Customer Management: #2 Organize Customers to Enhance Efficiency

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.

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,

Alert
"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.

Info
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.


Info
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. 


Notes
Up Next: Offering Customers different privileges

    • 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's

    • Community 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 you

    • Community 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 most

    • Introducing: 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

    • Tip #55- Accessibility Controls in Zoho Assist: Exploring Vision Settings- 'Insider Insights'

      As we approach the end of the year, it’s a good moment to reflect on how we can make our tools more inclusive and easier to use for everyone. Remote support often involves long hours in front of screens, varied lighting conditions, and users with different

    • Zoho Recruit Slow and Freezing on all screens

      We have had an issue with Zoho Recruit for weeks being extremely slow and at times freezing.  We have 100 mega internet, and I went into each computer and updated the virtual memory so there is more available.  Also restarted all computers daily.  Still having the issues.  Almost unable to work.

    • Credit Management: #2 Configuring Right Payment Terms for Credit Control

      Think about the last time you ordered something online and saw that little note at the checkout, "Pay on Delivery" or "Pay later". It's simple, but it actually sets the tone. As a business owner, you know exactly when payment is expected. Now, imagine

    • Dependent (Conditional) Fields in Zoho Bookings Forms

      Hello Zoho Bookings Team, Greetings, We would like to request the ability to create dependent (conditional) fields in Zoho Bookings registration forms. Current Limitation: There is currently no way to make one field’s available options depend on the value

    • Bug Report: Search fails to find existing notes after Evernote import

      Hello, I recently migrated from Evernote (~2600 notes across 23 notebooks), but the search functionality is currently broken. The Issue: I can manually browse to a specific note and see it exists. However, when I type the exact or partial title of that

    • Marketing Tip #13: Win repeat customers with post-purchase emails

      The relationship with your customer doesn’t end after the sale; that’s when it begins. A thoughtful post-purchase message shows customers you appreciate them, keeps your brand top of mind, and can even lead to another sale. You can thank them, ask for

    • Zoho Form

      I have problem with Zoho Form. One of form i don't received the PDF version. Others okay except this one. W904533

    • Create & Update Zoho Vault Passwords via Zoho Flow

      Hi Zoho Flow / Zoho Vault Team, We’d like to request an enhancement to the Zoho Vault integration in Zoho Flow. Current Limitation: At the moment, Zoho Flow supports only the following selected Zoho Vault actions, such as: Fetch passwords, Share passwords

    • Custom Related List Inside Zoho Books

      Hello, We can create the Related list inside the zoho books by the deluge code, I am sharing the reference code Please have a look may be it will help you. //..........Get Org Details organizationID = organization.get("organization_id"); Recordid = cm_g_a_data.get("module_record_id");

    • Migrate different zoho subscription to zoho one

      Dear We have different zoho subscription we need to migrate it to zoho one. Currently we are paying for zoho email, zoho expense, zoho payroll etc under different admin We need to move it too zoho one flexlible plan for all my employees

    • Features, Feedback and Votes

      We’re launching the Feedback Forum for our customers. This is 'THE' place where you can add everything you’d like to see in Zoho Books. If you don't find the specific feature you need, simply add it so others can also vote for it. While we cannot promise

    • Payment system for donations management

      I manage an organization where we receive donations from payers. Hence, there is no need to first create invoices and then create payments received against the invoices. What are the recommended best practices to do this in ZohoBooks?

