What's New in Zoho Books - December 2021

What's New in Zoho Books - December 2021

Hello!
We have arrived at the last month of 2021! And we at Zoho Books are back again with a fresh set of updates to enhance your accounting. Let's take a quick look at what's new this December:
 

Multiple Transaction Number Series

You can now create different transaction number series with unique prefixes for your transactions. This can be useful if you wish to create different series for transactions based on criteria like customers, items, the type of transactions, or the place of supply. If you have branches enabled in your organisation, you can create multiple transaction series for each branch. Learn more.

To enable this feature: Go to Settings > Preferences > Transaction Number Series.


Associate accounts with taxes (Global edition)

Create input and output tax accounts and associate them under Tracking Preferences while creating or updating a tax. You also have the option to delete the system generated input and output tax accounts.

To associate an account with a tax: Go to Settings > Taxes > New Tax > Select the account under the Track taxes under separate accounts checkbox.



E-invoicing (Saudi Arabia edition)

E-invoicing is being mandated from 4, December 2021 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To stay compliant, we've introduced e-invoicing in Zoho Books which will be  enabled for all organisations by default from 1 December 2021. 

In order to stay compliant with the new norms is to set Standard E-invoice Template and Simplified E-invoice Template as your default templates to generate ZATCA compliant e-invoices. Note:, once you mark an invoice as Sent, you cannot edit or delete it. To make adjustments to the amount, you can create debit or credit notes with the required amounts.

Check out our guide and help document to know more about E-invoicing.

To set the necessary template as default: Go to Settings > Templates > Invoices. Click the settings (cog) icon over the templates mentioned above and select Set as Default.


Redesigned MISC format and new NEC form in the 1099 report (US Edition)

To stay compliant with the latest IRS regulations, we've redesigned the MISC format and introduced the NEC format in the 1099 report. The following boxes were added to the respective forms for the year 2021:
- Box 11 - Fish Purchased for Resale in the MISC form
- Box 2 - Payer Made Direct Sales of $5,000 or More in the NEC form.
This feature is available in the US edition and the Global edition for organisations with the country set as US and currency as USD. If you've generated the forms in the old format, you can view them by clicking View Report in Old Format. Once you've generated the new report, the old report will be overwritten.

To generate the report: Go to Reports > Taxes > 1099 Report and select the required form.


Hindi Characters support in PDF Templates (India Edition)

If you've added Hindi characters for contact, template or item details, you can now display them in template PDFs by selecting Hind as the font in the Template Properties section while editing templates.

To generate a PDF template in Hindi: Go to Settings > Templates > Select a template > Select  Hind from the PDF font dropdown.


Try these features out and let us know what you think in the comments below. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at support@zohobooks.com. You can also view a list of all recent updates in the What's New timeline.

Regards,
The Zoho Books Team.

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