Preferences

The preferences section is where you can customize the modules in Zoho Inventory to match your business workflow.

To access this section, click the Settings icon in the top-right corner of the app and go to Preferences.


Enable Modules

Select the modules you want to enable in Zoho Inventory. Once you enable them, they will be shown in the left sidebar. You’ll be able to access and configure these modules only when you enable them in this page.

Enable Modules

Note: You can access the modules via API even if they are disabled in the Zoho Books browser application.

General Preferences

This section consists of generic functions provided in the modules which can be customized.

Discounts

Tax On Item Prices

Choose the tax preference for your items.

Additional Charges

Select the additional charges you’ll like to add:

Sales Persons

Mode of Stock Tracking

Zoho Inventory provides two methods based on which you can track your stock on hand. Choose an option that will help you control the method of documenting the incoming stock and the outgoing stock.

Reconcile Physical Stock for Standalone Invoices & Bills

Change Physical Stock Preference

To mark a standalone invoice or bill manually:

  1. Open the standalone invoice or bill.

  2. Click the Horizontal Ellipsis (…) icon on the menu bar.

  3. Select the Mark as Shipped/Mark as Received option from the dropdown.

    Mark as Shipped/Received
  4. Confirm your action in the pop-up that follows.

To remove the shipping or receive status from the invoice or bill, follow the steps above and select the Undo Shipment/Undo Receive option from the dropdown. The physical stock changes for the items will also be undone.

Rounding Off Sales Total

Check this option to round off the total amount in your sales transaction to the nearest whole number.

General Preferences - Round Off Total Examples

Address Format

Set the address format for your organization from the placeholders provided. To add more placeholders, click the Insert Placeholder dropdown menu and choose the field you’d like to add to the address format.

This address will be displayed in the PDF only.

General Preferences - Org Address Format

Branding

If your company has a brand logo, you can upload it under Your Logo. All the transactions that you send out to your customers and vendors from Zoho Inventory will be branded with this logo.

Themes

Personalize the look and feel of your Zoho Inventory organization by choosing from a variety of themes.

Zoho Branding

Enable the Would you like to keep Zoho Branding on your PDFs? option if you want to display the Zoho branding on the footer of your PDF templates.

Preferences - Branding

Customers and Vendors

The following preferences can be configured for the Contacts module:

Duplicate Contact Names

The contact display name is generally unique for each contact in Zoho Inventory. If you want to use the same display name for more than one contact, check the Allow duplicates for contact display name option.

This is especially useful when your customer and vendor are one and the same.

Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact

Note: This feature is available only in specific plans of Zoho Inventory. Visit the pricing page to check if it’s available in your current plan.

Zoho Inventory enables you to create transactions for your customers and vendors in different currencies. Let us understand how this works with the help of a scenario.

Scenario: Mark runs an online store that deals with multiple international clients. One of his clients is Zillum, a multinational conglomerate with numerous branches in different countries. Whenever Mark sells goods to Zillum, he invoices them based on the currency that is used in the country they operate.

Note: Zoho Inventory fetches the exchange rates automatically for the foreign currency in real-time while you create transactions. These exchange rates are fetched from our third-party service provider Open Exchange Rates against the base currency of your organization. However, suppose you want to enter the rates manually, disable exchange rate feeds first, and enter the exchange rates manually.

Enabling Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact

Before enabling Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact for customers and vendors, ensure that you update the credit limit in the base currency for all customers.

If you have created custom views, workflows or webhooks using the parameters receivables, payables, or unused credits, ensure that you edit the following for Customers and Vendors:

You will have to enable Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact to record transactions for customers and vendors in different currencies.

Enable multi currency

Note: You cannot disable Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact once you have created transactions in other currencies for your customers or vendors.

Creating Transactions in Different Currencies

Now that you have enabled Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact, you can create transactions for your customers or vendors in other currencies.

Choose multi currency

View Multi-currency Details of Customers and Vendors

Contact List Page

The receivables, payables and unused credits for different currencies will be listed below the customer’s or vendor’s default currency.

Multi currency in list view

Contact Details Page

Receivables or Payables will be displayed as a table. It contains the outstanding receivables or payables, unused credits, and the currency in which you have recorded transactions for your customers or vendors.

Multi currency in details page

Customer and Vendor Statements

The Statement section contains the breakdown of all the currencies in which you have created transactions.

View customer statement

Recording Payments Received or Made

You can also record payments in currencies you have invoiced your customers or recorded vendor bills.

Record a payment

Suppose you record a payment in a currency for which you have no transactions for the customer or vendor. In that case, the payment will be recorded as an excess payment.

Record excess payment

Reports

We have added Collapse All Currencies and Expand All Currencies buttons for reports that support Multi-currency Transactions for Each Contact.

Collapse All Currencies displays transactions created in the default currency of the customers or vendors.

Expand All Currencies displays all the transactions created for your customers or vendors.

The following reports support Multi-currency Transaction for Each Contact:

View reports in multiple currencies

When performing an advanced search, you can use the currency field as a filter to search for transactions of a particular currency.

