Starting October 1, 2026, Meta will begin charging per message for utility template messages sent within an active 24-hour customer service window on the WhatsApp Business Platform. This applies to all WhatsApp messages sent through Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Marketing Automation. Utility messages sent outside the window and marketing messages continue to be billed as they are today, and Meta only charges for messages successfully delivered.

The same Meta change affects Zoho Desk IM, with more to it. Rates are being revised for some countries and regions, and Service messages become chargeable, including those from Guided Conversations and Zia bots on a WhatsApp channel. The first 1,000 per business phone number each month are free, resetting monthly with no volume discounts beyond that, and once the allowance is used you'll need sufficient credits or messages won't send. Sandbox channels also support incoming messages only, so if your testing relied on sending from sandbox, that needs rebuilding.

This is live now. When a Client Portal user accesses the Users API, the response is limited to basic identifying details: name, ID, and user type. Email address, role, profile, and status are no longer returned, so any Client Portal integration relying on those fields needs updating. Regular CRM users are unaffected and still get the full response. If you have a valid use case for a removed field, contact support.

Workflow rules can now do more than trigger predefined actions. Add a deployed Zia Agent as an action, define the query you want to send, and it analyzes the CRM record whenever the workflow runs. When a new lead comes in, for example, an agent can review the lead's details and draft a personalized follow-up email, rather than sending the same predefined one to everyone. Available in the US, IN, EU, AU, and CN data centres for Professional and above editions.

Timelines now cover subforms, so rows being added, updated, or deleted show up in a record's Timeline, with a Primary Field identifying which row changed. With a KYC Documents subform, choosing Document Name shows exactly which document was updated. For existing subforms with no Primary Field set, S.No is used by default, though changes won't show until that field is in a used state.

Instead of clicking through multiple screens, you can now describe what you need and a native agent builds it for you. Five customization agents cover profiles, roles, data sharing rules, review processes, and segmentation, each behind a Customize with Agent button on its settings page. Need five new regional lead roles, each reporting to a different director? One prompt creates all five with the right hierarchy. You'll need Zoho Hosted LLM enabled under Setup, Zia, Models first.

When your partner network grows, spreadsheets and email threads stop keeping up. PRM (Partner Relationship Management) brings your partner ecosystem into a dedicated workspace inside Zoho CRM. Build tiered or non-tiered partner programs, give partners a portal to register deals and monitor their commissions, track how they're performing against targets, and automate commission calculations and payouts. It needs the new CRM UI, and it's included at no extra charge for now. Currently in the IN data centre for Enterprise and above, with other regions following.

The new Zoho Bookings extension for Zoho Cliq brings your booking notifications into the conversations you're already having. Get instant alerts when appointments are booked, rescheduled, or canceled, plus reminders before upcoming ones, see today's and upcoming appointments, and reschedule, cancel, or mark them completed or no-show without leaving Cliq.

Bigin has built this year's Apple AI updates into the app. Ask Siri about your schedule, get context on the deal or customer you're looking at, or find directions to your next meeting without leaving what you're doing. Apple Intelligence adds instant summaries of customers, deals, notes, email threads, and WhatsApp chats, smart reply suggestions, and daily overviews. On Apple Watch, an AI-generated to-do list and a Digital Crown timeline bring your day to your wrist. You can also generate product images from a prompt and let the card scanner handle business cards.

You can now connect a Snapchat account to Zoho Social and manage it alongside your other channels. Publish Spotlights, the standalone videos discoverable by a wider audience, add Stories that stay visible for 24 hours, and keep your best of either as Saved Stories beyond their usual expiry. Publish instantly or schedule ahead with Add to Queue or SmartQ. Available on Standard, Professional, Premium, Agency, and Agency Plus plans.

Night Mode is now in beta for Zoho Recruit, giving you a lower-glare interface for long sessions reviewing resumes or sourcing candidates. Enable it from the Profile icon by selecting Night under Mode, and it applies across dashboards, candidate and job records, module views, workflows, and navigation. External pages like your Career Site, Portals, and Marketplace Apps aren't covered yet.

