What's New in Zoho Inventory - March & April 2020
Hello, everyone!
Hope you're all safe and well. The past few weeks have been challenging not just for businesses, but for the entire world as we fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Even during these testing times, our team has been working remotely to provide you with maximum assistance. Here's a myriad of updates that were rolled out in Zoho Inventory in the past couple of months.
Reporting Tags
Reporting tags allow you to create customized tags and associate them with items, contacts, and transactions. You can then run your reports based on these tags.
To create a reporting tag: Go to Settings > Reporting Tags > click the + New Tag button.
Zoho Desk Integration
Zoho Desk is a help desk software used by businesses to address customer queries and feedbacks over a variety of channels. You can integrate it with Zoho Inventory to charge your customers for the tickets handled and for the time spent on each ticket.
Documents tab
The Documents tab is a space in Zoho Inventory where you can upload files. You can later attach these files to your contacts and transactions. You can also create folders to organize your uploaded files.
To access the Documents tab, click the folder icon in the top-right corner of the Zoho Inventory dashboard.
PayTabs Integration [GCC editions]
PayTabs is a popular online payment gateway in the GCC region. You can now integrate this gateway with Zoho Inventory to collect payments from your customers swiftly and securely. This integration is available in the Bahrain, UAE, and Saudi Arabia editions of Zoho Inventory.
Warehouse-level distribution of opening stock
Until now, the opening stock of an item was saved in the primary warehouse, and you will have to create transfer orders to distribute this stock to other warehouses.
You now have the option to split the opening stock among the available warehouses in the item creation page itself. You'll also be able to add serial and batch numbers to the opening stock in each warehouse.
Customer Credit Limit
By setting a credit limit for each customer, you can restrict sales for that customer when their payment due exceeds a certain amount. This will help you keep a check on your customer's outstanding receivables.
Field Validation
You can now write your own set of rules to validate the data of a field. You can also choose whether the rule is to be applied on all the transactions or on selected transactions that satisfy specific criteria. Validation rules is available for the sales orders and invoices modules.
To set up validation rules: Go to Settings > Preferences > Sales Orders/Invoices > click on the Validation Rules tab > + New Validation Rule.
Reports Comparison
Compare data from different periods of a report side-by-side, and get a clear insight into your business performance.
To do so: Go to Reports in the left sidebar > open a report > click Customize Report > under Compare with, choose a period and the number of such periods to compare with.
Taxable orders can be synced from Shopify [GCC editions]
You can now fetch VAT inclusive orders from Shopify in the Bahrain, UAE, and Saudi Arabia editions of Zoho Inventory.
Warehouse to marketplace mapping
For every marketplace integrated with Zoho Inventory, you can now designate a warehouse to track the incoming orders and stock changes. By assigning a dedicated warehouse, you can track the overall sales through that marketplace, and monitor the demand for the product in that particular sales channel. This is applicable for Amazon US, Amazon CA, eBay US, eBay UK, Shopify and Etsy.
Multi-piece shipment for UPS
If you have integrated Zoho Inventory with UPS, you can now create a single shipment with multiple packages. For every package in the shipment, UPS will generate a tracking ID and a shipping label which you can download and print.
Mercado Pago [Latin America]
Integrate your Zoho Inventory organization with Mercado Pago, a popular online payment gateway for businesses located in the Latin American regions. With Mercado Pago, you can collect online or offline payments for invoices via cash, debit or credit cards, and red link transfers, securely and effortlessly.
Taxes on Shipping Charges [UK & Global editions]
You can now apply taxes on shipping charges. Enter the shipping charges and then choose the tax rate to be applied to it.
Items with Identical Names
You can now create two or more items with identical names in Zoho Inventory. You must, however, provide a distinct SKU for each product you're creating.
To enable this: Go to Settings > Preferences > Items > Enable the Allow Duplicate Item Name option.
Do try out these features and let us know your thoughts about them in the comments.
Cheers,
Lakshmi