Accepting and Tracking Payments in Zoho One

In this guide, we'll look at how your sales team can accept and track payments in Zoho One. While CRM does not process payments directly, it integrates closely with Zoho's finance and payment applications so that all payment information can be logged in Zoho's accounting tool, Zoho Books, and logged in CRM. Whether your business needs a simple way to collect one-time payments or a full billing and subscription system, Zoho One offers flexible options that connect directly to your CRM.

Areas Covered

• Why Integrate your Sales and Finance Systems

• Common Forms of Online Payments

• How Online Payments Work in Zoho

  • Payment Gateways

  • Payment Collection and Billing Tools in Zoho

• Understanding Payment Options in Zoho

  • Zoho Books

  • Zoho Checkout

  • Zoho Billing

• Tracking and Automating Payments in Zoho

Why Integrate your Sales and Finance Systems

Managing and tracking payments through Zoho's Finance integration with Zoho CRM helps your business close the loop between your sales and finance teams. Instead of manually updating payment info or chasing down your customers to get paid, you can collect payments online, record them in Zoho's accounting system called Zoho Books, and then see their status reflected automatically in CRM. This saves time, reduces human error and manual effort, and helps your team focus on building relationships and selling instead of managing transactions.

Common Forms of Online Payments

Before you decide on a payment solution, it's important to know some of the common methods that your customers may use to pay you. Most businesses today will accept one or more of the following payment methods:

1. Credit and Debit Cards

Credit cards are the most common form of online payment, with debit cards also being quite common. These transactions are simple and familiar for customers. They enter their card information and the transaction is processed instantly.

2. ACH Bank Transfers

An ACH bank transfer is another common online payment method. An ACH transaction is an electronic money transfer made between banks and credit unions across a network called the Automated Clearing House (ACH). ACH payments are typically lower cost and more secure than card payments, but are slower to process and only available in the U.S.

3. Digital Wallets

Services like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay enable customers to pay using stored payment information instead of manually entering their card details. Functionally, these are the same as card payments.

How Online Payments Work in Zoho

Now that we're familiar with some common payment methods, we need to look at how these online payments actually get made. When talking about accepting online payments, it's important to define two separate but related concepts: the payment gateway, and the tools used to request, facilitate, and manage online payments.

Payment Gateways

The payment gateway is what actually moves money from your customer to you. It securely processes transactions, communicates with banking systems, and confirms whether payments succeed of fail. 

In Zoho's ecosystem, this can be done through an application called Zoho Payments. Zoho Payments supports card payments and ACH transfers, while securely handling the transaction on the backend. However, Zoho Payments is not your only option when it comes to accepting payments in Zoho. Zoho also supports third-party payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net, and other.  This gives you the flexibility to use the payment gateway that you want.

One thing that's important to understand is that a payment gateway's only job is to process a transaction. The gateway doesn't create invoices, subscriptions, or checkout experiences. It simply collects and processes payments.

Payment Collection and Billing Tools

Now, the tools that your customers interact with to make purchases sit on top of your payment gateway. These include Zoho Checkout, Zoho Books, and Zoho Billing. These tools are what give the customer the ability to decide to purchase with you. They define what the customer is paying for, how much they're paying, and when they should be billed. They also provide the customer-facing payment experience through checkout pages, invoices, and more.

Zoho Payments, or any payment gateway, is then used behind the scenes to process the payment and collect the money.

Check out this helpful doc to learn how to set up Zoho Payments

Understanding Payment Options in Zoho

In the Zoho ecosystem, there are three main ways to accept payments that connect to Zoho CRM. Those options are:

• Zoho Books for invoicing and payment collection

• Zoho Checkout for payment pages

• Zoho Billing for recurring billing and subscriptions

But before we dive deeper into each option, we need to understand how these applications connect to CRM. Zoho CRM includes a pre-built integration with Zoho's Finance Suite. Through this integration, businesses can sync financial info between Zoho CRM and Books and Billing. All you have to do is go to Setup -> Marketplace -> Zoho, and scroll down to the Zoho Finance Suite. Click manage to turn on the integration and configure it to your needs. Once the integration is turned on, Zoho books and Zoho Billing are integrated directly with Zoho CRM.

