The CRM Zen Show Episode 423 – There’s Always Room At The Table

Zoho News

Zoho One: Zoho Tables Now Included

Think of Tables as a spreadsheet but sexier: built for holding and organizing related data with grid, kanban, calendar, and gallery views, plus a pile of ready-made templates, and now it’s part of the Zoho One bundle. Not yet available in the EU data center, but everywhere else you can just go give it a shot.

Zoho One: Zoho Publish Now Included

Also joining Zoho One, Publish is your tool for managing Google Business Profiles, handling reviews, automating routine responses, and keeping multiple locations in one place, because in 2026 you need a Google Business Profile even if you don’t have a business.

Zoho Deluge: Throw Statements for Custom Exception Handling

The new throw (no s) lets you raise custom errors with any data type, strings, maps, lists, whatever, unlike the old throws that was stuck with plain text, so your catch blocks finally get real context about what went wrong.

Zoho Books: September 2026 Product Updates

A new Super Admin profile across Zoho Finance leads the pack, alongside custom fields for contact persons, a Nigeria edition, an Avalara customer code field, and a batch of Inventory report and Co-Create Agent enhancements. Pro tip from the show: make your super admin a shared account like support@yourcompany rather than a real person, so nothing breaks when Dave leaves.

Zoho Projects: Layout Rules for Projects, Phases, and Custom Modules

Layout rules, previously limited to tasks and issues, now extend to projects, phases, and custom modules, so you can show, hide, and require fields as work moves through stages. Surprised projects didn’t have this already.

Zoho FSM: Multi-Option Estimates

Send one estimate with Option A (repair) and Option B (replace) side by side, let the customer pick, and build the whole thing from the mobile app in the field. Now do this in Books and CRM, please.

Zoho Forms: Smart Fields for No-Code Calculations

Pre-built formula blocks like BMI, loan EMI, GPA, and compound interest drop the calculation and all its input fields onto your form in one go, and every piece stays editable afterward.

Zoho SalesIQ: Instant Bot Auto-Translation

Build your Zobot once, pick languages from a dropdown, and let Zoho, Google, DeepL, or Azure translate the whole thing (Greg’s vote: just use Google). Professional and Enterprise plans only, which includes Zoho One.

Zoho Recruit: Single Mass Email for Workflow Alerts

Workflow alerts can now go out as one email with everyone in the To field, which is fine for internal notifications and a terrible idea for candidates, and note that email tracking won’t work with it turned on.

Zoho POS: Loyalty Program with Rewards Points

Set tiered earning rules by transaction amount and straight cash redemption thresholds, printed right on the receipt. Premium plan by default, add-on for Professional, and we still want to know how quick the sign-up process is.

Zoho: TrainerCentral 2.0 is Now Available

The customer-facing course platform gets Zia content help, SCORM support for painless LMS migrations, paid or free student communities, sellable assessments, and dynamic bouncing-DVD-logo watermarking. Just don’t let AI write the whole course.

Zoho RPA: Update for Windows Agent Users

Heads up for anyone on Windows Server 2016 or 2019: RPA Windows Agent 6.0.0 and later won’t run there, so either upgrade the server or stay on Agent 5.2.2 and turn off auto-update from the Agent Listing Page.

Zoho: PDF Editor Desktop App

A free desktop PDF editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux that edits, annotates, reorganizes pages, password-protects, compresses, and exports entirely offline, with no account required and a CLI for scripted workflows.

Zoho Community: August 2026 Product Updates Part 4

August’s final digest brings Incentives for commission management inside CRM, Sequences in Bigin, Pre-Offer negotiations in Recruit, Desk email deduplication, a DocuSign integration for Writer, and an IN data centre IP allowlist update Analytics and DataPrep users need to action.

Zoho Mail: Cousin Domain Verification for Phishing Protection

Admins can now list trusted domains and have Zoho Mail automatically flag, spam, or quarantine emails from look-alike variations (zy1ker.com instead of zylker.com), with an option to cover your own internal domains too.

Code Share of the Week

Understanding the Difference Between throw and throws in Zoho Deluge

Greg saw the throw announcement and thought “wait, wasn’t that already a thing?”, which is how this code share came to be. The old throws (with an s) has been around a while but only accepts literal text as the error message, while the new throw (no s) takes any data type. The example fetches a deal via API and tries to grab the deal name; if it comes back null because of a bad ID or a broken connection, a throw fires with the deal ID and the full API response packed in. That means your catch block’s info statement shows not just that something failed but the context to figure out why. Greg admits he rarely used throws because it couldn’t be dynamic, so expect to see throw showing up a lot more in Zenatta code going forward.

This Week’s Blog

Zoho for Technology

Our latest industry page covers how SaaS companies, MSPs, and telecom brokers run on Zoho, from Desk and Analytics for support reporting to Jira integrations, commission tracking, and Zoho Billing for recurring revenue, with case studies from Interface One, Firefly, and Select Communications.

Tips and Tricks

Zoho Books Full Tutorial 2026 | Sales, Purchases, Inventory, & Settings

Nicole somehow distills Books down to 90 minutes, covering sales versus purchasing flows, banking, reporting, automations, and the roles and permissions you want locked in before anything breaks.

Zoho Forms Full Tutorial 2026 | Form Builder, AI, & UTM Tracking

Wayne walks through building forms, field types, AI elements, rules, and the part everyone should care about most: proper UTM tracking so you know which campaigns are actually producing leads.

This Week’s Quizzes

• Monday Quiz: How does Databridge solve the security risk of inbound exposure for private databases?
• Wednesday Quiz: Which Zoho Analytics feature is designed to increase transparency into how AI-generated insights are produced?