I’m sure you’d agree that Page Layouts in Zoho CRM is of immense help for businesses involving multiple products and (or) services. It helps avoid the hassle of creating multiple CRM modules thereby helping your overcome redundant data tracking. Take for example an insurance agency that offers variety of insurance services like health, life and automobile insurances. Instead of creating separate modules for each of these services, you just have to create 3 layouts. For every new policy, 2 emails have to be triggered - one to the client and another to the insurance vendor. This can be achieved using custom functions and workflow.

Custom functions are an integral part of automation processes of most Zoho CRM implementations. However, page layouts introduces a hassle with custom functions. By default, custom functions works only with the fields created in the default layouts associated with the respective modules. The custom fields created specific to the custom layouts would not be updated using custom functions. Fret not, through this week’s hack, I’d demonstrate how to overcome this limitation by using conditional layouts. Instead of using page layouts, we can use Conditional fields in CRM and show the fields related to each insurance categories. Now that all the fields are captured in the standard layout, custom functions would be triggered.

Here are the specifics:

Step 1: Create a Pick list field with three Insurance values:

Go to Setup->Modules and Fields->Click on the respective module->Drag and Drop a Pick list field->Add the Insurance names and provide a Field label and save it.

Step 2: Create a Conditional field for the pick that was created:

Go to Setup->Modules and Fields->Click on the respective modules->Layout rules-> Create a Layout rule for each of the pick list->Show the necessary fields as given in the screenshot below.

Now, if health insurance is chosen, only the 8 fields related to health insurance appears and as we remain in the standard layout, the related custom function gets triggerred immediately upon saving the record. 

Hope you found this hack useful. Check out other hacks shared in this series here.