Customer Management: #2 Organize Customers to Enhance Efficiency
When Ankit started his digital services firm, things felt simple. A client would call, ask for a website or a one-time consultation, Ankit would send an invoice, get paid, and move on.
"Just one client, one invoice. Easy.", he thought.
Fast forward a year, and the business looked very different. Some clients paid one-time for projects. Some were on monthly maintenance retainers.
Fast forward a year, and the business looked very different. Some clients paid one-time for projects. Some were on monthly maintenance retainers.
A few large clients had multiple teams, each raising requests and invoices separately. Some partners and resellers also required special pricing.
One afternoon, while reviewing outstanding payments, Ankit caught himself asking,
"Wait.. which invoice belongs to which team?"
"Did the head office already pay for this?"
"Why does this customer have three different records?"
That's when it hit him: onboarding customers was only the first step.
To scale smoothly, he needed a better way to organise customers rather than add them.
Zoho Billing addresses this exact challenge by helping businesses structure and segment customers in ways that match how they operate.
Organising Customers in Zoho Billing
Once customers are onboarded, the next step is organising them effectively to support growth, improve visibility, and maintain strong customer relationships. As businesses expand, managing customer data, transactions and financial workflows can quickly become complex.
Zoho Billing simplifies this with two powerful features:
Customer Hierarchy
Customer Groups
These features help businesses clarify customer relationships while keeping billing operations flexible and scalable.
Customer Hierarchy
Many businesses work with customers who operate across multiple locations, departments, or business units. In such cases, a hierarchical structure becomes essential.
Typically, a parent company oversees the financial obligations of one or more child companies.
Zoho Billing's Customer Hierarchy feature allows you to organise customers into a clear parent-child structure, providing centralised visibility and control over transactions.
In this setup:
The parent customer represents the central organisation or head office.
Child customers represent branches, departments or sub-entities.
Transactions created for a child customer can be made visible to the parent customer. This ensures transparency and avoids confusion when multiple teams or locations are involved.
Additionally, Zoho Billing allows payments and credits from the parent customer to be applied to the child customer's invoices, providing additional flexibility.
Imagine a company offering network infrastructure to corporate clients with offices in four cities. Each office raises separate service requests and receives individual invoices.
Instead of treating each office as a distinct customer, Zoho Billing allows you to:
Create the corporate entity as the parent customer.
Add each branch as a child customer.
This way, the head office can view all outstanding balances, track invoices across locations, and make consolidated payments when needed. The billing team gains clarity, and the customer gets a smoother billing experience.
Customer Groups
While Customer Hierarchy focuses on structural relationships, Customer Groups help businesses organise customers based on shared characteristics.
As a business grows, it often serves customers with similar pricing needs, payment terms, or discount structures. Managing these preferences individually can be time-consuming and error-prone.
Customer Groups in Zoho Billing let you segment customers by common attributes and manage them together. With Customer Groups, you can:
Assign a common pricelist
Apply discounts
Set payment terms
Make bulk updates across multiple customers.
Changes made at the group level can be allowed to apply automatically, or you can choose how it can be used by customers within that group, ensuring consistency.
Picture this, a SaaS company offers its product to:
Direct customers
Resellers
Enterprise clients
Each category requires different pricing and payment terms. Using Customer Groups, the business can create groups such as Resellers, Enterprise Customers and Direct Customers.
Special pricing and terms can be defined for each group. Whenever a new reseller is onboarded, they are added to the Resellers group and automatically receive the suitable pricing and conditions, without manual adjustments.
Customer Hierarchy Vs Customer Groups
While both features help organise customers and have similarities to an extent, they serve different purposes.
Features | Customer Hierarchy | Customer Groups |
Structure | Parent-child relationship. | Grouped by common attributes. |
Transaction Visibility | A parent can view/manage their child's transactions (with permission). | No transaction sharing. |
Reporting | Consolidated financial reporting is possible. | Group-based insights can be obtained. |
Best Fit for | Businesses with branches, subsidiaries or departments. | Businesses need segmented pricing or terms. |
Understanding the difference helps businesses choose the proper structure or even use both together for optimal organisation.
What does Organising Customer offer to businesses?
An effective customer organisation goes beyond clearer records. It directly impacts how efficiently a business operates.
When customers are structured correctly:
The billing team spend less time resolving confusion
Payments are tracked more accurately
Pricing and terms remain consistent
Customer relationships feel more professional and reliable
By leveraging Customer Hierarchy and Customer Groups, Zoho Billing helps businesses shift from reactive billing management to proactive financial control, laying a strong foundation for long-term growth.