    • There Might Be A Glitch in Determining If A String Represents A URL

      I suspect there might be a glitch in determining if a string represents a URL or not. For example, I cannot embed the following URL. Perhaps the exclamation mark or parentheses are the culprit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Grinch_Stole_Chri

    • Customer Management: #4 Enhance Customer Journey

      When Neha started DefineOps, a growing IT support and consulting firm, most of her work was straightforward. A client would sign up for a free version, decide whether the service works for them, and then either continue or discontinue. Billing was simple,

    • Android app sync problem - multiple devices have same problem

      Hello, I am having a problem with synchronization in the Android app. When I create a drawing, the data does not sync correctly—only a blank note is created without the drawing. I tested this on multiple devices, including phones and tablets, and the

    • Marketing Tip #1: Optimize item titles for SEO

      Your item title is the first thing both Google and shoppers notice. Instead of a generic “Leather Bag,” go for something detailed like “Handcrafted Leather Laptop Bag – Durable & Stylish.” This helps your items rank better in search results and instantly

    • Territory Assignment Issues (Lead to Account + Contact)

      1. Lead → Account & Contact Territory Assignment on Conversion A Lead is automatically assigned one or more territories using a workflow and Lead Assignment Rules. This works as expected, and we are able to assign multiple territories to a Lead automatically.

    • Marketer's Space: Proven tips to improve open rates – Part II

      Hello Marketers! Welcome back to another post in Marketer's Space! We're continuing from where we left off a fortnight ago. We ended the previous post discussing the subject line, and we'll continue from there. Let's dive right in. Pre-header Pre-header

    • SQL Table slowed to a crawl

      Hi all - I seem to have noticed an update. Now whenever I am typing in the script field for the SQL tables there is a huge delay and it is all very slow. This has never been the case for me in over 5 years of using Analytics - I really hope it's fixed

    • Deluge Events/search API works in user environment but not in sandbox – why?

      I am creating an Extension for Zoho CRM using Zoho Sigma Platform I’m using the following Deluge code to search Events in Zoho CRM based on Start_DateTime: criteria = "(Start_DateTime:greater_than:2025-12-20T00:00:00+00:00)"; url = "crm/v8/Events/search?criteria="

    • Ensure Consistent Service Delivery with Comprehensive Job Sheets

      We are elated to announce that one of the most requested features is now live: Job Sheets. They are customizable, reusable forms that serve as a checklist for the services that technicians need to carry out and as a tool for data collection. While on

    • What are Zoho Meeting capabilities included in Zoho Workplace Standard?

      I am evaluating using Zoho Meeting for my organization, but it is not clear what Zoho Meeting capabilities are already included in Zoho Workplace Standard. - Are meeting recordings included in Workplace Standard? - Can we invite external meeting participants

    • How can I get the participant list of a reoccurring meeting afterwards?

      I'm trying to use the Meeting Participant Report from the API docs but when I call it on a reoccurring meeting it returns that there are no participants because it thinks I'm talking about the meeting in the future. Is there a way to use webhooks or some

    • Function #50: Send Mass emails to your customers

      Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! We have reached a milestone of 50 Functions, which means that we have automated 50 different tasks in Zoho Books. Every Friday, we have shared a nifty function aimed at either automating a task or streamlining

    • Full Hebrew Language Support for Client-Side Zoho Assist Interface

      Dear Zoho Assist Team, We would like to request an enhancement to Zoho Assist's client-side interface to support full Hebrew language customization, including all popups, notifications, and session-related messages. Current Limitation The Join page allows

    • Add Hebrew & RTL Support to Feedback Widget

      Hello Zoho Desk Team, How are you? We are using Zoho Desk and would like to utilize the Feedback Widget. While Zoho Desk itself supports Hebrew and RTL, the Feedback Widget unfortunately does not. We kindly request that Hebrew and full RTL support be

    • Merge Tickets Directly from Contact Page in Zoho Desk

      Dear Zoho Desk Support Team, We are writing to request a new feature that would allow users to easily merge tickets directly from the contact page in Zoho Desk. Currently, the only option to merge tickets is from the Tickets list view page, which can

    • Different languages for users

      Hello, Do you plan to enable individual users to select their languages for interface? Currently language can be changed for everyone - it looks like a settings for a whole portal, which is not good when you are working internationally. Best regards,

