Calculate service cost, ticket age, and other metrics using Formula Fields

Hello everyone,

Formula Field is currently available on Early Access. Kindly fill out this Registration Form to request early access.

We have made an important update to the fields and layouts in Zoho Desk that will allow users to compute values within the record using Formula Fields.

This feature is available for both Standard and Custom modules.

Support agents often need to calculate tax, interest, the total cost associated with a service, and other details, such as the time remaining before a ticket becomes overdue. Performing these calculations manually can be time-consuming and even cause errors.

 

Formula Fields automate these essential computations directly within the support system to ensure teams have quick access to accurate, real-time insights. This helps them prioritize tasks, allocate resources efficiently, and deliver fast resolutions.

What is a formula field?  

Formula fields are custom fields that allow you to perform calculations by combining functions, operators, and existing Zoho Desk fields. With formula fields, you can create custom equations to automate complex calculations. Formula fields can perform:

 

• Numeric calculations: Calculate service costs, refund amounts, and expenses.
• Date-based calculations: Calculate the time elapsed since ticket creation and determine upcoming service deadlines.
• Text/String outputs: Create a customized message by combining other fields' values.

 

For example, a formula field can instantly calculate the total cost of handling a service request or display customized text like "SLA deadline approaching." 

How do formula fields benefit support teams?   

Support managers and agents need quick access to accurate data to make decisions and prioritize tasks. Here’s how formula fields improve operations:

 

Minimize manual errors

 

Manually calculating the refund amounts or insurance policy renewal date can lead to inconsistencies. Formula fields automate these types of calculations to ensure accuracy.

 

Example: A formula calculates the total refund for a ticket by summing eligible costs, such as the product price, tax, and shipping and handling charges.

 

Save time and increase efficiency

 

Automating repetitive computations lets agents focus on resolving customer issues.

 

Example: A formula field calculates the Days Since Manufacturing by subtracting the Manufacturing Date from the Current Date (using the now() function). This eliminates the need for agents to manually calculate how many days have passed since the manufacturing of the raw material, which helps agents track material age efficiently.

 

Provide real-time insights for decision-making

 

Formula fields update dynamically as ticket data changes, offering managers and agents immediate insights so they can take prompt action.

 

Example: A formula combines the now() date function with the SLA Due Time to create a custom field like Days Overdue, which dynamically shows the number of days a ticket has remained unresolved since its SLA due date. This enables managers to quickly identify and address the most pressing overdue tickets.

Industry-specific use cases for formula fields  

Formula fields are highly customizable and can meet unique business requirements across industries. Below are some of the real-world use cases to illustrate their benefits:

 

Raw material cost calculation in the automobile industry

 

Goal: To calculate the total cost of raw materials by including base price, shipping, and taxes (GST).

 

Formula: (cf_raw_material_base_price + cf_shipping_charges) + ((cf_raw_material_base_price + cf_shipping_charges) * (cf_gst_percent / 100))

 

This formula computes the total cost of raw material by summing the base price, shipping cost, and applicable GST. The calculation helps procurement teams understand the total cost of materials to assist in better budgeting and financial planning.

 

 

Calculating the total cost of the purchased product using different cost components

Goal: To determine the total cost of a purchased electronic product, the calculation considers the unit price, number of units, shipping cost, and any applicable discount.

 

Formula: Total cost = (unit price * number of units) + shipping cost - discount

 

This computation helps customers and businesses accurately determine the final payable amount for an electronic product purchase. It ensures transparency by factoring in all cost components, including product price, quantity, shipping charges, and applicable discounts.

 

Warranty expiration date for the purchased product

 

Goal: To calculate the warranty expiration date for a purchased product.

 

Formula: Adddate(purchasedate, 'P1Y')

This formula helps in automatically determining the warranty expiration date, which is typically one year from the purchase date. By applying this calculation, businesses or users can easily track when the warranty period ends, which is useful for customer support, product returns, or any warranty-related inquiries.

 

Determining the reminder date for renewing the software license before it expires

Goal: Notify customers when their software license is about to expire.

