Hi: I tried to have a Zoho developer help me but he couldn't so I am hoping someone reading this can help. This seems like it should be simple, but as a Zoho One relative newbie I'm completely lost.

IDEAL

What I want is to have one project for a magazine where each task is an article written by an outsourced writer. A task = an article; there are fields in tasks already for writer, organization, fee, etc. 

Then that writer/organization can be exported to books as a VENDOR (we pay them, we don't send them an invoice to pay us) and generate an invoice on a per-article basis (not hourly).

WHAT I WAS TOLD/WORKAROUNDS

Apparently this is impossible. Heavy sigh -- why can Zoho not do things simply?

I was told that those writer/organization single line fields can't be exported anywhere nor reported on (e.g. 1 org has many writers). Then I was told I can't create many user clients and assign any one user client to a task (i.e. task doesn't tie into a specific user client). WHY?!!??! Heavy heavy sigh.

So then I was told every article has to be a separate project (WHAT?!?!) and create a specific user client for each project/article. OK, fine -- this is messy and will flood our other projects with this magazine project but whatever, Zoho overlords. I'll just use tags to identify magazine projects and do what you say.

I then create one project as one article, a user client (writer) and a task (leave writer/org fields blank as they're apparently WORTHLESS). I then mark that single task as complete (published!) and then can go on and generate an invoice (no! we pay HER!), an estimate (no! not an estimate!) or an expense. Expense seemed like the best bet. But then the user client doesn't carry over to Zoho Books.

This completely defeats the purpose of tying projects and books together. There's no automation. A user client in projects cannot be a vendor in books. I'll never get a purchase order created from this process/workflow (to separate from our employee expenses). 

STUCK, HELP PLEASE

So now I'm back at square one. How do I simply have one of our magazine editors:

- Create something in projects -- article (whether a project or task within an overarching project), writer who needs to be paid (writer/org fields or client user)

- Generate a piece of "paper" in books with the writer's info (name, org, contact info) and what we owe her (billable amount)

- Be able to show how many articles any one writer has written and how much each multi-writer org has been paid

Thank you for any light you can shine on this subject.