If you sign in more than one capacity, say as your company's finance manager and also as an independent consultant, you've had to update your signature details each time you switch. Signature profiles fix that. Each profile holds a signature, initials, an organization stamp, and details like company and job title, with up to five saved and one set as your default.

Zoho Contracts now connects to DocuSign, linking contract management and the e-signature workflow. Start the signing process from a contract record and you're taken into DocuSign to set the signing order, authentication, reminders, and expiry, and place the fields. Contracts keeps the signature activity against the record, so you can see when a signer receives, views, signs, or declines, recall a pending request, or extend one that has expired.

Zoho Notebook now lets you share a notebook or notecard with a single group email address, and everyone in the group gets their invite the moment you click Share. You choose the permission, Read Only, Write, or Write & Delete, and can update it or remove access anytime.

There's plenty going on across the Workplace suite in August. Zoho Mail Premium is now available through the AWS Marketplace, with charges consolidated into your existing AWS billing. Zoho Sheet's offline mode also arrives on iPhone, so you can create and edit spreadsheets without a connection and import them once you're back online. Cliq, Writer, Connect, and Vault get updates too, including a Mailchimp integration for Cliq and subform-based document generation in Writer, so the full post is worth a look.

Scheduled Custom Reports now support saved Views, so recipients only receive data matching your filters, with unfiltered data sent if you don't select one. Quick Support for macOS now ships as a package installer with a property list configuration file, replacing the previous disk image, so enterprises can deploy at scale through mobile device management. Diagnostic Tools get new options across Linux, macOS, and Windows, and Android TV now works with the directional pad on your remote, so you can join a session without a mouse or touchscreen.

The Feed under Collaboration can now be opened from inside a specific project, so you only see that project's activity instead of everything at once. Admins also get four new time log restrictions, based on task completion, project status, IP address, and profile. Task completion caps logging proportionally: a task with six allotted hours at 50% complete allows three hours of logging. Project status can block logging on completed projects, which stops time being added after it's already been billed.

The Nigerian Edition is now live, bringing inventory management to businesses in Nigeria. Loyalty Program Management lets you reward customers with points they can earn and redeem across supported sales channels, including Retail Store checkout, with points automatically reversed when a credit note is raised for a return. The new CoCreate Agent creates sales orders, invoices, and credit notes from a plain-English prompt rather than field-by-field entry. Super Admin gives one administrator exclusive control over other admins, and Purchase Returns is now available across all editions. Early Access covers Combo Items and Item Modifiers, with plenty more in the full post.

When customers subscribe through Google Play or the App Store, keeping track of it all gets harder as your business grows. Omnichannel Subscription brings those subscriptions into Zoho Billing using the In-App Purchases SDK, so renewals, upgrades, downgrades, pauses, cancellations, and expirations stay in sync automatically. That means one customer with subscriptions across the mobile app, your website, and the sales team shows up in a single view. It's in early access, so contact support to enable it.

Zoho Creator portals now support mobile number sign-in alongside email, so users can join and authenticate with OTPs sent straight to their phones. Invitations, OTPs, and password resets all arrive as SMS, and admins can customize each message with reusable templates. You'll need the Creator SMS integration configured with credits purchased first, and for now it supports Indian mobile numbers only.

Zoho Apptics is now part of the Zoho One suite, bringing app stability, performance, usage, engagement, user behavior, growth, and app store insights together across mobile, web, and desktop. Developers get crash and error reporting and performance monitoring, while Flows, Funnels, Retention, and Segmentation show the journeys users take and where they drop off. SDKs cover Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, and a dozen other platforms. It's also built with privacy in mind, with user consent management and role-based access control.

That's your September Part 3 wrap-up. Which update stood out for you? Drop a comment and let us know, and we'll see you next week!

Missed an edition? Catch up on Part 1 (September 1–7) and Part 2 (September 8–15), or browse the full Zoho Community Digest archive.