Up Next: Offering Customers different privileges
Topic Participants
Hari Hara Sudhan. S
Sticky Posts
Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020
Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here'sCommunity Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020
Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly youCommunity Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020
Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate mostIntroducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020
Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides
Recent Topics
[Webinar] A recap of Zoho Writer in 2025
Hi Zoho Writer users, We're excited to announce Zoho Writer's webinar for January 2026: A recap of Zoho Writer in 2025. This webinar will provide a recap of the features and enhancements we added in 2025 to enhance your productivity. Choose your preferredPicklist field shows "none" as default
Hello, Is there an option to avoid showing "none" as the default value in a picklist field? I also don't want to see any option displayed. My expectation is to have a blank bar, and then when I display the drop-down list, I can choose whichever I waStage-probability mapping feature in custom module
Hi, I'm building a custom module for manage projects. I would like to implement the stage-probability feature that Potentials has. Is this possible?Field Description is very small
Hello, The field Description in the activity is very small. Why don't try open a new window, or a bigger popup, or increase the width of the "popup". Example:StatusIQ
Please add StatusIQ to data sources. We using site24x7 and StatusIQ together and site24x7 integration is already there. Thanks and regards, TorstenIn Zoho People, the Operations buttons are frequently not visible or do not appear consistently.
In Zoho People, the Operations buttons are frequently not visible or do not appear consistently. We request you to please investigate and address this issue, as it is affecting daily HR operations and user access.Marketing Tip #14: Increase cart value with product bundles
Bundling products is a great way to increase average order value while giving customers more convenience. Think “camera + tripod + memory card” or “soap + lotion + bath salts.” Bundles make shopping easier and feel like a better deal. It’s a win-win forProblem with Workdrive folders
I'm having a problem a problem accessing files in a Zoho work drive folder when using the Zoho writer app. The problem folder appears grayed out in the Zoho work drive window in both the online and writer application. However I can open the folder inAdd RTL and Hebrew Support for Candidate Portal (and Other Zoho Recruit Portals)
Dear Zoho Recruit Team, I hope you're doing well. We would like to request the ability to set the Candidate Portal to be Right-to-Left (RTL) and in Hebrew, similar to the existing functionality for the Career Site. Currently, when we set the Career SitePre-orders at Zoho Commerce
We plan to have regular producs that are avaliable for purchase now and we plan to have products that will be avaliable in 2-4 weeks. How we can take the pre-orders for these products? We need to take the money for the product now, but the delivery willZoho Books' 2025 Wrapped
Before we turn the page to a new year, it’s time to revisit the updates that made financial management simpler and more intuitive. This annual roundup brings together the most impactful features and enhancements we delivered in 2025, offering a clearCan multiple agents be assigned to one ticket on purpose?
Is it possible to assign one ticket to two or more agents at a time? I would like the option to have multiple people working on one ticket so that the same ticket is viewable for those agents on their list of pending tickets. Is something like this currentlyEdit default "We are here to help you" text in chat SalesIQ widget
Does anyone know how this text can be edited? I can't find it anywhere in settings. Thanks!Feature Request: Sync Leave Tracker to Zoho Mail / Calendar or provide option to download information
Zoho Leave Tracker offers the option to sync the leave Calendar to Microsoft 365 and Google Calendar. Adding an option to sync to Zoho-Mail Calendar would avoid duplication and add significant value for users. An alternative would be to allow users toCompensation | Salary Packages - Hourly Wage Needed
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says 55.7% of all workers in the US are paid by the hour. I don't know how that compares to the rest of the world, but I would think that this alone would justify the need for having an hourly-based salary package option.Multiple currencies - doesn’t seem to work for site visitors / customers
I am trying to understand how the multiple currency feature works from the perspective of the website visitor who is shopping on my Zoho Commerce site. My site’s base currency is US Dollars (USD) but my store is for customers in Costa Rica and I wouldArchiving Contacts
How do I archive a list of contacts, or individual contacts?How do people handle using Outlook and Zoho Project calendar at the same time?
We have an ongoing problem in our organisation where we use Zoho Projects to plan all of our projects tasks and that also allows us to look forward using the workload report to see which of our consultants are overstretched etc and which are available.10GB Email Storage Limits in Zoho CRM
We’ve had Zoho One for almost 5 years and have always synced our emails from Gmail via IMAP… As of late, we’ve run into issues with our emails not syncing, due to being over the 10GB storage cap… What’s very odd is that we haven’t changed a thing? I knowPerformance is degrading
We have used Mail and Cliq for about three years now. I used to use both on the browser. Both have, over the past 6 months, had a severe degradation in performance. I switched to desktop email, which appeared to improve things somewhat, although initialHow to set page defaults in zoho writer?
