No Need To Fix Something That Is Working

No Need To Fix Something That Is Working

Zoho Books is a great financial tool which helps businesses to become more efficient and productive with day-to-day operations. 
As such, every change, upgrade, improvement needs to be carefully thought before implemented in the software and I'm sure Zoho team is making great deal of effort to do just that. 

However, sometimes, I do run into an "improvement" or "new feature" which I am reluctant to understand the purpose or the benefit of introducing it in the software. 

Such "improvement" was recently introduced in the software with the formatting of phone numbers in Accounts, Contacts etc... 

Previously, the user could simply format the phone number as they needed in their country and according to their needs. Just like any other software in the world (Outlook, IOS, Android and more)

This is important, especially if the user wanted to add an extension to the number or any other standard universal characters for automated dialing.
For example, you could have a phone number entered as:

(###) ####,,####  or ###.###.####,,,####
(where each coma - ",," - represent dialing pause followed by an extension number)

Now, Zoho changed the formatting rules, requiring numerical characters only. 
Any other characters used in the phone number field will trigger an error icon (exclamation mark) next to the field, basically filling the contact info page with error marks. 

Zoho says the new formatting rules are not mandatory and users can ignore them
Well, if it's not mandatory then at least provide the users the option to turn off these alerts 
having so many errors on the screen and telling users to ignore them is counterproductive approach

Furthermore, other apps on the Zoho platform do not implement such strict and limited formatting. Maybe they are in the process of implementation, but this new feature should be carefully evaluated and consulted with the user community. 

ZOHO Team: Please either remove this formatting requirement or add a property in the settings to turn the alerts off.