Lookup Data Type
Organizations deal with a large number of entities such as users, customers, vendors, items and projects. There’ll be cases when you might want to compare and track any two entities.
Let’s say you want to measure the efficiency of users in your organization by choosing to track the number of customers each user adds. To do this, you would need to link the users and customers module. This linking is made possible by a datatype called the Lookup in Zoho Spend.
To understand this better, let’s look at two scenarios where the Lookup datatype can come into play.
Scenario 1: Patricia wants to keep track of all the purchase transactions a user creates on a regular basis. She creates a custom field in the purchase module with Lookup data type and selects the module as Users. After this, whenever she creates a transaction for that module, she can assign it to a specific user. By the end of the week when Patricia wants to check the number of transactions created by different users, she goes to the Users and Roles module and tracks them under the users’ Related List.
Scenario 2: Patricia owns a retail store she wants to keep track of all bags of rice (Items) that are purchased from a particular vendor. To keep track of it, she creates a custom field in Items module with the Lookup data type and selects the module to track as Vendors. When she adds the bags of rice as an item, she can assign the corresponding vendor to it. Now, to track all the purchases made for the bags of rice from a particular vendor, she goes to the Vendors module, selects the vendor and views the number of rice bags purchased under the vendor’s Related List.
Here’s how you can create a lookup data type:
- Go to Settings on the left sidebar.
(OR)
Click Settings in the top right corner of the page. - Select the module for which you want to add a lookup.
- Go to the Field Customization or Fields tab of the respective module.
- Click + New Field in the top right corner of the page.
- Fill in the following fields:
| Fields | Description |
|---|---|
| Label Name | Enter the field name which will appear in the module. |
| Data Type | Select Lookup as the data type. |
| Help Field | Provide a brief description on what the custom field is used for. |
| Module | Select the module in which you want to track the records. |
| Related List Name | Enter the name of the list which will appear in the looked-up modules. |
- Click Save.
The Related List with the lookup details will be available in the corresponding modules. To access the related list:
- Go to the module in which you have set up the lookup field.
- Navigate to the Related List tab from the Details page.
All the related entries can be accessed from this page.