hi, everytime i open the zoho writer i have to change the default page settings to - A4 from letter, margins to narrow and header and footer to 0. I cannot set this as default as that option is grayed out! so I am unable to click it. I saved the documentUnable to Send Different Email Templates for Different Documents in Zoho Sign
Hello Zoho Community, I am facing a limitation with Zoho Sign regarding email notifications sent to customers when a document is sent for signing. Currently, whenever I send any template/document for signing, the email notification that goes to the customerEnable History Tracking for Picklist Values Not Available
When I create a custom picklist field in Deals, the "Enable History Tracking for Picklist Values" option is not available in the Edit Properties area of the picklist. When I create a picklist in any other Module, that option is available. Is there a specific reason why this isn't available for fields in the Deals Module?Vault crashes on Android Devices
Vault is continuously closing after entering the master password on my Android device. After several attempts I get a system message that says there is a bug in the app. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the app, and cleared the app cache, but nothing¿Cómo puedo configurar las contraseñas creadas bajo una directiva para que nunca caduquen y no aparezcan como caducadas en los informes?
¿Cómo puedo configurar las contraseñas creadas bajo una directiva para que nunca caduquen y no aparezcan como caducadas en los informes? La razón por la cual contraseña estas no deben caducar es porque su actualización depende de mi cliente y no de mí.Camera access
My picture doesn't appear in a group discussion. (The audio is fine.) The guide says "Click the lock icon on address bar," but I can't find it. Advise, pleaseAre static links available
I'm still using Zoho Meeting in trial mode. My previous webinar software provided a static link, and I made the mistaken assumption that I could send out my link and start a meeting later. Mass confusion, but my fault. With a paid version do you get aWhy is Zoho Meeting quality so poor?
I've just moved from Office 365 to Zoho Workplace and have been generally really positive about the new platform -- nicely integrated, nice GUI, good and easy-to-understand control and customisation, and at a reasonable price. However, what is going onHow to print a label from zoho creator app?
Hello, I would like to print a label from zoho creator app record similar to attached one. Size 74mm x 102mm. I tried record template. It leaves plenty of space around the content and also I couldn't set the height of the page. So it is not printing properly. Could someone please direct me to right direction for this requirement?Integration between "Zoho Sprints Stories" and "Zoho Projects Tasks/Subtasks"
We have two separate teams in our organization using Zoho for project management: The Development team uses Zoho Sprints and follows Agile/Scrum methodology. The Infrastructure team uses Zoho Projects for traditional task-based project management. InWhere can we specify custom CSS in Zoho Forms custom theme ?
I'm using a form with a dark theme. The OTP popup window is unreadable, because for some reason, the OTP popup background fixes color to white, but still takes the font color specified in the custom theme. This ends up as white on white for me, renderingTeam Gamification
Would love to motivate, engage and encourage our team with our social media posts. Would like to include Gamification features of Social Media in Zoho Social or Marketing Automation. And also bring in Social Advocacy tools/tracking/management to these,Sync Data from MA to CRM
Currently, it's a one-way sync of data from the CRM to MA. I believe we should have the ability to select fields to sync from MA to the CRM. The lead score is a perfect example of this. In an ideal world we would be able to impact the lead score of aUpdate CRM record action
Currently, MA only offers a "Push Data" action to push data to a CRM module. This action is built to cover the need to both create a new record and update an existing record. Because it has been implemented this way all required fields on the CRM modulePro Lite Upgrade - Quick Access Tray
Hello, I was going to upgrade to Pro Lite but the Quick Access Tray feature isn't available for Windows. Of the four features not available for Windows, the QAT is what I'm most interested in. Are there plans to add this feature for Windows anytime soon?Boost your CRM communication with new font types, sizes, and default reply-to options while composing emails
Hello Everyone, We’re excited to introduce a series of impactful enhancements to the email composer settings in Zoho CRM. These updates enable you to personalize and optimize your customer interactions with greater efficiency. So what's new? Add customFeature Enhancement Request – Text Formatting Options in Item Description (Zoho Books/Quotes Module)
Dear Zoho Development Team, Greetings from Radiant360 Integrated Technical Services LLC. We would like to bring to your attention a functional limitation we've encountered within the Item Table / Quote Description section of Zoho Books (and Zoho CRM Quotes).3 year sick leave cycle
How do you set up a sick leave cycle for South Africa? In SA the sick works like this for the first 6 months you get 0.83 paid sick days a month, then after 6 months you sick leave balance is reset to 30 days that can be used over a 36 month cycle. ThisWorkDrive and CRM not in sync
1/ There is a CRM file upload field with WorkDrive file set as the source: 2/ Then the file is renamed in WorkDrive (outside CRM): 3/ The File in CRM is not synced after the change in WorkDrive; the file name (reference) in CRM record is not updated (hereIs Zoho Communityspaces now part of Zoho One?
Is Zoho Communityspaces now part of Zoho One?Next Page