The CRM Zen Show Episode 418 – Approved By Popular Demand

Zoho News

Zoho CRM: My Jobs and Approval Process Enhancements

The My Jobs module now splits blueprints, approvals, reviews, and image validations into their own tabs, and approvals pick up filters, bulk approve/reject, and the ability to assign approvers from a user lookup field on the record. Just be thoughtful with that bulk approve button, the whole point of an approval is that someone looks at it.

Zoho CRM: Saved Filters for Portal Users

Portal users can now save their own filters, up to 5 per module on Professional or 10 on Enterprise, Ultimate, and Zoho One. If CRM is where your data lives, the portal is worth a serious look before building one from scratch.

Zoho ERP: July 2026 Product Updates

Still India-only for now, but the July batch adds a work center calendar, manufacturing orders created straight from sales orders, cost overviews for bills of materials, and a retail app for iOS. Sign our petition for a demo account.

Zoho Projects: AI-Powered Custom Module Creation

AI can now build out the initial field set for custom modules in Projects, most useful when you have a pile of fields to create. Pro tip: have Claude or ChatGPT interview you first to craft a good prompt before you hand it over.

Zoho Projects: Zoho DAP for Contextual User Onboarding

Layer guided tutorials directly into Projects with Zoho DAP, a great fit since Projects is not an app you can just hand someone and say “use it.” Also handy for introducing new features to your existing team, not just onboarding new hires.

Zoho Desk: New Fields API

A new API for reading, creating, and updating fields in Desk, designed largely with MCP usage in mind but just as useful for standard scripting and integrations. The old organization fields API sticks around for at least 12 more months.

Zoho PageSense: Zoho MCP Integration

Your CRO data is now on Zoho MCP, so you can ask your AI assistant about web performance, heatmaps, and A/B tests instead of wrestling with the UI. PageSense 2.0 also tracks and routes tests far more reliably than it used to.

Zoho Bookings: Connections for Workflow Automation

Bookings now supports connections in Deluge, launching with Zoho Desk, Recruit, and Cliq, so no more hand-rolling OAuth just to tie your appointments into other apps. Always check for a connection before going down the custom OAuth rabbit hole.

Zoho Mail: Email Journaling

Journaling captures tamper-proof copies of emails at the server level and routes them to a dedicated journal mailbox, a must-have for compliance requirements like GDPR and HIPAA.

Zoho Sheet: Offline Support for iOS

Create and edit spreadsheets on your iPhone with no internet connection, then import your offline files back to the cloud when you reconnect.

Zoho Notebook: Import & Transcribe Call Recordings

Import call recordings into Notebook and let Notebook AI turn them into clean, searchable transcripts with structured notes.

Zoho ResearchStudio: Product Shutdown Notice

Zoho ResearchStudio will be discontinued on October 5, 2026, so export your qualitative research data before then.

Code Share of the Week

Claude Skill for Creating Zoho Creator HTML Snippets

Greg packaged up a Claude skill that builds Zoho Creator HTML snippet pages, the ones that look great in HTML and CSS but run Deluge API calls behind the scenes to pull data. The skill bundles five files: the main instructions, a style intake guide that can interview you or work from a screenshot, a Deluge-in-HTML reference (since Creator snippets can’t use JavaScript, Deluge does the procedural work), general CSS rules, and a blank starter template. The killer move is exporting your app’s DS file from the Application IDE settings and feeding it in alongside the skill, so Claude sees your exact field API names, picklist options, and lookups without needing any MCP connection. Greg tested it on an hour log tracker app, asked for a calendar view of this month’s and last month’s logs, and after one quick fix to the skill for the replaceAll regex quirk, it worked like a dream. Download it from Club Zenatta and upload the whole skill file straight into your Claude account.

This Week’s Blog

Zoho Books Accounts Payable: Full Guide

Christopher from our finance team (a confirmed real human, not an AI built in a lab) walks through the full accounts payable process in Zoho Books, from managing vendors and bills to vendor payments and bank statement matching, with companion videos throughout. Budget half an hour, you will probably read it twice.

Tips and Tricks

Zoho CRM Product Overview for Beginners 2026

A full walkthrough of Zoho CRM covering navigation, leads through deals, team spaces, settings, common integrations, and the data management tools that come up daily.

Zoho One Full Tutorial 2026

Tour the core apps people actually use in Zoho One, then dive into the admin UI, including the trial-blocking setting that will save you real pain and suffering.

Question of the Week

New CRM Account to Books Customer

Polio has two companies in one group: Company A runs CRM, child Company B does the work and invoices from Zoho Books, and new CRM customers need to land in B’s Books org. Tyler’s go-to is Zoho Flow with two accounts, where Company A posts webhooks to flows in Company B that create the customer, keeping the OAuth between orgs clean. If your Zoho account is a user in both organizations, you may be able to run it all from a single Flow, and community member AI chimed in to validate the Flow approach.

This Week’s Quizzes

• Monday Quiz: Which new feature allows users to bridge the gap between data insights and business execution by triggering multi-app actions directly from reports?
• Wednesday Quiz: How does the “Classified Views” feature on the Explorer page improve navigation?