    • Kaizen #222 - Client Script Support for Notes Related List

      Hello everyone! Welcome to another week of Kaizen. The final Kaizen post of the year 2025 is here! With the new Client Script support for the Notes Related List, you can validate, enrich, and manage notes across modules. In this post, we’ll explore how

    • 2025年 Zoho コミュニティ 活動の振り返り 🎉

      ユーザーの皆さん、こんにちは！コミュニティチームの中野です。 2025年も多くの学びと出会いがあったZoho コミュニティ。 本記事では今年の活動を振り返りながら、フォーラムの投稿・参加者の皆さん・イベントのハイライトをご紹介していきます。 目次 フォーラム：注目の投稿 フォーラム：多くの貢献をしてくださった方々 ユーザー交流会振り返り ワークアウト振り返り その他のトピックス 1. フォーラム：注目の投稿 本フォーラムでは様々な議論と知識の共有が行われました。 ユーザーの皆さんが日々の業務で直面する課題を投稿し、経験豊富なユーザーさん達が実践的な解決策を提供してくださいました。

    • Customer Management: #3 Giving Customers Control & Privilege

      Rio, the founder of RenoTech Solutions, a fast-growing digital service company, found itself juggling a dozen different services for its clients. They handled one-time setup fees, recurring monthly invoices, and custom milestone-based billing for projects.

    • Can I use a Standalone CRM Function as the Callback URL For Async Export Data API?

      I am creating an export job using this API https://www.zoho.com/analytics/api/v2/bulk-api/export-data-async/create-export/view-id.html There is a "callbackUrl" key in the CONFIG object. I tried copying the URL for a standalone function in CRM which can

    • Add RTL (Right-to-Left) Text Direction Support Across All Zoho Learn Editing Interfaces

      Hi Zoho Learn Team, Hope you're doing well. We would like to request an important enhancement to Zoho Learn regarding support for right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. 🔹 Current Issue While the Knowledge Base Article editor provides

    • Add Hebrew Support for Meeting Transcripts Provided by ZIA in Zoho Cliq

      Hi Zoho Cliq Team, Hope you're doing well. We would like to request the addition of Hebrew language support for the Meeting Transcript and Summary feature in Zoho Cliq. Currently the transcript and summary feature is available for recorded meetings and

    • Remote Control Functionality During Screen Sharing in Zoho Cliq

      Hello Zoho Cliq Team, We would like to request the addition of remote control functionality during screen sharing sessions in Zoho Cliq. Currently, while screen sharing in Cliq is very useful, it lacks the ability for another participant to take control

    • Centralized Organization Information Management in Zoho One

      Dear Zoho One Support, I'm writing to propose a feature that would significantly improve the user experience and streamline data management within Zoho One. Current Challenge: Currently, managing organization information across various Zoho One apps requires

    • Enhance Zoho One Conditional Assignment to Fully Reassign App Settings When Changing Departments

      Hi Zoho Team, We’d like to submit a feature request regarding the current behavior of Zoho One’s conditional assignment logic when moving a user between departments. 🔧 Current Limitation As it stands, Zoho One’s conditional assignment does not remove

    • Ability to Filter Alias Mailboxes in Zoho Recruit

      Dear Zoho Recruit Team, I hope you are doing well. We would like to request a feature enhancement regarding the handling of alias mailboxes in Zoho Recruit. Currently, when we connect an alias mailbox (e.g., jobs@domain.com) from our Zoho One account

    • Automatic Department and Employee Sync Between Zoho One and Zoho People

      Dear Zoho Support, I'm writing to propose a valuable feature request that would streamline data management and improve user experience within the Zoho ecosystem: automatic synchronization between departments and employees in Zoho One and Zoho People.

    • Prefered Bin Missing in android APP

      Andoroid app dosent show preferred bin in the picklist. The workaround support reccomend is to use the computre to create the picklist. it shuld be information to be shown aas basic for the pciker.

    • Next Page