Formula: Subdate(LicenseExpiryDate, 'P15D')

This formula helps to generate a reminder date that is 15 days before the license expiry, ensuring that customers are notified in advance. By using this calculation, businesses can send renewal reminders ahead of time, giving customers ample time to renew their licenses and avoid service interruptions.

For more information on the available operations and functions for creating formula fields, please refer to the help document.

Give it a try, and share your experiences, feedback, or suggestions in the comments below. We’d love to hear how Formula Fields helps your support teams.

Thanks, and have a great day!

Regards,

Varsha P

Zoho Desk - User education

• Topic Participants

• Varsha P

  

• Sticky Posts

• 2024 Email Authentication Standards: Elevating Security with Google and Yahoo

  In contemporary email communication, email authentication plays a pivotal role in mitigating email fraud, spam, and phishing attacks. Brace yourself for a new level of security. Starting February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will be implementing robust email

• Using Agent Email Address as From Address

  Currently, while replying to a ticket, it is possible for agents to choose their own email addresses as 'from' addresses. Although we built this just for that little extra flexibility, in hindsight, it hasn't figured much in conventional usage.  Almost all businesses prefer that responses to their customers' tickets be sent from the common support/service email address and NOT from those of individual agents. During personal interactions at events, some of you have even made passing mentions about

• Edit and Delete options in Comments

  A lot of teams have been using ticket comments extensively to collaborate everyday. Notification Center further improved this experience by bringing real-time updates. As we continue to build more improvements to this experience, we've shipped a small-yet-important

• Webinar 2: Supercharged customer support for growing business

  Join us for this webinar and learn how to step up your support game using a real-time communication platform to generate happier, more successful customers. In this live webinar, we will will discuss the importance of SalesIQ for your support team and how it can help you:  Understand your customers better and their journeys to proactively support and engage them even before they ask for help.  Integrating real time conversations into Zoho Desk’s Support, providing a conversational customer service

• Customize Colors of your Customer Self Service Portal

  You asked for it. We heard you. We're happy to roll out the most sought after feature request, Customizing the Colors of your Customer Self-service Portal. Now you can set the color of your customer portal to mimic your company's web site, so that your customers visiting the portal will not feel alienated by the default theme.  Go ahead and configure the color of the header, tabs, fonts and background according to your needs. You can either choose between default color themes like Blue, Grey, Green

• Recent Topics

• Marketing Tip #20: Increase traffic with strong meta titles and descriptions

  Meta titles and descriptions are what people see first on search results before they ever click through to your website. If your pages use generic titles or basic descriptions, you miss the chance to stand out, and search engines may not know which page

• Kanban view on Zoho CRM mobile app!

  What is Kanban? The name doesn't sound English, right? Yes, Kanban is a Japanese word which means 'Card you can see'. As per the meaning, Kanban in CRM is a type of list view in which the records will be displayed in cards and categorized under the given

• Not able to delete a QC nor able to revert or create a cycle of manufacturing for QC failed Jobs

  Not able to delete a QC nor able to revert or create a cycle of manufacturing for QC failed Jobs

• Dheeraj Sudan and Meenu Hinduja-How do I customize Zoho apps to suit my needs?

  Hi Everyone, I'm Meenu Hinduja and my husband Dheeraj Sudan, run a business. I’m looking to tweak a few things to fit my needs, and I’d love to hear what customizations others have done. Any tips or examples would be super helpful! Regards Dheeraj Sudan

• is there any way to change the "chat with us now" to custom message?

  is there any way to change the "chat with us now" to custom message? I want to change this text

• Deprecation Notice: OpenAI Assistants API will be shut down on August 26, 2026

  I recieved this email from openAI what does it means for us that are using the integration and what should we do? Earlier this year, we shared our plan to deprecate the Assistants API once the Responses API reached feature parity. With the launch of Conversations,

• Capture Last check-in date & days since

  I have two custom fields on my Account form, these are "Date of Last Check-In" and "Days Since Last Contact" Using a custom function how can I pull the date from the last check-in and display it in the field "Date of Last Check-In"? and then also display the number of days since last check-in in the "Days SInce Last Contact" field? I tried following a couple of examples but got myself into a bit of a muddle!

