Introducing Purchase Orders in Zoho Books: Streamline your purchases!

Posted by Posted on February 27, 2014 by Harish

Ever since we launched the latest version of Zoho Books with a new interface and added features, we have been receiving rave reviews from our customers.

We continue to investigate and interact with our users to see what other feature requests could be useful. Today we add another feature for inventory control thereby crossing yet another major milepost. We’re pleased to announce a new feature in Zoho Books: Purchase Order.

Purchase Orders are documents you issue when you buy products and services from a supplier. They help keep an account of all the purchases you make for your business.

This new feature in Zoho Books will allow you to:

Create and send customized purchase orders
Manage and access multiple purchase orders with ease
Duplicate PO for the same set of items or services
Track open Purchase Orders with our reports
Customize the PO template to match your supplier’s requirements

The Purchase Order tab on the new interface of Zoho Books is sure to be another appreciated feature for every user. We’ve made it comprehensive and easy to use.

Go ahead. Start using PO now.

Learn everything there’s to know about Purchase Orders from our help page.

Share, Discuss and Get Paid Fast: The Client Portal is here!

Posted by Posted on February 24, 2014 by Krupa Subramanian

Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice are not just for you but also your clients!

The Client Portal allows you to share information with your clients conveniently and efficiently. Get rid of lengthy email threads to discuss estimates and forget waiting for an update on the invoices you sent. The best part is, you don’t need to wait so long to get paid!

Client_Portal

Here are more reasons why you should start using Client Portal in Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice, immediately. Read more →

Introducing the New Zoho Books: Smart Accounting for Growing Businesses

Posted by Posted on January 28, 2014 by Rodrigo Vaca

If you think accounting for your business is complicated, then you haven’t been using Zoho Books. Today we’re pleased to release the latest version of our online accounting software. Of course it makes accounting for your business so much easier, even enjoyable, but that’s not all there is to it. With Zoho Books you can invoice customers and get paid online quickly, track time and expenses you incur for your business while on the go, and it even helps you prepare and submit your year end forms.

Automating and Simplifying Accounting

Revamped Banking in Zoho Books

One of the biggest changes you’ll notice when trying out the new Zoho Books is the beautiful new UI. But it is much more than just a cosmetic change. We’ve re-worked the most common workflows to make sure they are not only easy to understand, but also easy to do. For example, we completely revamped the banking module. Bank reconciliation is typically one of the most tedious things to do, and Zoho Books not only makes it now simple, but it also does most of the work for you. It automatically categorizes marks the transactions it finds in your bank’s feed so you don’t have to.

Mobile Accounting

Mobile Accounting

Modern business professionals are always on the go. And now you can take your accounting, and all the relevant financial information about your business with you too. Our brand new mobile apps for iOS and Android will help you track expenses, and send quotes and invoices. In addition, we are introducing our first Windows Mobile app, which helps you keep track of your expenses while on the go.

Easier Customer Interactions

Client Portal For Customers

The new edition of Zoho Books sports a new client portal. Using the portal makes it easy for your clients to approve or comment on the quotes and invoices you’ve sent them, view their recent transactions and most importantly, they can also pay you for any outstanding invoices, thus shortening the time it takes for you to get your money.

File 1099s with ease

We know that year end is always a busy time for you as you file the 1099s for your vendors. Our recent integrations with Track1099.com and Tax1099.com will help you prepare and e-file the 1099s quickly in a painless manner.

Beyond Time Tracking

Time-tracking made easy

If you’re a freelancer or a business that charges customers based on time, you’ll be delighted by the new features that help you go faster from time tracking all the way to getting paid. Our new calendar and weekly time sheet views help you ensure you don’t forget to invoice for any hours you’ve already worked. You can also quickly log the time and expenses you incur on behalf of your customers on our mobile apps.

APIs, and a lot more under the hood

If you’re reading this we know you can’t be bothered with the technicalities of accounting – all you want to do is run your business. So we’re not going to bore you with every single feature that is new and every technical detail that make this such a big release. In a separate post by our engineering team we‘ll explain, for example, how our app is built 100% on REST APIs, and how we have no hidden APIs for ourselves. Does that sound like technical gibberish to you? Well, all you need to know for now is that all that under-the-hood work means that there will be many interesting collaborations with third parties coming up soon.

Rodrigo

10 Smart Moves For Early Tax Planning

Posted by Posted on January 15, 2014 by Krupa Subramanian

Planning your tax early can save you a lot of heartburn and money. Invest time in early tax planning and be freed from the stress of filing the taxes altogether in April.

To make this easier for you, we’ve put together ten smart moves that will help you get started on your tax planning.

