it's certainly worth taking a look at. The next thing on my list are approval processes. So another place where Zoho Books is a little bit limited in the past is, let's say I had a purchase order and I wanted to set it so any purchase orders over a certain value had an approval process. If I go into purchase orders and then go into approvals, all I used to have was either no approval, simple approval or multi-level approval and no approval does what it says simple approval and multi-level approval what they did is basically say every single purchase order is going to go to approval either to one person or in the case of multi-level to one person and then whoever is the next level every single purchase order the problem is most businesses especially businesses that have grown might have lots and lots and lots of purchases that are going out. And most of them might be for almost no money. They might be odd little things here and there that you don't need an approval process for. There was no built-in way to manage that. We actually had work around where we would build custom functions and custom validations and it solved the problem. It wasn't ideal because we were having to build it custom. Now we can do really simply, we can create custom approval processes. So I can now go in and say create custom approval and I'm going to call this a PO over a thousand pounds and I can now go in and say okay if the purchase order is to have a look for the total of the purchase order is over a thousand pounds I can now say that's now going to either go to a specific person for approval I can auto approve or auto reject. What I'm going to do is say, okay, any purchasers over £1,000 are going to go to Kirsty for approval. So if I hit save there, if I now go back into another tab, just for simplicity, and open up Zaha Books, if I now go and create a purchase order, hit new, choose an example, I've just got to test one in here. So they're buying a big lorry for £2,000. Is there anything else I need to fill in here. I think I've got it all. Save as draft. You can now see I've got to submit that for approval because it's over my threshold. And when I submit it, that's now going to go straight to Kirsty to be approved. So I can't do anything else now. I can't send that out.

50:32I can't move it forward. I can't convert it to a bill because it's not been approved yet. What's really clever though, is you can combine approval process rules. So I've got one here for over a thousand pounds. But let's say I also want to have another one. So let's say under a thousand pounds and I don't know, marketing. I could now go in here and I can say, okay, if the total is less than a thousand pounds, testing my math skills here with my signs, and I can go in here and pull any other field from my purchase order. But I can also do stuff like if any of the line items accounts is, and then I'm going to go into marketing, and this is I think where it's really intelligent. So I'm going to say if any of the accounts include marketing and advertising, so even if not all the lines contain marketing and advertising, if just one contains marketing and advertising, I'm again going to say that has to go to Kirsty for approval, and then in this case I'm going to say it also has to go to me for approval. So I'm going to hit save, and I've now got both of those rules I now go back into purchase orders and I hit a create purchase order choose another one and let's say this time I'm going to do a I don't know let's say I've got a we'll stick with big lorry uh but we'll put that under marketing I think it was this one here and I'll say that's 120 pounds and I'll also say we've got a bin item ignore the names here they're just where we do various tests and I'm going to say that is an inventory asset that's great save as draft oh I've got the vac treatment let me do that so that UK hit save now again you can see I've got to submit that for approval in fact what I might just do is I might change this just so we can see the difference I'm actually going to take Kirsty out there and say it goes to me for approval and I'm going to submit for approval hit yes and you'll see this time it comes to me for approval and I can actually then go in there and I can approve it or reject it myself which is good but you can see now we've got those two different rules that run in parallel so they're going to give us far more control over how we can do those approval processes in future and for me it's the fact that you can do it based on the accounts for the line items make it really powerful because what it means is you can set up different approval processes for each department of the business and this is something that's come up quite a lot with some of the larger clients we work with because they might have a marketing department that has their own budget that has their own approval process which is completely different from say the sales department that has a different person doing the approval and a different budget and a different set of thresholds so you can now set those all up and you can manage those effectively within Zoho Books without any custom code whatsoever. Another example we've just done in here is if I go back into this time into bills we've set up a custom approval process to say okay if a bill gets created and it has no PO number and it's over a thousand pounds that must then go for approval if it's got a purchase order number that's fine because if it's got a purchase order number that means we've previously approved it we've already committed to that expense that's absolutely fine so again it allows us to be a bit more flexible with these approval processes. It used to be literally just a year ago that if you turned on approval processes for bills it was also on for purchase orders because effectively the whole of purchasing and the whole of sales were treated as just two things. You either had a sales approval processes or a purchases approval process. Now you can do it per module as well. So again a lot more functionality there. So I recommend taking a look at this because I think a lot of businesses will benefit from these more complex approval processes. The next thing on our list are payment terms in settings and associated price lists. So if we go back into settings, you'll now see a new tab in here for payment terms. This gives you now a centralized place to manage the payment terms used within your system. What's nice is this now makes it easy to deactivate payment terms. So if you no longer want to offer net 15 and net 30, you can mark as You can also create new payment terms from here as well and you can set your default in here as well.

