What's New in Zoho Inventory - May 2021

We've made some essential enhancements to the shipping and tracking modules of Zoho Inventory that'll aid your fulfilment process. Read on to learn about the new updates.

Third-Party Billing for UPS

Editions: All

Subscription Plans: All

Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books (via Inventory add-on) now support third-party billing for UPS integration. With this option, you can now specify a third-party account which will bear the shipping costs and the duties (for international shipments only).

There are no dedicated steps to enable or disable this option. While creating a UPS shipment in Zoho Inventory, you will come across an option called Configure Billing Method, wherein, you will be able to specify who pays for the transportation charges and taxes. You can either bear these costs yourself or assign them to a third-party by providing their UPS account number, country code, and postal code.

This feature would especially come in handy for drop-shippers who work with other vendors to supply goods to end customers.

Real-time Tracking for Purchase Receives (or GRNs) through AfterShip

Editions: All

Subscription Plans: Professional or higher

You can now keep track of the goods which you have purchased from your vendors through AfterShip tracking.

Until now, AfterShip tracking was supported only for manual shipments and transfer orders. This service has now been extended to track purchase receives in Zoho Inventory.

After you record a purchase receive for your purchase orders, click the Enable real-time tracking button on the top-right corner of the purchase receive. Fill in a few details (like the tracking ID, carrier, etc,.) to start tracking your goods in transit and get updates within Zoho Inventory.

Note: When you create a purchase receive to enable real-time tracking, the physical stock of all items on the purchase receive will increase accordingly, even if the goods are yet to reach you.

Tracking URL for EasyPost and Manual Shipments

Editions: All

Subscription Plans: All

The dedicated Tracking URL field in manual shipments now lets you visit the carrier's website to track the status of your shipment. This is available even for the shipments tracked in real-time by AfterShip.

In case of EasyPost shipments, the tracking URL is displayed within the shipment order. Click the new window icon adjacent to this URL to view the status of a particular shipment directly from EasyPost.

Pulling Marketplace Orders from a Custom Timeframe

Until now, you could only sync new orders or resync orders from a particular timestamp. With this update, you can now select a date range within which you want to re-sync orders and items from a marketplace into Zoho Inventory. To do so:

Go to the integration details page of a marketplace.
Click the Sync Manually button under the Orders or Items section.
Choose the 'Specific Period' option from the Fetch records from dropdown.
Select the start and end date.
Click Initiate Sync to pull your orders.

Cost Price Field in Inventory Adjustments and Transfer Orders

We have provided a field to enter the cost price of the stock when creating or editing inventory adjustments by quantity and inter-branch transfer orders.

For Quantity Adjustments, this field will be pre-filled with the cost price specified for the item from the most recent purchase transaction. If your organization is enabled with branching, the cost price is determined based on the cost of the item in the branch associated with the transaction.

For Transfer Orders, this field will be pre-filled with cost price from the most recent purchase transaction associated with the destination branch. This field will only be available for transfer orders between warehouses associated with different branches.

The value entered in this field will be used for inventory valuation.

Give these new features a spin and let us know your thoughts about them in the comments below. You can also write to us at support@zoho-inventory.com if you need any assistance.

Thanks and regards,

Lakshmi

The Zoho Inventory Team