News Highlights
- Zoho Expense: Business travel booking moves inside Expense, joined by corporate cards, an MCP connector, parallel approvals, and a long-overdue sandbox.
- Zoho PageSense: User Journey shows the path each visitor actually took, not the one you assumed they would follow.
- Zoho Books: Tax category values in the Analytics sync change on October 20th, so hard-coded values in your query tables and formulas need a look.
- Zoho Cliq: Guest users can finally be added to your organization’s channels instead of being stuck in one-on-one chats.
Zoho News
Zoho Expense: AI-Powered Travel & Expense Management Updates
Booking business travel now lives inside Expense, either self-service or through a designated travel arranger who plans, books, and manages everything for the team, and it arrives alongside prepaid and user-paid corporate cards, an MCP connector for forecasting and anomaly detection, Zia trip questions, parallel approvals, a real audit dashboard, and the sandbox the Finance apps have been sorely missing.
Zoho CRM: Note Reactions and Updated Notes Interface
Notes get a chat-style refresh with emoji reactions, so you can finally tell who has actually read the note you left for Derek in accounting, and the reactions stick around even after that user gets deactivated (rolling out in Saudi Arabia and Japan first).
Zoho: Everything New Across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, & MacOS 27 Golden Gate
A rundown of how roughly ten Zoho apps plan to take advantage of the new Siri, on-screen context, foundation models, and beefed-up camera OCR (point at an invoice, ask for a bill in Books), with CRM mysteriously absent from the lineup.
Zoho Books: Tax Category Value Updates for Zoho Analytics
More PSA than news: on October 20th the tax category values syncing from Books into Analytics switch from numeric IDs to section-style labels, so every query table, formula, or filter holding a hard-coded value needs updating, and the dependency details option on the Accounts table is where you go to find them all.
Zoho Inventory: July & August 2026 Product Updates
The July and August catch-up covers the Nigerian edition, custom dashboards, and loyalty program management, plus a closer look at the new Super Admin role, one per organization, who approves which Finance apps get set up under your domain. It’s like the Highlander, there can only be one.
Zoho Recruit: Approval SLA for Approval Processes
Approvers now have a clock on them, with time limits set per approver or per role, automatic email reminders, and the option to auto-approve or auto-reject once the deadline passes so nothing sits in the pipeline forever.
Zoho Cliq: Collaborate With Guest Users
Guest users are no longer stuck in one-on-one chats and can be dropped straight into your organization’s channels, great for contractors, freelancers, and vendors, while Networks remains the better fit for larger or longer-term external communities like customers and franchises.
Zoho Pagesense: Zoho MCP Integration
Point Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini at your PageSense data and ask in plain English how a funnel is performing or what the A/B test is telling you, with permissions fully under your control, so start with the fewest and expand from there.
Zoho PageSense: Introducing User Journey
Funnel analysis measures how well people stick to the path you drew for them, while User Journey shows what each visitor actually did after landing on a given page, which is how you find out that the only route to your money page is a tiny button nobody can see.
Zoho CRM: Flexible Approval Process Enhancements
Approval rules and stages can be named instead of numbered, with stage-specific field updates and task assignments, rejection email notifications carrying CC and BCC, a consolidated approver pipeline view, and an approval history you can read as a table or as a narrative.
Zoho Sprints: Custom Color Coding for Entities
The full color spectrum is now open for custom priorities, statuses, release stages, tags, and the risk and opportunity matrix, so you’re no longer boxed into the handful of default swatches.
Zoho Social: August 2026 Social Publishing Updates
WhatsApp bulk messaging arrives, Arattai joins the list of connected channels, and URL properties move into the compose window so you can shorten links and set UTM tracking without a trip to Settings.
Zoho Recruit: Night Mode Beta
Late-night resume reviews get easier on the eyes with dark mode in beta across dashboards, records, module views, and navigation on every Recruit plan, flip it on from the profile icon in the top right.
Zoho Bookings: Zoho Cliq Extension for Appointment Management
A new Cliq extension pushes booking notifications and reminders into chat and lets you view, reschedule, cancel, or mark appointments complete without ever leaving the conversation.
Zoho Assist: September 2026 Feature Updates
Scheduled custom reports can now be filtered by a saved View, macOS Quick Support swaps the DMG for a PKG and PLIST combo built for MDM rollouts, diagnostic tools expand across Windows, Mac, and Linux, and Android TV picks up DPAD navigation.
Zoho Community: September 2026 Product Update Digest
Part one of the September digest covers subform-triggered workflow rules in CRM, a new zoho-crm skill for AI coding tools, Automation Studio conditional branching in Desk, and throw statements in Deluge.
Code Share of the Week
Get Any Field’s Previous Value(s) with the Timeline API in Zoho CRM
Matrix wizard Tim McGee is back, this time pulling the full edit history of any field on a record into a function using the Timeline API. CRM already gives you one picklist history tracker per module, usually spent on deal stage, but this works on any field, including free text ones where you have no idea what’s going to land in there. The standalone function takes a module API name, a record ID, and a field API name, then hands back every change with the old value, the new value, who made it, and whether it came through the UI, the API, or an automation. Tim’s example only adds $10 to a deal when the stage moves from Submitted to State into Intake, which the automation function checks by reading the most recent change in that list. From there you can test whether a field was ever set to a given value, measure how long a record sat in a stage using the audited timestamps, skip your own automation’s edits so it does not trigger itself, or flag everything touched by an import. Very clean code on this one, and it’s free over at Club Zenatta.
This Week’s Blog
Zoho for Field Services
Another industry page, this time for the technicians out in the real world doing the salt of the earth stuff, covering flooring, freight and logistics, dispatch, and environmental restoration builds across CRM, FSM, Books, WorkDrive, Sign, and Analytics. Big shoutout to Zoom, CQ Floors, and EFS Group, and please check your sync settings before FSM, Books, and CRM start fighting over who owns the record of truth.
Tips and Tricks
Zoho Campaigns 3.0 Is a Major Upgrade!
Wayne walks through the Campaigns 3.0 overhaul, a CRM for Everyone style visual refresh with a rebuilt email builder, upfront theming, per-element mobile visibility, Zia writing help, contact status filters pulled out of the dropdown, and webhooks in workflows that can fire any Deluge function you want.
This Week’s Quizzes
- Monday Quiz: In the Zoho Cliq v3 API, what major change was made to endpoint URLs to improve RESTful consistency?
- Wednesday Quiz: What is the primary feature that distinguishes a Spotlight form from a Card form?
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