Hello everyone!

August's second half brought a strong set of updates to Zoho CRM. The Functions experience gets a complete redesign, Incentives brings commission management natively inside the platform, and Dashboards pick up four focused improvements. There's also a Quick Win on Blueprint file uploads and two Kaizens, one building an arrival readiness dashboard and one on product-specific pipelines.

Let's get into it!

Product Updates:

A redesigned Functions experience

Each function now has its own workspace to monitor performance, track associations, debug issues, and review revision history in one place. The Functions tab lets you sort, filter, tag, and save custom views, so finding the right function takes seconds. Python 3.12 is now supported, alongside Deluge, Java 17, and Node.js 22. If you're writing in Java, Node.js, or Python, Zoho Request Client gives you a built-in way to call CRM APIs, other Zoho services, and third-party APIs, and it handles authentication for you on CRM calls. Built-in Analytics shows invocations, success rates, and credit consumption across a 30-day window. Rolling out in phases.

Four dashboard improvements

Funnel components now support drill-down, so clicking a stage opens the records behind it. Duration is no longer mandatory for KPIs, Target Meters, Funnels, and Comparators, so you can leave it empty to build against your whole dataset, or still set a date range when you want a time-bound view. Date filters pick up Before and After operators, useful when you care about everything either side of a milestone rather than a window with two ends. Week groupings now show start and end dates instead of week numbers, so charts are easier to read. Rolling out in phases.

Sales commission management now lives inside CRM

Incentives for Zoho CRM is a new app in the CRM App Space that uses your existing sales data to calculate, automate, and track commissions without duplicate effort. Design plans for different sales roles and structures, whether flat, tiered, quota-based, or line item-based, trigger computation from leads, deals, invoices, or custom modules, automate approvals, and build dashboards to track commission spend and top contributors. It's included at no extra charge for now on Enterprise, Ultimate, CRM Plus, and Zoho One, though your org needs to be on the new CRM UI and there's no mobile support yet. Rolling out to Ultimate first, with other editions following.

Automate anything at every stage of your review process

Until now, review process actions were limited to notification toggles. You can now attach a function to any review action, giving you full control over what happens when a record is submitted, reviewed, rejected, or resubmitted. Send custom emails, update fields, call external services, or trigger whatever else your workflow needs. One thing to know if you're working with the API: records still in review are only returned when you pass approved = both, and in the UI they sit under the Leads in Review view rather than All Leads.

Full Data sandbox now supports additional storage

As CRM environments grow, the default 10 GB limit for a Full Data sandbox was stopping larger organizations from creating or rebuilding one at all. You can now buy an additional 30 GB from the Storage page, or straight from the alert that appears during sandbox creation when your production data exceeds the limit. The extra storage applies only to the Full Data sandbox, not other sandbox types. You'll need the Admin profile or the View Storage permission to buy it, and the storage page only appears if you have an active Full Data sandbox.

Quick Wins:

Making file uploads mandatory in Blueprint transitions

Added a custom File Upload field and found it missing from the During tab in Blueprints? Qscript Software Pvt Ltd shared a neat way around it: under Associated Items, check Attachments and mark it mandatory, so the transition can't complete without a document.

Kaizen:

(Kaizen #256) - Build an Arrival Readiness Web Tab

Front office teams spend valuable pre-check-in time opening booking records one by one to spot issues. This Kaizen builds a Web Tab that pulls all arrivals within the next 48 hours, classifies each as Ready, Action Required, or Attention based on ID verification and special request status, and lets staff send reminders or create tasks directly from the dashboard without leaving the screen. It combines CRM Widgets with Deluge functions exposed as REST APIs, and the full code is in the Kaizen GitHub repository.

(Kaizen #257) - Creating Product-Specific Sales Pipelines With CRM APIs

When a business sells multiple products or services, a single Deal pipeline rarely fits all of them. This Kaizen walks through creating and managing product-specific pipelines using the CRM APIs, with a car dealership running separate processes for new cars, insurance, and service plans. It covers retrieving the right layout and stage IDs, adding missing stages to the Stage picklist, creating pipelines with the correct stage order, and handling real-world changes like inserting a new stage mid-process or retiring an old pipeline and transferring its Deals across with the stages mapped.

That's your August Part 2 CRM Digest. Got a question, a build you're proud of, or something you'd like to see covered? Drop it in the comments, and we'll see you in the next one!

Missed Part 1? Catch up on August Part 1, or browse the full CRM Digest archive.