The company

Guardwel Industries Private Limited has been manufacturing physical security products for over 40 years. Founded by the late Shri Anthony Tuscano along with his son, William Anthony Tuscano, the company started with a single product: a fire-resistant filing cabinet. Since then, Guardwel has expanded into a full range of safes, lockers, and vaults. The business is now run by the second generation of the Tuscano family.

Guardwel’s primary customers are banks, non-banking financial companies, and jewelry showrooms across India, including large national banks, international banks, and large corporate offices with branch networks that span the country. The company is also moving into a newer, high-technology category of robotic security products, including robotic strong rooms, vaults, and automated locker rooms.

Guardwel’s scale and its relationships with major national banks make its operational requirements considerably more complex than those of a typical manufacturer, spanning multi-branch logistics, a dealer network, and long-term rate contracts.

The challenge

Guardwel ran its entire operation on Tally for close to 18 years before making the switch to Zoho Books. At that time, the company had little to no automation in place.

The business itself added layers of complexity that a standard accounting setup could not absorb. Guardwel’s banking customers operate branches across the entire country, and a shipment often cannot go straight to the end customer, either because the site is not ready or because it is too far from Guardwel’s own base to service directly. The material has to sit with a local dealer in the meantime.

That created a problem most off-the-shelf systems are not built to handle: the same dealer needed to be tracked as both a customer for the material sitting at their location and a vendor for the commission owed to them, with no standard way to link those two roles together. A single purchase order from one bank could also require shipping to a hundred different branch addresses. Since banks often work through fixed annual rate contracts, pricing needed to be locked at the customer and item level rather than negotiated per order.

Tally also lacked a proper sales module, which meant Guardwel could not build the level of automation or workflow optimization the business needed, even after creating extensive custom scripts to compensate. Guardwel tried a handful of other software systems as well, but none were able to match the complexity of its operations.

The solution

Guardwel began its relationship with Zoho by implementing Zoho CRM to manage sales and quoting. When the company later moved its accounting onto Zoho Books on its own, it discovered that the transactions it had already entered independently did not reconcile, leaving an opening balance mismatch of roughly ₹250 crore that needed to be resolved before the new system could go live.

Guardwel worked with Zoho Partner Strateworks Solutions to properly implement Zoho Books. The team first resolved the opening balance discrepancy and matched it against the company’s trial balance before rebuilding its day-to-day accounting workflows from the ground up. The entire quote-to-cash process Guardwel runs today was built from scratch on Zoho, with no equivalent to carry over from its Tally days.

Despite the complexities surrounding the implementation and the company’s specific needs, Tuscano noted that Strateworks’ implementation team understood the business.

In partnership with Strateworks, Guardwel worked to consolidate its fragmented processes into a single, scalable digital ecosystem.

At the center of the setup is an integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Books. Guardwel’s sales team creates quotes and sales orders inside Zoho CRM, and a custom API automatically replicates each confirmed sales order into Zoho Books, where the rest of the financial workflow, including delivery challans, invoices, and credit notes, takes place.

To handle its dealer-held delivery model, Guardwel worked with Strateworks to build a custom delivery challan process. Rather than shipping directly to a bank branch that may not be ready to receive a product, Guardwel routes shipments through a dealer’s location first. Since dealers function as both customers and vendors within the same relationship, Guardwel also built a link between the two records so each dealer’s activity is tracked accurately on both sides of the transaction.

To manage large multi-branch orders, Guardwel created a custom subform within its sales order process that captures delivery state, district, and location details, along with the relevant dealer, for each line item. This allows a single sales order to represent shipments to dozens or hundreds of individual branch locations rather than requiring a separate order for each one.

Guardwel also extended its use of Zoho beyond Books and CRM into Zoho Creator, where the company manages its tender-based business. When a tender is entered into Creator, a script automatically syncs the corresponding entries into Zoho Books.

Guardwel uses a similar approach for its dealer commission structure, calculating commissions based on invoice data and generating purchase orders once a dealer accepts the calculated amount. For customers who require a proforma invoice before an order is fulfilled, a common requirement among Guardwel’s banking clients, the company built a custom workflow in Creator that generates one directly from a sales order.

Guardwel has also brought customer-facing communication into its day-to-day use of Zoho Books. The sales team uses the built-in WhatsApp integration to send invoices and payment links directly to customers. Guardwel also gives its banking clients access to a client portal where they can view their own invoices and billing history without needing to request documents by email.

Benefits and ROI

In the year and a half since going live on Zoho Books, Guardwel has replaced an 18-year-old, largely manual Tally setup with a fully automated quote-to-cash process built specifically around how its business operates. Sales orders now move from Zoho CRM into Zoho Books without manual re-entry, and the dealer-link and delivery challan workflows give Guardwel a way to track inventory that sits with a dealer before it reaches a bank branch—something the company had no process for previously.

The tender management integration between Zoho Creator and Zoho Books automated what had been a manual, deposit-tracking process, while the custom dealer commission workflow removed the need for Guardwel’s team to calculate payouts by hand. Between the WhatsApp integration and the client portal, Guardwel’s customers also have more direct, self-service ways to receive and access their billing information.

Looking forward

Guardwel continues to work with Strateworks to refine its Zoho Books setup as the business grows and expands into newer categories like robotic security products. The company plans to extend the same customized, integrated approach it has built with Zoho Books and Zoho CRM to support that next phase of the business.