55:03This was all possible before but it was kind of hidden within a sub menu of a sub menu so this just makes it nice and easy for you to be able to do that going forward. The final thing is our associated price lists. So price lists are a way for you to be able to mark up or down individual items, sales or purchase prices and apply that as a default for either customers or vendors. but you can now also do that if you have locations set up. So locations might be you operate a couple of different branches with different warehouses for etc and depending on the branch you offer different sales prices and different purchase prices. You can now go into that and you can then go in and you can set your price list and that will then apply for any transactions created from that location. This is particularly helpful let's say if you have maybe I don't know a branch in London and a branch in Manchester and you've got two different prices depending on what branch they're paying for. You can set up your two locations and you can apply your prices for those two different locations and then automatically any transactions for Manchester will have the Manchester pricing. Any transactions for London will have the London pricing.

56:13So again another nice convenient little upgrade to Zoho Books. And that's it for today. That's our quick run through of all of the updates coming to Zoho across CRM forms and books. I think there's some really helpful things in there. I actually think forms and books are the more exciting updates this month than CRM although that cadences feature is a really great one to to start using. Does anybody have any questions before we wrap up? I can see Phil has got a question in here so uh interesting re advanced iframed just subscribe to forms today as the free version was very basic so we'll go on and get it in a few months time yeah so zoho forms is is a really good tool obviously the depending on the subscription will depend on the functionality you've got everything i've just shown today has been in zoho one so that gives you everything but you can subscribe to it standalone and actually i think the pricing for zoho forms is pretty relatively low for what it offers particularly around the tracking. I don't know if they would have updated the pricing page yet but yeah you can see at most it's £75 per month but that's absolutely everything. Chances are you might not need everything but to be honest if you're looking at the higher end chances are Zoho One might be a good way to look anyway. Just running through some other questions will the recording be available as I'd like to review books absolutely I will put the recording online it'll probably be tomorrow morning it just takes a couple of hours to process edit and upload and things like that so probably be up tomorrow morning but I will send an email around to everybody so that they know that that's up there obviously any specific questions as well I'm more than happy to answer see we've got a question from Caroline do you advise IMAP or POP for email sync as there's a difference on displaying the emails in CRM in my Okay, so we're getting a little bit into the weeds of how email works.

58:14IMAP and POP. In the simplest terms, POP is a way of Zoho effectively copying the emails from your email server into Zoho. IMAP is a way of it effectively dynamically showing the emails from your mailbox into Zoho. POP takes up your Zoho storage. IMAP doesn't because IMAP isn't storing the emails itself. it's just showing you a copy of them, a representation of them. I generally default to IMAP. The only exception is if someone leaves the business and their email is shut down, obviously IMAP will stop working because the email inbox no longer exists. That said, within CRM, if somebody is leaving, there is actually an email backup function. So even with IMAP, you can select to backup their emails and it will be copied into CRM. But that's primarily intended for if people are leaving the business but you want to keep their emails in Zoho is using that backup function.

59:09But generally our default IMAP, some of this will depend by your company's IT policy. Some companies might have certain things locked down for security reasons so some of it might be dictated by that as well. So a little bit of a vague answer but hopefully that kind of points you in the right direction. Any other questions? No, it looks like everybody is happy. Okay, so I will get the recording uploaded onto the website this evening, ready for tomorrow. If anybody has any questions or would like to follow up on anything, just let me know. And if you would like to book an introduction call so we can talk through the specifics of how any of these new features might work in your Zoho, you can see the QR code on screen now or again, I'll drop the link into the chat.

01:00:00Otherwise, I hope everybody has a good rest of their day and I will speak to you all in the next webinar. Thank you, everybody. Have a good evening. Bye.