This is going to be the first hack for the year. Let us consider a scenario in which a sales rep wants to know the list of vendors that don't have any contacts in it. Because, without a point of contact to the vendors, the inventory management cannot be managed properly. In Zoho CRM, we have reports that help us extract the data that is present inside CRM. For instance, we can find all the Accounts and Contacts for which the "Industry type" of the account is "Software". So we only get the accounts that are related to software. So reports are usually used in scenarios where you want to see the statistics of the data you are having in your data base.

The hack I am going to propose today is going to pull a report for which there is no data associated to it. 

Steps to create the report:

Go to Reports module->Create report->Choose the Vendor (Parent module) as Primary->Choose Contacts (Child module) as related module->Tabular report->Advanced filters->Last name "Is Empty" and save the report.

This will show all the vendors that don't have any contacts associated to them. Using this report, you can find the contacts for those vendors and keep it updated. 

Limitations: This can be used only for the standard modules linked by standard look up fields. If you create a custom module and link it with any other module, the above hack will not work. So this can be used in places where you want to find the Accounts that don't have any contacts, Deals, Campaigns without any leads, Sales Orders that are not yet converted to Invoices etc.

Do try to share your feedback or query here. Happy to help. We'll be back next week, with another cool hack!