Zoho Problems as at 31.01.2021

1)    Orders placed on Amazon, do not sync through from Zoho to quickbooks online correctly with correct taxes. So none of my orders from Amazon are in QBO. I now have over 7 months of transactions missing from my accounts- so I have no idea about the status of my accounts.

2)    If an invoice from Zoho doesn’t sync through to QBO, (and believe me this happens for multiple silly reasons) you receive no warning or alert. So unless you search through activity logs, or constantly run tables of invoice numbers in QBO and zoho to find any gaps you are none the wiser, and again your accounts in QBO are meaningless as so much data is missing, but the alrming thing is you don’t even know that!

3)    Packing lists are so basic that your customer, on receiving a parcel, cannot see how many items they ordered and how many were shipped. They only get a list of how many were shipped, so they have no idea if the items not listed have simply been missed of the order, or if there is a stock issue. You need 2 columns- qty ordered and qty shipped

4)    This links into the fact that you cannot have a zero qty line item on an invoice/ packing slip- so again, the customer has no idea if you simply missed the item off the order, or it was OOS

5)    The next invoices in a sequence automatically toggle to ‘Vat Inclusive’ after an order from Shopify or Amazon has come in. This would not be an issue except that Zoho does not understand the basic principle that the overall value of the invoice should not change but the item prices displayed will change. So you have an item which is £5.00 ex VAT. If you choose to display prices as Including VAT it should then show as £6.00.  This is how other accounting software such as quickbooks/ XERO etc  works . So the overall invoice total shouldn’t change. It’s just how the prices are shown.  But Zoho doesn’t understand that- so if you don’t notice that that option has been toggled without your knowledge, you land up with piles of invoices sent out to clients with the total value too low, because that switch has been toggled, and effectively the customer has not been charged the £5.00 + vat or £6.00 inc VAT. They have suddenly been charged £5.00 inc VAT!! I have tried to explain this to ZOHO but they don’t seem to understand it. The only reason I picked this problem up is that I noticed when customers were making payments, which I was recording in Zoho as instructed, that the payment wasn’t able to allocate in QBO, because some of the invoices were ‘missing’ in QBO. On investigating why the invoices were missing in QBO, I discovered that they had not exported from Zoho due to being toggled to ‘Vat inclusive’ which QuickBooks didn’t accept because the overall invoice value was wrong. Again, there was no warning message that the invoice had failed to export to QBO!!

6)    Zoho Doesn’t handle VAT Inclusive/ vat exclusive correctly. So you have an item which is £5.00 ex VAT. If you choose to display prices as ‘Including VAT’ it should then show as £6.00.  This is how other accounting software such a QuickBooks works So the overall invoice total doesn’t change. It’s just how the prices are shown.  But Zoho doesn’t understand that, and I have lost hundreds of pounds as customers have been sent invoices with the wrong values, and paid them, and then refused to pay when I have noticed and corrected

7)    ZOHO and QBO don’t talk the same language with VAT – sometimes invoice totals differ by a few pence in quickbooks and Zoho – and so payments don’t allocate correctly in QBO

8)    ZOHO reports are not suitable for managing inventory:- so for example, you receive an item into stock and you know lots of people are waiting for it, but you have no way of running a report to find out who is waiting for it?? You can see there is X qty of committed stock- but can you see who it is for? NO? This is supposed to be inventory software. In quickbooks you can see how many items are on back order, and then drill down on that qty and see who is waiting?

9)    Zoho workflow for PO is too rigid, such that you cannot actually keep track of what inventory you have ordered and what you have received! So for example, you place a PO for 3 line items. The vendor issues a bill for those items, you pay it, and they commence manufacture. However, they may ship some of the order by air, and some by sea (perhaps you are in a hurry for it or perhaps they could not make everything at once? 0 But Zoho will not let you make a partial receive if the bill has been issued- Unless you divide it into 2 bills, or delete the bill and payment,  Which is not feasible as you paid the whole bill up front. And deleting the bill in Zoho does not then do that in QBO_ so again your accounts are inaccurate! You should be able to choose how many items you receive and when- after all this is inventory system not accounts system!! I chose ZOHO because it was listed as integrating with QBO- but there are SO many flaws in this integration.

10) I can’t seem to run reports to show average monthly sales of items?

11) There is no option to decide at which point physical stock has ‘left inventory’ so you cannot keep track of stock if several customer order the same low stock item on the same day- you will only be aware of a problem at the end of the day when you ship all the parcels. I would like the option to set my inventory to reduce once I have made a packing slip or invoice, so as soon as it is allocated to one customer it is no longer available to allocate to another. At the moment the default is that it leaves inventory only when the parcel is  actually shipped which causes me lots of problems   of overbooked inventory. 

12) If you offer discounts on a bill, there are no VAT codes for this. 

13) If you have items in a group with 4 colour variations, and 10 sizes and then you decide to add another 2 colours to your collection, there is no way to add these options. You. Have to create a new group and make the 20 new items, and then move them to a group. Again, crazy- this is supposed to be an inventory system capable of handling variants!

14) There are regular updates,  (refreshes) but we never know what has been updated, and frequently these updates cause a random problem- we need to know what we are updating when we press that yellow ‘refresh button’ 

I know there are many other problems I face on a daily basis, but these 14 really make Zoho very difficult to use on a daily basis, and the number of errors I have in my accounts is huge.  I have been struggling away with Zoho since June 2020, and I am now very much regretting my choice and want to change to another provider, but I cannot even do that as I do not have a full set of accounts to export. SO I am stuck. I am probably the only person in the world thankful it is COVID times because my business is quiet enough to struggle along with these problems but honestly, the stress it is causing me!!  I Have had multiple support calls with various member of the team, and I am often told – ‘this is almost ready be patient’, or ‘no, this is not possible right now but we will tell the development team.  At this stage I would not recommend ZOHO to anybody. Which is sad. - I like the guys and  when I first started testing it I thought it was fab. But as I tried to run my business, more and more problems revealed themselves!