While working with customers across different industries, we have identified a few functional questions and gaps that commonly arise—especially for project-based and service-oriented businesses.
Many organizations, such as those in shipping, construction, and service-based industries, receive customer orders in the form of projects, tenders, or bidding processes rather than standard item-based sales orders. For example, in the shipping industry, companies may receive an order to build a ship through a tender or project-based contract.
In such scenarios:
The sales order is created as a service or project, not with individual inventory items.
These companies procure thousands of materials from multiple vendors and maintain them in inventory.
However, during project execution, it is not practical or feasible to add all consumed items to the original sales order.
The key challenge here is inventory consumption:
Materials are issued and consumed against a project.
Inventory levels should reduce accordingly.
Consumption costs should be accurately tracked against the project for proper project costing and profitability analysis.
Currently, there does not appear to be a clear option to consume inventory directly against a project or service-based sales order while ensuring correct inventory reduction and cost allocation.
Our second important point is regarding the Proforma Invoice:
Proforma Invoice is one of the most critical requirements across almost all industries.
Customers frequently request this document prior to final invoicing.
It is good to see that Proforma Invoice has been added to the system, as this is a highly demanded and widely used feature.
We would appreciate your clarification on how Zoho ERP plans to handle the following:
Project-based inventory consumption without itemized sales orders
Accurate project cost tracking along with inventory reduction
Enhancements, roadmap, or best practices related to Proforma Invoice usage