Hi Everyone,
I've been a loyal Zoho Books and Zoho One customer now for over a decade. I've been frustrated at times, but overall it seemed like a pretty good choice at the time. As the years continue marching on, I'm ready to pull the plug on everything Zoho.
It really feels like the company has absolutely zero interest in ever listening to us, pretty much about anything. Maybe I'm completely off base but here is where I'm coming from.
Years ago, yes years! Over 5 years ago I opened a topic asking how to accept a credit card payment for multiple invoices. A simple thing, really. Client phones up says, "Here's my credit card, please apply this to the outstanding invoices we have with you." Right? We've all been there. Client does not want a portal account, client does not want to click on the "pay now" button on the invoices. Client wants a frictionless experience of paying their invoices. Turns out there was no way to do that back then, and now 5 years later, there still is no way to do it. A couple of years ago, they reached out to me to say that this functionality was going to be added that November. Spoiler: it wasn't. To this day, aside from writing some custom function that might work, there is no way to accomplish this. I don't have time to start writing custom functions.
Like many small businesses, we have trouble getting paid on time from some of our customers. We have on our invoice that past due invoices may be charged 2% per month which is legal in the part of the country we're in. Is there any way to do this in Zoho Books? Apparently not. Will there ever be? Nobody knows. I was able to find messages here on the support forum from 12 (!!!) years ago where people were asking for this feature. It's a basic part of having receivables, and I'm certain it was a feature in QuickBooks going back to the 90s. In Zoho Books? Nope. Answers from Zoho? Same old same old.
In every case where there is a glaring oversight on Zoho's development team, it seems it's always the same response from Zoho:
- Politely acknowledge that Zoho Books (or whatever Zoho module we're talking about) does not have this feature.
- Say that it may be on the "roadmap", but that nobody is certain what is or isn't actually on the roadmap. It's secret of course. Nobody in customer support seems to know anything about the roadmap, only that it's a word they use when they refer to when something may or may not happen.
- Say that the timeline to implement the feature is unknown at this time.
- Years go by, same thing. More years go by, same thing.
If this were an open-source or inexpensive system, I could be more forgiving of some of this. Obviously, they're not. We've paid Zoho many thousands over the years. And they're just not getting better.
Loyal customers are literally begging for what should be a basic feature. Evidently, the company has no interest in what we want or need so long as we keep paying their invoices and waiting patiently forever.
Let me ask, does anyone else think this is ridiculous? Why should we have to learn their scripting language to implement basic features that the competition has had for years? If their scripting language is so easy, then why can't the Zoho Books developers use it to add these features to their software???
My patience is nearing an end. If it wasn't so painful to migrate accounting systems I would have done it already. I'm getting close now though. I get emails and phone calls from the likes of Xero, FreshBooks, and others all the time with very attractive offers.