We've been using the Zoho CRM for the past few months and are generally satisfied however we have not been able to get the Inventory functionality (which is the primary reason we are using the paid version) to work acceptably well. We have the following problems/issues:
1. The Inventory "Qty in Demand" field is updated when a Sales Order is created. I believe it should only be updated once a Sales Order is set to "Approved" status. There are may times when a Sales Order is initially created but is updated a few times before being considered final. If the update only happens at the "Approved" status, it would more accurately represent the process.
2. The "Qty in Stock" field is currently effected by both Purchase Orders and Invoices. It is increased when a PO is created and decreased when an invoice is created. We would much rather have the Qty in Stock be reduced when a Sales Order status is set to Delivered. This is more appropriate because the time that a produce leaves our Warehouse corresponds to when we mark a Sales Order as Delivered, not necessarily when we invoice.
3. When you delete an invoice, it reduces the "Qty in Demand" field as opposed to adding the qty of items back into the "In Stock" field. This is a bug since it reduces the "Qty in Stock" field when an invoice is created. This is moot anyway since the qty's should be adjusted on the status change of the Sales Order, not the Invoice.
4. We need a field that tells us how many of an item we need based on Qty in Stock, Qty in Demand and Qty Ordered. That is, if we have 10 in stock, 15 in Demand and 5 on order, we know we have at least enough inbound to satisfy demand. We have created a calculated field but it does not update dynamically because it does not pull data from fields in all the same modules. We have ended up created a second custom field set to all "0's" and doing a bulk update to force a calculation on our custom calculated field.
These are the major items that we feel need to be addressed. We have come across other issues that are better classified as bugs that missing/incorrect functionality. The most difficult to deal with is that if you delete a Sales Order, it does not seem to adjust the inventory values. You must first set the item quantities to 0. If this is the way it must work, It would be nice to not allow the delete of a Sales Order in a status other than "Created" assuming that the inventory is not affected until a Sales Order is set to Approved/Delivered status.
These are important issues for us and have been difficult to work around. If we don't see some progress on these rather soon, we'll really have no choice but to look elsewhere which would be a shame given the way we feel about the rest of the product.