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Dear Customers,

We hope you're well!

By their nature, modern businesses rely every day on computations, whether it's to calculate the price of a product, assess ROI, evaluate the lifetime value of a customer, or even determine the age of a record.
With Zoho CRM, you can include such calculations within records using the formula field. Today, we're introducing some new enhancements that aim to improve the accuracy and usability of formulas in your business processes.


Let's look at them!

Enhancement 1: Auto-refresh time-based formulas to view real-time values.

Businesses rely on time-based computations to conduct various analyses. Some computations measure time like a stopwatch. For example:
  • To ascertain the possibility a customer might churn, you would compute the age of their deals.
  • To validate an applicant's eligibility for an insurance policy, you would calculate the age of the applicant as of the current date.

The above examples are ongoing calculations that show the age of the record or of the customers. For these types of computations, you might expect that the formula is constantly ticking and rendering an accurate time measurement whenever you view the record. However, formula fields in fact compute and render the latest result only when the record is edited manually or updated via automation. By simply viewing a record, an agent may not be seeing accurate results. This enhancement addresses this.
Though formulas that provide the latest values include a "now" function in their syntax, computing all of these formulas continually and concurrently across all records poses a significant technical constraint. To address this constraint, we've introduced a checkbox to the formula field property labeled, Automatically refresh formula fields containing the Now function in real time.

If checked, the auto-refresh checkbox makes the relevant formula run every time the user visits or edits the record. This means users will always see the correct time measurements.

Info
Limitation:
  • You can apply the auto-refresh only for two fields with the Now function per module.
  • Formulas with date/ date time return types cannot be used in workflows that are based on date/time -based triggers.
  • Fields enabled with auto-refresh will have updated values every time you view them. But, this doesn't qualify for record edit. If you have automations based on edit of a record, this record will not be used unless the record is really "edited".
  • Also, creating custom views and filters using these fields cannot be done.

Enhancement 2: Stop formula executions based on criteria

In contrast to the case above—where you'd expect the formula to run constantly—there are scenarios wherein you may want to stop a computation from executing. Let's say a customer has churned, and you want to calculate the time it took them to churn. In that case, you might want the formula to stop computing under certain conditions.

Accordingly, you can use this new function to:
  • Calculate the number of days the deal was under negotiation
  • Calculate the number of days spent in trial before conversion
  • Calculate the number of days taken to ship a product
You may want to stop ongoing computations whenever there are events acting upon a given record. By doing so, you can determine the amount of time the record spent in a particular stage.

Previously, there hasn't been any functionality in Zoho CRM that effectively stops a formula from computing. Even when a cutoff date has passed, formulas continued to compute durations. With this enhancement, you can stop computations or freeze values based on specific criteria.

With these two enhancements, you can choose how you want your time-based formulas to be computed—to keep them running or to stop at a given time.

Info
Limitation:
A formula field that has auto-refresh and stop criteria enabled, then those fields cannot have multiline fields, picklists, and lookup fields as participating fields.

Enhancement 3: Include an existing formula as part of another formula's component

A formula is only as powerful as its components. Zoho CRM enables you to construct various complex formulas, but one missing piece has been the inability to include an existing formula field to construct a new one.

Thus far, you could do this by building a long and linear syntax.

For example, let's say you want to determine the discounted value and overall discount percentage for your finalized quotes. Firstly, to determine the discount value, you'd write a formula.

Next, to find the discount percentage, you'd write another formula that looks something like this:

As you can see, the structure of the formula involves an existing computation. In Zoho CRM, to achieve this, you'd first formulate the discount value, and then—to find the percentage—you have to repeat the discount formula to get the percentage.

For a simple formula like this, the syntax is fairly easy to understand. But imagine calculating commissions, which would involve several smaller formulas—in which case, you have to repeat the entire formula structure even if you already have them computed in your record layout.

This is complex, redundant, and time-consuming—problems that this latest enhancement addresses.

A formula field looks like any other field in Zoho CRM. Thus, in addition to the list of fields available under the fields part of the formula configuration, all the existing formula fields will also be listed. Admins can construct new formulas using the existing formulas without having to repeat syntax.

That's all for the updates. If you have any feedback or questions, please drop them in the comments section. Let's connect!

QuoteRelease plan: These enhancements are lined up for release DC by DC, gradually. We will keep you posted on the comments accordingly.

Thanks and have a good one!
Kind regards,
Saranya Balasubramanian

5 users like this announcement.
16 Replies
Reply
  • 11 days ago

AWESOME!!

But why that?
"You can apply the auto-refresh only for two fields with the Now function per module."

Because it wouldn't be Zoho if there wasn't an arbitrary restriction thrown in to further hamstring customers who have been waiting 7 years+ for a piece of common-sense functionality! 

  • 11 days ago

Hi,
The current limit is mainly due to technical constraints in dynamically displaying the updated values. We understand that a higher limit on auto-refresh fields would help to cover more use cases. We will definitely take this into consideration as we work on optimising the functionality.

This is WONDERFUL and adds a lot of flexibility!!!!  Please let me know when it is available and if we can be part of the early release!!!!

Way to Go Zoho Team!

  • 11 days ago

Very useful release, thanks !

My customer has been waiting for this option for some time!
I am very happy to hear this news.
We hope for an early release in US-DC.

  • 9 days ago

Hi,

Whether the auto refresh field can trigger workflow "when XXX is edit" ?

Hi Kava,

The auto-refresh formula field's value change is not considered as the record edit so it will not trigger an automation. However, when using an auto-refresh formula field as a criteria in the Record edit-based workflow rule it will trigger an action.

Amazing!
Indeed, the limit of only two fields is too little.

Enhancement 3: Include an existing formula as part of another formula's component


Will this enhancement include the ability to include aggregation fields in formulas?

Yes, @YosiGrinwald.

It is possible to include aggregation fields in formulas.

We are using a calculated field to handle VAT so it does not use the now() function but does need to be calculated more frequently.

You mention in your post that calculated fields only update when edited manually or via automation. Is that automation only in CRM as I am manually creating a sales order from Zoho Flow and that is not enough to trigger my field to calculate. If there is existing automation that will trigger this that solves the problem for me.

Hi Alex,

Our developers are checking on this, and I'll keep you informed as soon as I have an update.

Appreciate your patience.

Hi Alex,

The formula field values are updated even when records are created through Zoho flow. 
Please let us know if you face any challenges with this. If so, I request you write to support(at)zohocrm(dot)com so we can further check this case.

This is a great addition. I do agree it would be nice to be able to include more than two fields per module. Hopefully this is something that you can accommodate in the near future.

@Jordan.

As @Sravani, mentioned in the previous post we will consider this in the future.

Reply to Saranya BalasubramanianA
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