Zoho Checkout works a little differently than the above. Rather than integrating directly with CRM, Checkout integrates with Zoho Books. Payment info collected through Checkout is recorded in Zoho Books and then shows up in CRM through the Finance Suite integration.

Now we can look at each option in more detail.

Option 1: Zoho Books

Zoho Books is the most common way for businesses using Zoho to accept payments. Books allows you to create invoices that include online payment options within them. Once the invoice is sent out, a customer would then receive the invoice, click the payment link, and submit the payment using the payment gateway you've configured.

And, once Zoho Books is integrated with Zoho CRM by turning on the Zoho Finance integration, then invoices and payments become visible in Zoho CRM. This way, sales teams can see the status of an invoice and any payment activity without having to leave Zoho CRM.

Using Zoho Books is best for businesses that primarily bill customers through invoices and do not need dedicated checkout pages or subscription billing tools.

Option 2: Zoho Checkout

Zoho Checkout is best for businesses that need a fast, easy-to-configure way to collect payments online while keeping all financial data synced in one place. Checkout allows you to collect payments through a shareable payment page. These branded payment pages can include your logo, product descriptions, and pricing, and can then be shared with customers through emails, as part of your website, or as a standalone webpage.

Once you've enable the Zoho Books and Zoho CRM integration, all you need to do is integrate Zoho Checkout with Zoho Books to connect Checkout and CRM. Once the integration is complete, you can include payments links in quotes or invoices that are created in Zoho CRM. And when a customer completes a payment through the link, the transaction automatically appears in Zoho Books, and the corresponding record in CRM updates to show the payment status.

Zoho Checkout is best for businesses who need to host dedicated payment pages on their website. Checkout is great for donation pages, event registrations, and more.

Check out this 5 minute video to get a more in-depth overview of Zoho Checkout

Option 3: Zoho Billing

Zoho Billing is a full-fledged billing management solution. It’s designed for businesses that bill customers regularly or need to manage renewals, upgrades, and cancellations. All information in Zoho Billing can also integrate directly with Zoho Books so that your financial information is centralized.

When you turn on the Zoho Finance Suite integration in Zoho CRM, Billing will be connected to Zoho CRM. Then, you can automatically create invoices, send renewal reminders, and record payments directly from CRM.

Zoho Billing is best for subscription oriented businesses that need automated renewals and subscription management.

Check out this page for a variety of helpful videos on Zoho Billing

Check out this page to watch a tutorial series on Zoho Billing.

Tracking and Automating Payments in Zoho CRM

Once the Zoho Finance suite integration has been turned on in Zoho CRM, payments can be viewed directly from CRM using the Finance tab on the related contact, account, or deal record. Each record shows the customer's quotes, invoices, and payment history pulled directly from Zoho Books.

Here’s how it could work in practice. When a deal in CRM is marked as "Closed Won," a workflow rule can automatically create an invoice in Zoho Books with all of the details of the deal already populated. That can then be emailed to the customer.

The customer receives the invoice and clicks on the included payment link. They then submit payment using the payment gateway you've configured, like Zoho Payments, PayPal, or Stripe. Once the payment is received, the invoice is marked as paid in Books, and that information is also shown in Zoho CRM. There's no need to update the record manually or ask the financial team for the details of the payment.

For businesses using Billing, similar automations can be configured to create subscriptions, generate recurring invoices, and more.

Once an invoice is sent, a workflow rule can send a reminder email out to a prospect if they don't pay the invoice in a certain amount of time. And when an invoice is paid, a workflow rule can automatically send out a thank-you email to the customer. There are countless additional follow-up automations that can be created with workflows in Zoho CRM, all of which can be catered to your specific sales process. You can learn more about configuring workflow rules here.

These automations help your team prevent delays in payment collection. And since everything syncs through the Finance integration, your sales and finance teams always have access to the same payment information.