We have suddenly run into a limitation of Zoho CRM, and we are seriously considering searching for another CRM where we can solve this.

Zoho CRM makes the following assumption: that users manage meetings between themselves and an external lead. So, Zoho CRM does not give the user any tool to specify a timezone. A meeting is supposed to happen in the timezone that the user has in their settings.

So, when the user fills a date-time field, it will automatically be considered in the user's timezone (and be converted to other timezones if other users with a different timezone in their settings see the record). This happens in meetings and in all modules in fact.

Now consider this situation: a user closes a meeting for a business trip in a different country. The user, on the phone with the lead, closes a meeting for 10am, and writes 10am in the CRM field, but the meeting's location has a +2 time difference; so, a user in that timezone, or the lead if they get the calendar invitation, would see 12pm, which is an incorrect hour.

This may be seen as a corner case. Zoho CRM's assumption that a user is closing meetings for themselves and a lead, in the same timezone, is surely correct most times. But my company closes dozens of cross-timezone meetings every month, and users constantly record meetings for third parties that will happen in a different timezone from the user. It's also usual for us to close meetings that the user won't be attending.

So, a person in California may close meetings that they won't attend and will happen in Puerto Rico, and the final report for this might be generated and printed by a user in Spain. And this won't be an exception that can be handled manually, it will happen massively.

Zoho CRM, as it is, apparently offers no way of managing this. It seems there is no way of overriding the timezone assumption and adding a timezone part to date-time fields.

Does anyone know any solution to this situation? Thank you.