Managing Reports and Dashboards in Zoho One

In this guide, we'll look at how reports and dashboard in Zoho One help you understand and improve your sales performance. We'll also discuss Zoho Analytics, which is a specialized reporting and business intelligence tool that's included in Zoho One, that can help you understand your business performance, identify new opportunities, and make better decisions across your organization. Strong reports turn data into clear, actionable insights that show where your business is thriving and where it needs attention.

Areas Covered:

• Understanding Reports and Dashboards

• Default Reports in CRM

  • Useful Default Reports

• Custom Reports in CRM

• How to Create Custom Reports in CRM

• CRM Reporting Limitations

• Expanding Reporting with Zoho Analytics

• Sharing Reports and Dashboards from CRM

• Sharing Reports and Dashboards from Analytics

Understanding Reports and Dashboards

Reporting is an incredibly valuable capability for any business because it helps you make strategic business decisions using real data instead of guesses or assumptions. Reports are available in nearly every Zoho tool. In the CRM, reports can show you how well your sales team is performing, which products or services are the best sellers, or areas of your sales process that aren't working well.

Dashboards are a collection of reports that give you a visual overview of the state of your business at a glance. A sales manager might use a dashboard in CRM to collect a variety of reports that show the health of a sales pipeline. Meanwhile, an executive might view a dashboard in Zoho Analytics to track month over month revenue or customer acquisition trends. Both reports and dashboards give you visibility to help you make informed business decisions with confidence.

Default Reports in CRM

Zoho CRM includes an extensive range of out-of-the-box reports that are ready to use as soon as you set up your account and input your sales data. These reports are organized by module and help you get immediate visibility into your sales performance without having to go through the manual effort of building reports yourself.

Below are some useful default reports in Zoho CRM:

Lead Reports

• Leads by Source: Shows how many leads you're generating from each lead source to see which marketing channels are most effective

• Leads by Ownership: Displays how leads are distributed across your sales team

• Today's Leads: Leads created today

Deal Reports

• Pipeline by Stage: Breakdown of all your open deals by stage

• Sales Person's Performance Report: Deals gained by each sales person

• Deals Closing by This Month: Deals that are closing during the current month

Account Reports

• Key Accounts: Shows which accounts have the highest sum of their deals 

• Accounts by Industry: Shows the number of accounts you have broken down by industry
   

Activity Reports

• Activities by Salesperson: Tracks the number of meetings, calls, or tasks completed by each sales rep

• Today's Calls, Tasks, or Meetings: Shows the calls, tasks, or meetings that a sales rep has scheduled for the day
   

Custom Reports in CRM

Zoho CRM also includes powerful reporting tools that allow you to build sophisticated reports. You can create reports around leads, contacts, accounts, deals, tasks, and all other CRM modules, then bring the reports together in a dashboard. Best of all, reports auto generate as your data changes, so you only have to create a report once.

Here are some useful, custom reports that Zoho CRM users create:

• Deals by Stage Duration: Shows how long deals spend in each stage, helping you identify bottlenecks in your pipeline.

• Average Deal Size: Shows the average value of a won deal

• Inactive Deals: Shows deals that haven't been touched in a certain amount of time

• Conversion Rate by Lead Source: Shows at what rate specific lead sources turn into closed won deals

• Revenue by Product or Service: Shows which products or services generate the most revenue

• Forecast vs Actual Sales: Compares projected revenue over actual revenue earned over a given period

• Renewals Upcoming: Identifies existing customers who have a renewal upcoming in a specific time period
   

How to Create Custom Reports in CRM

Creating custom reports in CRM follows a structured process. You first need to choose a primary module that you would like to create a report for. This determines the data your report will focus on, i.e. deals, accounts, leads, contacts, etc. You can then choose to add related modules if you want to add in information from a different module.

Then, you select columns to add to your report. Columns correspond to the fields that exist within specific modules. For example, if you're reporting based off the deals module, one of the columns in your report could be "Stage." This column will show which stage a deal in your report is in. Once you have the modules and columns chosen, you can apply filters to narrow down your report.

Finally, you can choose to group columns and rows or to aggregate columns to find calculate totals, averages, or counts.

Let's now take a look at how this works in practice. We'll use the "Average Deal Size" report as an example.

To create the "Average Deal Size" report, navigate to the left side of the page and click "Reports," then create a new report. Select "Deals" as the Primary Module, and click continue. We won't add any related modules because this report doesn't need to include information from any other modules. Then navigate to "Columns" and choose the columns you'd like to appear in your report. In this report, we'll use the columns "Deal Name," "Stage," and "Amount." This will give us a list of all of our deals, what stage they're in, and what their closing amount is.

We now need to filter this report to solely show us deals that are "Closed Won." To do this, click "Filter" and create a filter of "Stage is Closed Won."  Now we have a list of closed won deals and what their closing amount is.

