We are an electrical contractor. We moved to Zoho earlier in the year, due to the diverse functionality offered, and the reps answered 'yes' to all of our questions in relation to functionality (as well as the promise of the 'imminent' release of a service management application). We, unfortunately, asked the questions "can we create kits to simplify selecting products for quotes" and "can we make picklists" separately, which, more fool us, lead us to think that we would be able to pick composite items on quotes, and then generate a picklist of items required for the composite item. On discovering this was not the case, we began looking into various avenues within the platform, and that maybe this is possible with some form of coding (without the use of a 3rd party application).

If we were to, for example, generate a sales order from a quote (we currently do not do this and take the accepted quote as the sales order) is there some way to 'intercept' the generation of the picklist? For Example

On selection of Create Picklist (from Sales Order)

For each item in list

This would (in my mind at least) run through each of the items on the sales order, check if it is composite, add on all of the associated items in the required quantities, remove the composite item, then check through all of the associated items (as they have been added to the list) and break those down as well. This would either then give a picklist in editable form (to modify for alternatives - we could not create composite items for every possible alternative for a service. Replacing a consumer unit is one single service, but has thousands of possible iterations for the items required), or a generated picklist that can be edited.

The issues I am currently scratching my head over are 1) is this even feasible to attempt, and 2) I don't really know how to code such a thing (yet); I don't want to spend days poring over various forums to build the code if it isn't possible to do in the first place.

Has anyone else attempted such a thing? I have seen it is not an uncommon issue that people have, but I'm sure there is someone else out there who will have thought to use a sledgehammer to open a nut.

Also, are we going to be able to associate goods to services in the FSM app, that would enable us to generate picking lists, materials consumed, etc which would in turn mean we could actually use the Inventory app as an inventory app, not just a long list of products and their prices. Such a thing would render my above query moot, assuming that the app is due to be released in a similar timescale as it would take to build the suggested workaround above.