Intended workflow for estimates, received POs, etc.

Intended workflow for estimates, received POs, etc.

In every sales organization I've been, the flow of information has followed the same path:
  1. RFQ received from customer
  2. Quote sent to customer
  3. PO received from customer
  4. Sales Order created internally (work begins)
  5. Invoice sent to customer
  6. Payment received from customer
This workflow is very hard to follow in Zoho, which makes me wonder if there's a different method that I'm just not aware of.

Here's an example of what I mean, using Zoho Finance integration in CRM:
If I send a Quote/Estimate to a customer from CRM, neither that email nor his replies or attachments are visible or accessible at all from that Estimate; Same goes for Sales Orders. I have to find the Contact or Account to locate the customer's reply to find the PO attached to it.
From there, I can't simply associate/move the attachment to the Estimate; I either have to download the attachment and upload it again to the Estimate, or add it to my Work Drive and attach it from there (which is about as many clicks). If I create a Sales Order from that Estimate, the attachment isn't copied over.
And the attachments I add to the Estimate and Sales Order in CRM aren't synced over to Inventory or Books, so the PO isn't visible to the Invoicing team.
I thought maybe I should be going through the whole process in Books or Inventory, but the "Mails" tab only shows email subjects - not their contents or attachments (which is strange).

I'm surprised at how tedious this all is, given how streamlined Zoho is for other tasks; it's actually more work to use Zoho for this than to just forward emails around internally and save POs to a Google Drive folder. So I feel like I must be missing something.

Is there an easier way to go about this?



      • Sticky Posts

      • Free Webinar - Digital signatures for digital contract management with Zoho CRM

        Hi, Did you know you can seamlessly send and collect signatures on important business documents like business proposals, vendor agreements, sales contracts, invoices, and other inventory documents with Zoho Sign’s extension for Zoho CRM? Join our upcoming
      • New User Interface for your Email integration in Zoho CRM

        Hello folks,  As most of you may already know, Zoho Mail recently got a new user interface that's a lot better and easier to use. As a result, this change will affect your email integration with your Zoho CRM account**.  If you have your email integration in Zoho CRM set up through POP, your Emails UI in CRM will be moved to the new Zoho Mail UI. We hope that you like the new and improved Emails interface inside Zoho CRM. Feel free to share your feedback by commenting below.  **Please note that,
      • Fetching leads from Zoho CRM into Zoho Creator, automatically

        I'd like to pull new leads from the CRM system, into Creator, on a daily basis. Is this possible?   Yes, it is possible. Zoho Creator and Zoho CRM are integrated with each other, enabling you to synchronize data between them. This is done by fetching records from CRM into a Zoho Creator form. In order to achieve this, you'll have to configure a workflow alert in Zoho CRM.  For instance, you can maintain the lead details in CRM on a separate form in Zoho Creator by fetching the details automatically