Hello everyone!

The second half of July brought five CRM updates, including a heads-up for developers on API changes coming in October, one Quick Win on keeping your attribution data intact through lead conversion, two Dev's Corner threads worth bookmarking, and a Kaizen on bulk processing at scale.

Let's get into it!

Product Updates:

The mobile app gets smarter on iOS and Android

Several updates landed across iOS and Android this month. Reports are now on iOS with export support, dynamic formula fields on Android always show current values, and multi-select lookup fields now work during Blueprint transitions on both platforms. Check the announcement for the full rundown.

Advanced Analytics now covers your team modules too

Zoho CRM's Advanced Analytics now supports team modules, so you can pull team data, notes, and fields directly into your reports and dashboards. Track team productivity, workload distribution, deals closed by team, and customer journeys across the full lifecycle without manual exports or workarounds.

Kiosk Studio now supports loops

Kiosk actions used to run one record at a time. Now a loop lets you configure the logic once and run it across multiple records automatically, and you decide when it stops.

Turn scanned tables into subform entries

Zia Vision's ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) can now recognize and extract tabulated data from scanned documents and store it directly in your CRM subforms. Think prescription tables, insurance forms, or university applications, anything with rows of data that used to need manual entry.

Heads up: mandatory field behavior is changing in the APIs

Zoho CRM is planning API updates expected to roll out by the end of October 2026. Last_Name in Leads and Contacts will no longer be system-mandatory, and you'll be able to configure either First_Name or Last_Name as mandatory based on your layout. There are breaking changes to the metadata and Get Records APIs, so if you have integrations touching these fields, it's worth reviewing them now. Nothing is live yet. Check the announcement and the comments for the technical details and guidance on adapting your integrations.

Quick Wins:

Don't lose your lead data when converting to a contact or deal

When a lead converts, fields like Lead Creation Date and UTM parameters don't carry over automatically, quietly breaking your ROI and attribution reporting. Kudos to @Subhash Kumar for laying out the fix: create matching fields in Contacts and Deals and map them under Setup → Modules and Fields → Lead Conversion Mapping. For multi-touch models, a post-conversion workflow can populate the rest, and he makes a good case for treating the original Lead values as immutable first-touch data.

Dev's Corner:

A reusable function for bulk deleting records programmatically

Deleting records in bulk is easy enough in the UI. Doing it automatically, from your own business logic or an integration, is where it gets tricky. @Sakis Oikonomou shared a reusable Deluge function that uses COQL to fetch record IDs with pagination, batches them into groups of 100, and runs the CRM bulk delete API while tracking successes and failures. Change the module API name and it works anywhere.

Every scope added, and still a scope error

Emma was trying to pull her mail merge templates into a custom function dropdown and kept hitting OAUTH_SCOPE_MISMATCH, despite having every mailmerge scope she could think of. She shared her full code and the error, and the community got her there: @Haiku Technical Support pointed at the broader settings scope, and @Jeyaprakash M confirmed that adding ZohoCRM.settings.ALL was what did it. A good reminder that granular scopes don't always cover a settings endpoint.

Kaizen:

(Kaizen #251) - From Campaign Leads to Sales Orders with Mass Action APIs

Mass Action APIs let you reassign, convert, and process records in bulk, all asynchronously. This Kaizen walks through a complete campaign-to-sales-order flow: bulk lead reassignment, batch lead conversion, then Quote-to-Sales Order conversion, with job IDs and status APIs at every step so you always know what happened. Note the limits, up to 50,000 records for a mass owner change, but 50 per call for conversions.

Kaizen #252 - Managing Data Sharing Rules using APIs

This Kaizen covers the complete API lifecycle: retrieve, create, update, activate, deactivate, rerun, and monitor, so you can integrate sharing rule management directly into your governance or compliance workflows.

Kaizen #253 : Custom Validation for Blueprint to Enforce Mandatory File Uploads and File Extension Compliance Using Client Script

Deals moving forward without the required document attached is a quiet but costly gap in any approval workflow. This Kaizen shows how to use a Client Script on the beforeTransition event to check whether a file is uploaded and whether it's the right type, blocking the transition with a clear error message if either check fails.

That's July Part 2 wrapped up, and July with it!

Caught something cool we missed, or have a favorite from this edition? Drop it in the comments. We'd love to hear from you.

If you haven't already, check out Part 1 of the July digest for the first half of the month. We'll be back with more updates and community gems.