Our Zoho Wish List

We normally see a lot of users complaining about many aspects of Zoho, but while we agree that many contributions are positive, many hurt the efforts in helping a company that has become an integral part of our every-day operations.

For these reasons we decided to enumerate our own list of features and changes that we would like to see in the system. Some are more urgent than others, but all lead to a better system and we hope that they are well treated by the people in charge.

I would also like to mention that, I personally have many years of experience in software development and product management, and it is using this experience on which we base our observations.

The wishlist, not in a particular order:

1. Reports - need to be able to edit them and select or change the modules. Currently you can personalize the reports but you cannot see which modules are included in the reports or are used to construct them. It is impossible to change the modules in a report without having to re-create the report from scratch. Sometimes one needs to see how a report is constructed in order to understand the results, but this is currently not possible in Zoho. One is forced to recreate a report from scratch and play with trial and error.
2. More Reports - export to Google Docs. The reports are exportable to Excel and PDF but not Google Docs. Let’s face it. If we bet on a cloud application like Zoho, and login with Google apps, we are likely using Google Docs. We need to export reports to Google.
3. Workflows (urgent): Trigger workflows based on the modification of a field, regarless of the value introduced. Currently, one can trigger a workflow if one knows what the value field will be changed into. For instance, if qty is < 6, then  trigger the workflow. However, it is much more useful to trigger a workflow if one can select a field and one does not know which value will be entered. For instance: on Invoice Date {change to any value}--> trigger the workflow. It is impossible to create workflows using dates if we don’t know the value in advance.
4. Workflows: Trigger workflows based on field comparison. Today it is impossible to trigger a workflow based on these scheme: if MODULE.A.Field1 > MODULE.A.Field2 THEN Trigger Workflow. It  would be even more useful to trigger the workflow comparing fields between related modules, in other words: if MODULE.A.Field1 > MODULE.B.Field2 THEN Trigger Workflow
5. Efficiency: Automatic naming of subjects for each record in all modules. Currently one is forced to manually write a subject for each record created. This leads to error and non-standarization. It is much more useful to have the ability in each module to customize the automatic naming of the record. For instance, by selecting certain the fields in the Contacts module (let’s say, Contact No, Contact Name and Contact Last Name), Zoho should be able to create the record’s subject without user input. This will save hundreds of thousands of work hours for all your customers around the world. Facilitating naming convenion is a must.
6. Automatic record count in related modules: for instance, if one has an Account with 15 {valid} contacts, create and update a field within the Account module that reflects the number of valid, active (or whatever criteria) contacts. In this case, the automatic field names Contacts Qty should have an automatic value of=15.
7. Formulas with Better Module integration (urgent). When we create a record in a related module, the formula should be able to update a field in a related module, not just the parent module. For instance, let’s say we use the Invoice module and we have also customized a related Payments module. When we create a Payments record, this should update a formula field called TOTAL PAYMENTS in the Invoice which totals the amount of payments of that customer, based on the value of each record in the Payments module. This is just an example. To be an enterprise-ready system, Zoho needs to take seriously the integration of modules in formula fields.
8. Formulas: create formula fields using other formula fields. This request and its obvious applications, has been made over and over in the forums, but as far as we know it hasn’t even entered the roadmap yet.
9. Reduce time cycles for enhancements. The current strategy of Zoho of producing large changes over time doesn’t address the requirements of users dynamically. If Zoho is to remain and improve on its dynamic image, it needs to produce smaller changes and fixes faster, rather than focusing on long development cycles, like the recent UI. Some of the users’ requests have been expressed for several years to no avail. This creates extreme user frustration and in the end it hurts Zoho’s image more than it hurts clients.
10. Birthday reminders and templates (urgent). This feature has been requested over and over in the forums, and after many years of operations, it seems it is a high priority for customers but not for Zoho. Currently, there is no way to setup a simple automatic event that greets customers on their birthdays. It’s CRM 101 and it is long overdue.
11. Backups as a standard feature (urgent). In light of the recent outage, and as a general principle in marketing and sustaining a cloud application, it is very clear to the user community that Zoho’s strategy to monetize the backup feature is completely off the mark. Zoho needs to revise this misaligned conception for what should be a well thought out management feature available to all paid editions. It needs to include record revision management using snapshot solutions, available in the database industry for quite some time. Backups constitute a basic necessity in any serious platform, again it’s CRM and Sysadmin 101.
12. Email management (urgent). I won’t go into details as to the merits of this one, as it is a topic that is very extensive, but all the user community knows what is missing here and has expressed the necessities over and over. The question is, is Zoho listening? What is the company’s strategy to address these issues?
13. Truly integrated invoices (urgent). Let’s face it. Invoices with no payments constitute a half-baked solution. Even forcing the companies to acquire a poorly-integrated product such as Invoices and Books is worse. The CRM package requires it’s own full fledge Invoice product. Even better would be to integrate CRM and Books completely, not as an after-thought. Just doing this change, it would place Zoho into the ERP realm and incresae the value of the company over and over.
14. Full feature set to all paid editions. We think it is a mistake to reduce the number of features for the Professional Edition. In this manner, it is difficult to try out the features available in Enterprise in a meager 15 day period. In our opinion, a better strategy would be to make all features available to paid editions, differentiating them in the volume of transactions/number of users/number of records. We suggest Zoho think this over. Why provide a “basic”system when you can provide a whole system which is valued based on growth or size?
15. Offline access. Another carrier-grade feature that needs to be placed on people’s desks and phones rather quickly. Zoho needs to understand mobility in the real world today, and how the lack of offline impairs greatly the usability of the product. You want to be a cloud champion? Provide offline access.
16. Exporting Reports to PDF and printing (urgent). Finally, we need to stress the issues related to the current issue exporting reports to PDF and printing them. This feature used to work nicely, but it has been broken for a long time and nobody has cared to fix it. The reports print with no margins and basically the export feature is completely useless at the moment. What is the value of a good report without printing?

To end on a good note, we commend the Zoho developers and managers in launching the new UI, much cleaner and better, with only minor issues to be resolved. In general it is a good step forward. Users who complain all the time should make a better effort to understand these changes first and adopt a less whining attitude. Congrats to Zoho.

Finally, we would love to have this message to be passed along to Sridhar Vembu, he has had a good vision from the beginning and should be made aware of the issues surrounding the user community and pay special attention to those who provide feedback in a constructive maner.

We love Zoho and will continue to provide positive feeback to help you make the system better.

Regards,