Finally, we need to get the average of the amount of these deals. To do this, navigate to "Aggregate Columns" and select the checkbox for "Avg of Amount." Now, we can we the average amount of our closed won deals.

To go more in-depth on creating reports in Zoho CRM, check out this article.

CRM Reporting Limitations

CRM reports are perfect for tracking your sales performance. However, there are two situations when it makes sense to build reports in Zoho's business intelligence tool, called Zoho Analytics: cross-functional reporting and forecasting.

Reports in Zoho CRM are based entirely on data stored in Zoho CRM. This means that these CRM reports will be created using only sales data. So, while these reports are excellent for analyzing your sales performance, they don't include financial, marketing, or other data that you would use to analyze the health of your entire business. This is where you will want to use reports in other software, or bring all the data from all the software you're using into Zoho Analytics.

An additional limitation with reports in CRM is around forecasting. While Zoho CRM can do some forecasting, Zoho Analytics contains more robust capabilities.

Expanding Reporting with Zoho Analytics

For businesses with more sophisticated reporting needs or that want a complete view of how their business is operating, Zoho Analytics can bring data from multiple sources together into unified reports.

Zoho Analytics can bring data in from:

• Zoho applications, like Zoho CRM, Books, Desk, Marketing Automation, etc.

• 3rd party applications, like Salesforce, Hubspot, Quickbooks Online, etc.

• Spreadsheets

• Proprietary databases

Organizations use Zoho Analytics to bring together data from different software systems. For example, you could merge lead data from CRM with metrics from Zoho Campaigns or Marketing Automation to see which of your marketing campaigns generated the most leads. Additionally, you could then bring in financial data from Zoho Books to see which of those leads actually ended up purchasing from you. With a cross-functional report like this, you can see which of your marketing campaigns have the highest ROI, and you can then invest more in those types of successful campaigns while divesting in lower performing campaigns. Cross-functional visibility allows management teams to make decisions based on an entire customer journey, not just one department.

Zoho Analytics also allows you to build dashboards that update automatically, and those dashboards can be shared across teams. These dashboards can include key performance indicators like revenue growth, ROI, or operational costs. Dashboards and reports can also be set to update automatically as new data comes in, which means your numbers always stay current without needing to rebuild reports. In addition, you can use AI-powered insights and report building through ZIA, Zoho's artificial intelligence, to create reports, identify trends or anomalies, and suggest new metrics to track.

Check out this 8 minute video to learn more about report building with Zoho Analytics

Sharing Reports and Dashboards from CRM

Zoho CRM gives you multiple ways to share reports and dashboards with your team so everyone can stay informed. You can share reports instantly, export them for offline use, or schedule them to be delivered to your team automatically at specified intervals.

When sharing a report manually, you can choose to email it immediately or schedule to email it later. Reports can also be exported as PDF, XLS, or CSV files, making them easy to add to presentations or share with people outside of your organization.

For recurring reports, Zoho CRM includes a report scheduler that can automatically send reports to specific users, roles, or teams on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. The selected reports are emailed to people in XLS format. Scheduled reports can be sent out to people using email, Zoho Cliq, or Cisco Webex.

To set up a scheduled report, navigate to the Reports module, and click on the drop down menu at the top left to show all of your different report folders. In that drop down menu, select "Scheduled Reports. Then click "New Report Scheduler" on the top right and choose the report you'd like to send, how the file will be exported, when and how often the report will be sent out, what channel to send the report through, and who the report will go to.

Sharing Reports and Dashboards from Analytics

Zoho Analytics makes it easy to share reports and dashboards with your team or anyone outside of your organization. To share, open a report or dashboard and click the share button in the top-right corner. From there, you can choose who to share it with by entering specific email addresses or selecting existing user groups in Zoho Analytics.

When sharing, you can also set permissions that control what others can do with the report or dashboard you've shared. You can allow them to solely view the report, or you can allow them to export data, view underlying data, drill down into the data, or use Zia Insights. Zia Insights give users access to AI-generated explanations and trends within the report, like why a number increased or decreased.

If you want to share a report with more people, you can make it public. Public views can be shared through a password-protected link, a private link within your org, or a fully public link available on the web. This is helpful for when you want to share reports with clients.

Zoho Analytics also allows you to embed reports and dashboards into slideshows or onto webpages. This way your team or clients can view live, interactive reports or dashboards without logging into Analytics.

For recurring sharing, you can schedule reports and dashboards to be automatically sent to specific recipients on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Scheduled reports can be delivered through email, Zoho Cliq, or third-party platforms like Slack. This ensures stakeholders always receive the latest data without anyone needing to send updates manually.

By using these sharing and scheduling tools, you make sure everyone in your organization, and even externals clients, has timely access to the insights they need to make informed decisions.

Check out this 4 minute video to learn how to share reports and dashboards from Zoho Analytics