Use multi currency in advanced search

Customer Address Format

Under the Customer Address Format, you can insert placeholders(for additional data) and customize the format of your customer’s address on PDF templates.

You can also create custom fields for contacts and use them as a placeholder in the address.

Contact Preferences - Contact Address Format

Approvals

If you want the transactions to be verified by you and/or your trusted staff before they are accounted for, you can set up an approval workflow in Zoho Inventory. This helps in catching overlooked mistakes and prevents any unnecessary losses to the company.

Learn more about transaction approval in Zoho Inventory.

General Preferences - Transaction Approval

Items

Set Measurement Units

Choose the measurement units with which you’d like to record the dimensions and weight of your items.

UOM preferences

Duplicate Item Name

Check the Allow duplicate item names option if you want to use the same name for more than one item in your inventory. But before you do, you must make the SKU field active and mandatory since it will serve as the index field for mapping the appropriate items during import.

Composite Items & Price Lists

Advanced Inventory Tracking

This section lets you enable advanced inventory tracking methods like serial number tracking and batch tracking. Also, you can select the transactions in which serial number or batch details have to be tracked. To do this:

  1. Check the box near serial number tracking and/or batch tracking to enable one or both options.
  2. In the section below, click Configure to manage how your inventory is tracked.
Configure
  1. In the configuration popup, the first option lets you choose the transactions for which serial numbers and batches can be tracked. The options are:

  2. Invoices, Sales Receipts, Bills, and Credit Notes.

  3. Packages, Purchase Receives, Return Receives.

  4. Based on your choice, serial numbers and batch details will be recorded when you create the transactions in the list.

  5. Mark the Mandate serial number or batch tracking in transactions checkbox if you want to ensure that serial number or batch details are entered when you create an item or a transaction.

Insight: If you’ve not checked this option, transactions or items with missing tracking details will have a banner on their details page where you can update the serial number or batch tracking details. Update Details

Pro Tip: If you have not mandated serial number or batch tracking in transactions, the Missing Advanced Inventory Tracking Details report will help you identify transactions that do not have serial number and batch tracking details.

Low Stock Settings

Select one or more of the following low stock settings you want to apply to your organization:

Additional Information

This section contains the fields related to the items module which you can choose whether to show or not show on your PDF templates.

Items Additional Info Preferences

Here, you can also configure the scope of sales and purchase prices for each role in your organization. To do so:

The Admin will have complete access to all the fields.

Configuring permission to access sales/purchase price

Note: To hide the sales or the purchase price for a role, you must first restrict their access to those modules completely. Learn how you can configure the permissions for a role here.


Unit Conversion

Unit Conversion in Zoho Inventory automatically lets you convert an item’s base unit to another unit while creating transactions. Learn More

Sales Orders

Configure the sales order module to keep up with your sales volume.

Sales order preferences Sales order preferences Sales Order Preferences

Package

Here, you can create additional fields for the packages module using custom fields. This will be reflected across all the new packages.

Related: Learn more about creating packages for a sales order in Zoho Inventory.


Shipment

Choose whether or not to send notifications to your customers for manual and carrier shipments.

Shipment Preferences

Related: Learn how you can create shipments in Zoho Inventory.


Invoices

You can configure the following preferences for your invoices module.

Edit Sent Invoices
Payments

Check the options you’d like to automate when your customer makes you an online payment.

Invoice Order Number

Choose whether you want to display the Sales Order Number or the Sales Order Reference Number as your Invoice Order Number.

Invoice Preferences
Terms & Customer Notes

Here, you can enter your business' terms and conditions and additional notes. This will be displayed in all the invoices. You can also modify the content at the time of creating the invoice.

Custom Fields

You can also create custom fields to record additional information on your invoices. This will be reflected across all future invoices.


Payments Received

Configure the Payments Received module to express your gratitude.

Here, you can create custom fields to record additional information on your payment receipt. This will be reflected across all your future payment receipts.

Pro Tip: You can autogenerate the payment receipt number using the Auto Generate Number custom field. You can have only one custom field of this type.


Purchase Orders

Closing a Purchase Order

You can choose the action following which you want your purchase order to be closed in Zoho Inventory.

Purchase Order Preferences
Field Description
When Receive is recorded Your purchase order cycle will end once you record the receives of all items specified in it.
When Bill is created Your purchase order cycle will end when you associate a bill with it.
When Receives and Bills are recorded Your purchase order cycle will end when you record receives and associate bill(s) with it.
Terms & Conditions:

Enter the terms and conditions of your business to be displayed in your purchase order. This will be displayed in all the purchase orders created unless otherwise you change the content at the time of creating the purchase order.

Notes:

You can enter notes for your vendors and suppliers on your purchase orders.


Bills

Here, you can create custom fields to record additional information on your bills. This will be reflected across all your future bills.


Payments Made

Here, you can create custom fields to record additional information on your payments made. This will be reflected across all your future bill payments.


Custom Fields

The custom fields are additional fields that you can introduce to a module to enter more data.