Early tax planning tips

Bottom line is, I love the new UI and I don’t want to go back…

Posted by Posted on November 26, 2013 by Meera Sapra

With any software, even the smallest of changes can greatly improve the experience of users who have been using it regularly. And when there’s a whole bunch of such small, thoughtfully crafted changes packaged into a completely new interface, the result can be instant delight.

That’s exactly the kind of result we’d hoped to get, when we recently shared a sneak peek of our upcoming new UI for Zoho Invoice and Zoho Books. So, ever since the beta-release, we’ve been eagerly waiting to see reactions from customers who had early access to this new version. We had worked really hard on this new, re-imagined UI, and we wanted to see what difference it made to those for whom it mattered the most – our customers. This was quite a nail-biting period, especially for the teams who had worked for months to make the new UI a reality. They now waited patiently to see the results of their efforts.

Once the feedback started flowing in, we were really thrilled to see so much happy, positive receptivity for the new UI and the changes that came with it!

Read more →

Sign up for a preview of the New, Faster Zoho Books!

Posted by Posted on November 4, 2013 by Reshma Roy

Our customers create amazing things at work and at Zoho we build products to help them with it. Our vision when we created Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice was to help business owners manage their finances without being stressed out. Ever since we released the products, we’ve been receiving great feedback and many requests our way. We knew it was time to give them more. So, we made use of all the great feedback and completely re-imagined our product.

New Zoho Books We set ourselves three goals and focussed all our energies to create a snappy, lighter and a delightful experience for our customers to come back to every single day.

Get work done faster

By reinventing ourselves, we’ve been able to create a much faster, efficient and powerful app for you. Be it creating your invoices or running your reports, every screen was put under the microscope and redesigned to simplify it further. Information is now more visual and easier to understand.

Do better business with powerful features
The re-architecture has given us an opportunity to add more powerful features, like the client portal (to collaborate with customers and vendors) and also features like attaching expense receipts to track expenses way better than before. Having future-proofed our product, we’re now on a mission to get more features on board for you in the coming months.

Be part of a greater ecosystem
Everything mentioned above has been made possible with our REST APIs. We want to open them up to the world so that developers across the world can create something truly amazing, something even better. This way not only would our customers have awesome integrations but also better ways to add more value to their business.

We’re fine-tuning both the products so we can have them gift-wrapped for you before the New Year! But we couldn’t resist giving you a sneak peek early on.

Go ahead, REGISTER your email address and we’d get back to you on how you can access the new version of Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice

Spending Too Much Time Waiting for Payments?

Posted by Posted on July 16, 2013 by Sarah

This is a guest post by Craig Keolanui of SmBizWinningTips.

According to a recent survey, over 50% of small businesses find collecting payments and late-paying customers to be the most challenging aspects of managing their cash flow and payment activities. And particularly for businesses running on low margins, late payments can be a huge setback. iStock_000019620208XSmall

Late payments can cripple a small business with cash flow problems!

Late payments not only reduce your revenue, but they also have you paying for goods (components of a sale) or services (payroll) while waiting for payments to come in. If your sales are increasing, but late payments are also taking off, you will have a revenue shortfall when you start paying your bills.

If you are not completely on top of your books, this can sneak up on you right when things start getting consistently busy. The joy of increasing sales can quickly be extinguished by the angst of having to call for payments when it comes time to pay for supplies or payroll. You have to do whatever you can to encourage early payments while deterring late payments.

There are several steps to take to encourage early payments. Invoicing in a timely manner goes a long way, but you can also try:

Invoicing twice a month. Some companies cut checks on certain dates and you might receive half of the usual monthly activity a little early. Keep this in mind also for accounts that are getting bigger or keeping more money tied up.
Make sure to establish contact with accounting departments at any of the businesses with delinquent account activity and send them email reminders after mailing each statement.
Encourage paying off invoices as opposed to waiting for monthly statements.
Give a credit on the next statement for any early payment. You can also set up a rewards program or discount for companies that pay before 15 or 20 days.
When setting up accounts, give some kind of one-time credit or discount for any accounts that are set up with purchase cards (credit cards!). Accepting them eats into your margin, but you set a firm hook and make it easier to process orders and get paid in full.

Discouraging late payments can also help speed things up. Here are some techniques to use:

Charge the dreaded late fee. Make sure you spell things out and if you are just starting to establish late fees, be very specific about “invoice dates” vs. “statement dates”.
Try calling clients who actually place orders to inform them of any issues getting payments out of accounting. Sometimes peer pressure will work better than any call you could make.
Put up a list of delinquent accounts for staff members to act on if those customers place an order.
Set yourself up to process electronic payments. Many of these customers can be steered that direction and you can start offering it to others.

Increased sales is a good thing, but making sure you get paid for your sales is critical to keeping the cash flowing and avoiding coming up short.