• Subscriptions for service call

  So we install products and we want to offer a service contract for the customers yearly service calls to be billed monthly. So ideally at some point we want to email them a quote for their needs. WE will choice it our end based on the equipment. It would

• Connection to other user

  Zoho Cliq handles sharing of Custom OAuth Connections that require individual user logins.

• How to invite friends on other social media platforms to one of my group chats in arattai?

  Hello, I have formed chat groups in arattai. I want to invite my friends on other social media platforms like WhatsApp/ FB to one of my groups. Different friends would be invited to different groups. How to share an invite link of one of my groups to

• Zoho Books (UK) needs to be able to submit a CT600 CTSA return

  As well as a VAT Return, most (if not all) small businesses have to submit a CT600 Corporation Tax Self-Assessment. There are many providers who do this (like Xero) bujt not Zoho. Can you add this to the request list please? Many thanks Steve

• Cliq does not sync messages after Sleep on Mac

  I'm using the mac app of Cliq. When I open my mac after it was in sleep mode, Cliq does not sync the messages that I received. I always have to reload using cmd + R, which is not what I want when using a chat application.

• Function #2: Create a Deal in Zoho CRM when an Estimate is created in Zoho Books

  For those who use Zoho CRM integrated with Zoho Books, here's a nifty function that helps you optimize your sales process by adding a Deal in Zoho CRM whenever an estimate is created in Zoho Books. Custom Function: To create the custom function, go to

• Set expiration date on document and send reminder

  We have many company documents( for example business registration), work VISA documents. It will be nice if we can set a expiry date and set reminders ( for example 90 days, 60 days, 30 days etc.,) Does Zoho workdrive provide that option?

• Analytics : How to share to an external client ?

  We have a use case where a client wants a portal so that several of his users can view dashboards that we have created for them in Zoho Analytics. They are not part of our company or Zoho One account. The clients want the ability to have user specific,

• Payroll and BAS ( Australian tax report format )

  Hello , I am evaluating Zoho Books and I find the interface very intuitive and straight forward. My company is currently using Quickbooks Premier the Australian version. Before we can consider moving the service we would need to have the following addressed : 1.Payroll 2.BAS ( business activity statement ) for tax purposes 3.Some form of local backup and possible export of data to a widely accepted format. Regards Codrin Mitin

• Zoho Desk API - Send Reply to CUSTOMERPORTAL

  Hello! I'll try to send a reply to Customer Portal, But the response is 500 (INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR in service response). {"Error":"{\"errorCode\":\"INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR\",\"message\":\"An internal server error occurred while performing this operation.\"}"}

• Issue with open-rate reporting in Zoho Campaigns

  Hello, Since yesterday I’ve been experiencing an issue with the open-rate reports in Zoho Campaigns. The campaigns I send appear in the reports as if none of the emails have been opened, even though I know they have. To verify this, I replicated the campaign

• Best practices for managing Project Charters, Business Case and RAID logs within Zoho?

  Hello everyone, I’m currently refining our PMO setup within Zoho Projects and I’m curious how others are handling high-level governance documentation. We’ve been using the standardized Project Charter, Business Case and RAID frameworks from projectmanagertemplate.com

• Is It Possible to Convert a Custom Module to a Quote?

  I recently created a custom module in our CRM environment for RFQs so that our sales team can submit quote requests directly in Zoho rather than by email/phone. This allows for a cleaner overall process, minimizing potential errors and potentially encouraging

• Proposal: Actionable API Error Messages to Reduce Support Ticket Volume

  I've encountered a long-standing frustration with how Zoho Creator's API communicates errors to developers, and I'm hoping the Zoho team can address this in a future update. This issue has persisted for over 9 years based on community discussions, and

• Allocating inventory to specific SO's

  Is there a way that allocate inventory to a specific sales order? For example, let's say we have 90 items in stock. Customer 1 orders 100 items. This allocates all 90 items to their order, and they have a back order for the remaining 10 items which could

• Closing the Loop: Why Lookup Asymmetry is Harming Data Integrity in Creator

  TL;DR: Lookup fields allow users to add new related records inline via the "+" icon, but there's no equivalent ability to edit an existing related record without navigating away and losing form context. Adding a native "Edit" icon—with automatic User

• using the Client script on the load of the form if service no is empty means then i want to make issue relate to is Service

  using the Client script on the load of the form if service no is empty means then i want to make issue relate to field is Service if Purchae no is empty means then i want to make issue relate to is Purchase

• Work Order wont mark as Completed

  I have a couple of work orders that won't mark as completed even when I've marked the Service Appointments as completed fully.

