Introduction to Zoho Books

Topics covered in this article

This article introduces Zoho Books, including the management of customers, sales and purchases.

Who is this article for?

Everyone within the financial / accounting team that needs to work with customers, sales or purchases.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure you:

1. Have access in your computer or phone, to Zoho Books

About Zoho Books

Zoho Books is Zoho's cloud-based, smart accounting software designed to help businesses manage their finances and cash flow. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, and managing accounts payable and receivable.

Once you access the application, you can see several menus to the left:

1. Home: the dashboard with suitable widgets to get an bird-eye watch over the accounting activities like total receivables, total payables, cash flow, etc.
2. Items: allows you to work with items, items groups, price lists and inventory adjustments, to better handle the products your company works with
3. Banking: allows you to manage your bank accounts
4. Sales: centralize your organization’s sales, including information about clients, estimates, sales orders, shipments, payments received and invoices
   
5. Purchases: allows you to manage everything related to purchasing items, including vendors information, expenses, purchase orders, bills and payments made
   
6. Time tracking: keep track of the time invested in different projects the company is executing and controlling, through Zoho Projects
7. Accountant: helps you handle accounting operations like register manual journals, currency adjustments and the chart of accounts
8. Documents: store important documents securely and easily access them from anywhere and anytime. From here, you can auto scan or mail-in documents and convert them into transactions
9. Reports: access more than 65 different reports to see information about the inventory, receivables, payments received, banking, taxes, purchases and expenses, etc.

Work with items

To manage items, clic the "Items" menu to the left, and then click on "Items" [1] again. In the center of this page, you will see the list of existing items. You can search for a specific item using the search bar [2] or create a new element by clicking the right "New" button [3]:

When creating a new item, specify all required information and then, press the "Save" button in the bottom of the page:

You can edit, adjust stock, mark as inactive, delete, etc. an item by clicking on its name and selecting the appropriate option to the right:

Sales

To work with the sales flow, click the "Sales" module to the left. First thing you need to create are customers. To do this, click the "Customers" [1] menu and then "New" [2]. You can also search for any customer by using the search bar [3]:

When creating a customer, enter all required information and then, press the save button at the bottom of the page:

Similarly, you can create estimates, retainer invoices, sales orders, packages, shipments, invoices, sales receipts, payment links, record payments received and so on. Just click the appropriate option to the left depending on your needs (for example, estimates [1]) and you will have access to all the documents created. You can use the search bar to look for specific records [2] and click the "New" button [3] to the right to create a new document:

Purchases

Similarly to sales, you can work with purchases by clicking on the appropriate module to the left. The same way you need customers to record sales documents, here, you need vendors to record purchase operations. Click the "Vendors" menu and you will have access to the vendor list. You can search for a specific record by using the search bar and create a new vendor by clicking the "New" button:

When creating a new vendor, enter all required information and press the "Save" button located at the bottom of the page:

Similarly, you can record expenses, purchase orders, purchase receives, bills, payments made, recurring bills and so on. Just click the appropriate option to the left depending on your needs (for example, "Expenses" [1]) and you will have access to all the documents created. You can use the search bar to look for specific records [2] and click the "New" button [3] to the right to create a new document:

Next steps

Additional resources

Check the following video for more information about customer and sales:

Check the following video for more information about vendors and purchases:

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