Simplifying complex report writing

Simplifying complex report writing

I'm not sure that there is an easy way to do this in Zoho but thought that people in here might be able to help - Zoho has so many products that maybe it can be done by linking to another.

So the scenario is that we have to at regular intervals write complex and detailed reports for clients...about 30% of the data we need will be in Zoho CRM. The rest is changeable but repeatable so we could in theory use a "Wizard" or tool to fill out most of the remaining information (we don't need to retain that additional info we just keep a copy of the final report).

Currently we do all this outside of Zoho.

I was considering using a simple mail merge from Zoho to writer for the 30% - but ideally we would like to take users through a form to complete the remaining 70% of data and then leave them with the final report in an editable format so that they can tidy it up etc. fix anything that needs bespoking.

I looked at Writers automation tool to create fillable fields, but it's a bit clunky because of how field lengths can change etc. And it can't be used via a mail merge from CRM

I have also been considering a 'custom module' to pull the contacts in take the user through a CRM wizard to complete that module and then merge that out to Writer from the custom module...not tried this just thinking about solutions. However this feels a bit silly as we don't need to retain that information and thus a custom module seems OTT and will cause Data Bloat.

The other option I thought about but have not explored would be using Zoho Forms to pull everything in from CRM that is held there and then the user would go through the form filling in everything else and then that could be the data source for a 'writer' mail merge...and hopefully launching that could be triggered from the Zoho Form itself so that the user can then tidy it up.

I have a feeling I might be trying to re-invent the wheel here so thought I'd ask the community how they do similar?

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