• Item name special charaters <>

  Im trying to input speical characters such as < and > into item name and item description but comes up with following error: Invalid value passed for Item Name and Invalid value passed for Item Description How do i allow speical characters?

• Zoho Analytics Dashboard - How to hide the user filter

  I am using the same dashboard template across different external clients and applying a user filter to the data by site URL. How can I hide the user filter in View Mode so the external client won't see the list of other clients in the drop-down menu?

• Kaizen #229: Email-Deal Associations in Zoho CRM

  Hi All, Welcome back to another week of Kaizen! Emails are a core channel for customer communication in any CRM system. In Zoho CRM, emails can be associated with records across multiple modules. In this post, we will focus on email associations with

• Action Required: Update Microsoft SQL Server Security Settings Before February 2026

  Dear Users, We recently deployed security updates in Zoho Analytics that inadvertently caused connection failures for a few customers using Microsoft (MS) SQL Server hosted on older Windows versions (Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, and 2014). To restore

• Contacts limit in basic vs standard - what counts? Are customers contacts?

  I’ve been using books for a number years for my small business. I only ever work with 20 clients at any given time. I do purchase services from a number of vendors to run my business, so there are some comtacts there too. I used to use the basic package,

• Saving issue

  First problem I opened a MS word file in writer. after the work is done, it does not save instantly, I waited for like 10min and it still did not save. second problem When I save a file, then file gets saved as another copy. I just did save, not save

• Automating Employee Birthday Notifications in Zoho Cliq

  Have you ever missed a birthday and felt like the office Grinch? Fear not, the Cliq Developer Platform has got your back! With Zoho Cliq's Schedulers, you can be the office party-cipant who never forgets a single cake, balloon, or awkward rendition of

• Create Tasklist with Tasklist Template using API v3

  In the old API, we could mention the parameter 'task_template_id' when creating a tasklist via API to apply a tasklist template: https://www.zoho.com/projects/help/rest-api/tasklists-api.html#create-tasklist In API v3 there does not seem to be a way to

• Ability to Set a Unified Tab Order/View for All Users in Zoho Projects

  Hello Zoho Projects Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to submit a feature request regarding tab/menu organization in Zoho Projects. Current Behavior: The tab (module) order in Zoho Projects is user-specific. Each user (internal or external)

• Task Order

  Hello! I've recently switched to Zoho Projects and a long time user of MS Project, Asana and LiquidPlanner (which has recently been purchased) and I'm running into a frustration I'm hoping someone can assist with. It has to do with how tasks are ordered

• Automating CRM backup storage?

  Hi there, We've recently set up automatic backups for our Zoho CRM account. We were hoping that the backup functionality would not require any manual work on our end, but it seems that we are always required to download the backups ourselves, store them,

• 2026 Product Roadmap and Upcoming Features

  This is your guide to what is coming in Zoho Vertical Studio throughout 2026. We’ll update this post throughout the year as items move from development to release, and as and when new initiatives are added. Once a feature is released, it will be reflected

• Vendor legal and DBA names for USA users

  I would like to hear how Zoho Books users are handling DBA names in the vendor profile. If the Company name in the vendor profile has to be the legal name (line 1 of the W-9), whare are you entering the DBA name (the name that checks are made out to)

• Zoho Books API invoice email bouncing with 'relaying-issues' error

  I have waited over 30 days for zoho books uk to assist with the following and i have had no replies or tickets erronously closed. The service has been terrible - very unlike zoho! So i am raising this here hoping that a community member can assist: Hello,

• Stop the Workarounds: We Need Native Multi-Step Forms

  After over 17 years of community requests, I'm hoping the Zoho team can finally address the lack of native multi-page form support in Zoho Creator. This has been one of the longest-standing feature requests in the community, with threads spanning nearly

• Next Page