Zoho CRM: Manage accounts, contacts, and deals. Ideal for sales teams tracking opportunities, which Zoho calls “Deals”.

Zoho Books: Handle quotes, invoices, and financial reporting. Perfect for operations and accounting, and can even replace QuickBooks.

Zoho Inventory: Manage stock, warehousing, and purchase orders.

Zoho Projects: For project management beyond sales and proposals. Plan, track, manage tasks, and collaborate on all your projects.

Zoho FSM: Field Service Management. Optimize every aspect of your field service business, from scheduling to work orders and service calls.

Zoho One: A full suite package of 45+ apps from Zoho, including all of those listed above.

CRM Plus: A suite of apps that unifies your sales, marketing, customer service, and every other customer-facing team on one platform so you can deliver exceptional customer experiences to every customer.

Finance Plus: From invoicing to order management to accounting, Zoho Finance Plus has all the tools you need to streamline all of your back office operations.

Accounts: In Zoho CRM, Accounts are entities that have one or multiple contacts. Typically these are companies or organizations you do business with, but can represent a customer/residence.

Contacts: In Zoho CRM, Contacts are individual people, associated with one Account.

Deals: In Zoho CRM, Deals are opportunities you’re tracking with defined stages. Usually a Deal = Project. Deals need to be associated with an Account in order for a Proposal in Portal to be linked to a Deal.

Zoho Books: This is Zoho’s financial platform for quotes, invoices, and accounting. Zoho books is the “glue” that connects a Portal Proposal to other pieces of Zoho, like Projects. You don’t have to use Books for accounting to replace QuickBooks, but you do have to use Books if you want the Portal proposal to be used in Zoho for a project or for inventory management.

Customers: In Zoho Books, Customers are the single customer entity for financial transactions. When a Customer is created in Zoho Books from Zoho CRM, you will decide which information (from CRM Accounts and Contacts) is used to create the Customer record in Zoho Books.

Items: Products or services in Zoho Books that make up your quotes and invoices. Portal’s native integration allows you to seamlessly map items in Portal to items in Zoho.

Search and import client contacts in Portal from Zoho CRM or Zoho Books.

Link Portal proposals to Zoho CRM Deals with automated status and stage updates.

Push accepted Portal proposals into Zoho Books as line item Quotes.

$49 /month base price, which includes:

Always create Accounts for qualified contacts (end users, businesses, or builder partners).

Accounts represent who is paying the bill (e.g., “The Smith Family” or “XYZ Builders”).

Accounts have a Billing Address and Shipping Address.

Multiple contacts can be associated with a single account.

Create Contacts for each individual person associated with the account.

Examples: Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, the builder’s project manager, or designer.

Contacts each have a mailing address field.

Contacts can only be associated to one account in Zoho’s out-of-the-box configuration. ~See Case 3 below~

Treat Deals as the job site or project opportunity. Portal Proposals can be linked to a Deal. When you add a customer to a Portal proposal, Portal will prompt you to link to an open Deal associated with the Account. Or you can create a new deal in Zoho CRM for that Proposal, assigned to the selected Account.

Each Account may have one or multiple deals, depending on whether the customer has multiple projects (e.g., multiple homes, offices, or ongoing projects with a builder).

Add a custom Address field to Deals if needed to track project/job site addresses. Here’s more info on custom fields in Zoho.​

Accounts and Contacts are imported from Zoho to Portal. This is not a live, 2-way “sync”. Instead, Zoho should be the source of truth for your customer information. When you select a Zoho Account or Contact inside Portal, the information is imported to a People record in Portal. You can click the link to view the Account in Zoho at any time. You can also re-import updated information in Portal if the Account or Contact information in Zoho has changed, but this is manual - not automatic.

Deals link to Accounts, not Contacts, within Zoho CRM.

Portal Proposals link to Deals in Zoho CRM. Updates to a Portal Proposal will be pushed to the linked Zoho Deal. This is a one-way information push into Zoho - edits/changes to a deal within Zoho are not pushed back to the proposal in Portal.

Once accepted, proposals may be pushed to Zoho Books, where the primary contact on the Account becomes the Customer record attached to the Zoho Books quote.

From there, the information (Items, Services, etc) on the Quote can be leveraged inside Zoho throughout Zoho’s app ecosystem - i.e., Projects, FSM, Inventory, etc.

When connected to Zoho, searching People in Portal - from a Proposal, for example - will search your People in Portal as well as Accounts and Contacts in Zoho.

When you select a Zoho Account or Contact, Portal will import the information and link the record.

You can also prevent duplicates between Portal and Zoho with merge tools to keep records clean in Portal

Once the Customer is connected to a Proposal, you can link the Portal Proposal with an existing Zoho CRM deal—or create a new one.

Portal proposal statuses (Submitted, Accepted, Declined, etc.) can be mapped to your Zoho CRM deal stages for automation.

Expected revenue on the Zoho CRM Deal will be connected to your Proposal total.

Proposal activity will be logged into the notes section of the Deal in Zoho CRM.

Push an accepted Proposal into Zoho Books as a Quote.

Choose whether every line item transfers, or summarized version (parts, labor, fees).

Map items and ensure proper income/expense account alignment.

Avoid duplicate products—Portal matches existing Books items before creating new ones.

Once you connect Portal to Zoho in the Integrations section of your Settings page in Portal, you’ll be presented with options for how the integration works:

In Accounts & Customers, you can select where you would like to import customer information from in Portal - Zoho CRM or Zoho Books.

In Deals, you can map the various Deal stages in Zoho CRM to proposal statuses in Portal. When the proposal status changes, the corresponding Deal stage will change. Several are required if you would like the deal to update with the proposal.

Goods & Services includes settings for creating new items in Zoho (when applicable). This is just the default values, you can also change it per item when pushing a proposal over.

In Quotes, you can choose whether or not you want to push Proposals to Zoho Books, and if so, whether it pushes in as an itemized or summary version of the quote.

The Builder can be setup as an Account in Zoho CRM.

Each home or project is a separate Deal under that builder account.​

Use the Account as the homeowner.

Create separate Deals for each property/project.

Out of the box, Zoho does not allow a contact to belong to multiple accounts.

Solutions:

If you are using QuickBooks for Accounting, you still may need to build Quotes and Invoices in Zoho Books for Inventory Management.

Inventory is allocated on Sales Orders, and fulfilled via Invoices in Zoho Books. Convert sales orders into invoices for stock to be marked as fulfilled.

Dealers wanting task-level tracking can:

Contact: Cameron Cox

Location: Texas

Email: cameron@everflowsolutions.com

Phone: (435) 773-5647

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Email: sam@officehubtech.com

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Email: kirk@vrespons.com

Phone: (317) 442-2299

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