Hello everyone!

The first half of August brought a solid run of CRM updates, from Canvas Templates and a more flexible Approval Process to portal filters, My Jobs approvals, and bigger label limits. Alongside those are two fresh Kaizens, the return of the Kiosk Studio Sessions series, and a couple of community threads worth jumping into. Here's everything from August 1–15, 2026

Product Updates:

Portal users can now save filters

Portal users had to re-apply filters from scratch every time they needed a filtered view. That changes now. Portal users can save and reuse up to 5 filters per module on Professional, and up to 10 on Enterprise and Ultimate, just like standard CRM users.

Bulk actions and smarter routing in the approvals tab

The Approvals tab in My Jobs now lets you bulk approve, reject, or delegate instead of handling requests one by one, with advanced filters and column management to find what you need. Approval comments can be saved as record notes for use in reports and automations. You can also assign approvals to a user lookup field, so the right person gets the request automatically based on the record. Check the announcement for the full rundown.

Heads up: longer module and field labels are coming

Module and field label limits are increasing in Zoho CRM. Module labels go from 25 to 50 characters and field labels from 50 to 100, giving you room for clearer terminology instead of cut-off abbreviations. It's rolling out in phases over the coming days. Developers using the Modules or Fields APIs should review any client-side validations that enforce the old limits.

Design a form layout once and apply it across modules

If you use the same Canvas form design across several modules, updating it used to mean editing each module separately. Canvas Templates fix that. Build one master template, link as many modules as you need, and any layout change rolls out to all of them automatically. You can still override styling for an individual module within the template, or unsync a module entirely to make it independent while the rest keep inheriting updates.

Build more flexible approval workflows

Configuring an approval process is now far more flexible. You can name rules and stages, set field updates and task assignments per stage, add email notifications on rejection, and review the full approval history in a new tabular view alongside the narrative one. If your approvals span multiple teams and review stages, they're now much easier to build and manage. Available on Enterprise and Ultimate, rolling out in phases. Check the announcement for the full rundown.

Quick Wins:

Show Kiosk changes without an in-page refresh

A Kiosk that updates fields or adds related lists can't refresh the record page in place when it finishes, something a few users have asked for. Sunderjan confirmed an in-page refresh isn't currently possible, but pointed to a practical alternative: use the Open Record action in Kiosk Studio to open the updated record in a new tab, so users still see the changes without disrupting the flow.

Functions and Client Scripts:

Converting RTF to plain text in Deluge

There's no built-in way to strip rich-text formatting to plain text on the fly in Deluge, so Sakis Oikonomou shared the approach he uses: convert the line breaks, strip the tags, then decode and tidy what's left. If you've tackled this before or have a cleaner approach, jump in and share it.

Kiosk Studio Sessions:

Session 10: automate renewal risk classification with Zia Agents

The Kiosk Studio Sessions series is back with a substantial build. Session 10 walks through a full renewal risk classifier inside Zoho CRM, using two Zia Agents in a Kiosk flow: one reads the account and its related records to classify it Green, Yellow, or Red with a confidence score, the top three signals, and a recommended retention play, and the other logs the CSM's (Customer Success Manager) final decision back to the record. The CSM stays in control, with a human-in-the-loop review before anything is written back.

Kaizen:

(Kaizen #254) - Building a temporal lead score decay system

A lead that engaged last week shouldn't look the same as one that engaged today. This Kaizen adds a Current Intent Score that decays the longer a lead stays inactive, sitting alongside the original engagement score rather than overwriting it, so your sales team can prioritize the leads with the most recent buying intent instead of the highest historical score.

(Kaizen #255) - Building a real-time operational dashboard with Queries

What if your Service Manager could open CRM and instantly see which requests are overdue, which have breached SLA (Service Level Agreement), which need escalation, and which have weekend target dates, all in one place? This Kaizen builds exactly that with a Query whose serializer computes those indicators at runtime, so the dashboard reflects live data with no exports or manual reports.

That's your August Part 1 CRM Digest. Got a question, or something you'd like to see covered? Drop it in the comments, and we'll see you in Part 2!

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