To create a custom field for a module:

  1. Go to Settings > Preferences.
  2. Open a module of your choice, say, Invoice.
  3. Go to the Field Customization tab and click + New on the top-right corner of the page.
  4. Enter a label name and select a data type for the custom field.
  5. Choose an appropriate level of PII sensitivity if applicable. Learn more about the privacy and security in Zoho Inventory.
  6. If the custom field contains personally identifiable patient information, you can set the custom field as ePHI. This means that all the data entered in that field will be encrypted and only accessible to users who have the required permission.

    Note: You can mark custom fields with the folowing data types as ePHI: Text, Email, URL, Phone, and Date.

  7. Enter a default value to display in the field, if needed.

    Insight: If you’ve marked a custom field as PII or ePHI, you won’t be able to provide a default value for it.

  8. Choose whether the field is mandatory and if you want to display it in all PDFs.

Note: You can have a maximum of 44 custom fields and each data type has its own limits.

Custom field data types

Types of custom fields supported by Zoho Inventory are as follows:

Text

Select the Text datatype to record additional information of your choice. You can enter a short text, numerical value or a combination of both up to 100 characters. Values allowed are A-Z, 0-9 and special characters.

Email

You can record additional email addresses using this field. Eg: fynn@hotmail.com.

URL

You can record and save website URLs using this field. Eg: www.zoho.com

Phone Number

This field allows you to record additional phone numbers of a contact. Eg: (123)-456-7890

Number

This field allows you to store numerical data(as whole numbers). Eg: 18, -18

Decimal

This field allows you to record decimal values. Eg: 2.38, -33.2

Amount

This field allows you to record amount along with the default currency code set for your organization. Eg: USD50, GBP76, AUD30 etc.

Amount
Percentage

Here, you can record values in percentages.

Percent
Date

This field allows you to record custom date values. Eg: Custom Date - 30/11/2022, Relative Date - Today, Tomorrow, Starting Date of Month etc.

Date
Date and Time

This field allows you to record the date and time in a transaction. Eg: Last Sync: 30/11/2022, 10:10.

Date
Checkbox

Using the checkbox field you can confirm an action, answer a question or make a choice. Here, you can also choose to have the checkbox ticked by default or leave it unticked.

Checkboxes
Auto-generate Number

Using this field you can autogenerate values with prefixes of your choice. You can have only one custom field of this type.

Auto Generate Number

Useful for creating a drop-down type custom field where you can input standard choices and make a selection.

Drop-down

Note: You can only have one custom field of this type.

Multi-select

This custom field is similar to the drop-down field where you can input standard choices and select multiple options.

Multi-select custom field

Note:

Lookup

The Lookup data type in custom fields allows you to pull and display data from one module inside another.

Scenario: Patricia wants to track the efficiency of the users in her organization. So, she decides to track the sales orders they create for customers. For this, she creates a Lookup custom field in the Sales Orders module and selects the module whose data she wants to access (in this case, Users) and specifes a list name which tracks the associations.

To create a lookup custom field:

Lookup custom field

To view the related list in the looked up module:

Associated lists
Multiline

The multiline or multiple line custom field is a textbox that allows you to enter descriptive text of up to 36000 characters.

You can only have a maximum of five custom fields of this type.


Custom Field Limitations

There are limitations to the number of custom fields you can have for each data type.

For easy understanding, let’s split the datatypes into four sections:

Section 1

Note: Sum of the custom fields created for the above mentioned datatypes should not exceed 20.

Section 2

Note: Sum of the custom fields created for the above mentioned datatypes should not exceed 12.

Section 3

Note: Sum of the custom fields created for the above mentioned datatypes should not exceed 4.

Section 4

Section 5

Hence, when combined, you can have a maximum of 44 custom fields in a module.


More Actions for Custom Fields

Edit, Delete or Mark Custom Field Inactive

If the custom field is no longer of use then you can mark it as Inactive.

  1. Go to Settings » Preferences.
  2. Open the module with the unwanted custom field.
  3. Go to the Field Customization section.
  4. Place your cursor over the custom field and you can choose the Edit, Mark as Inactive option or the Trash icon to delete it.
Edit/Delete/Mark Custom Field Inactive

Note: The Mark as Inactive option will be visible only for the custom fields of the following modules: Contacts, Sales Orders, and Purchase Order. For the Items module, you need to deselect the custom field and it will become inactive.

Re-arrange Custom Fields

You can change the order in which the custom fields appear in your PDFs. To do so:

Change order for custom fields 1 Change order for custom fields 2

Custom Field Access

You can restrict certain users in your organization from accessing a custom field capturing sensitive information. To do so:

  1. Go to Settings, then Preferences.

  2. Open the module with the custom field and go to the Field Customization tab.

  3. Click the down arrow next to the custom field and click the Configure Access option.

    Configure Access
  4. Choose the access level for each role and click Save.


Custom Field Usage Stats

The Custom Field Usage stats option allows you to keep track of the number of custom fields you’ve created and the fields remaining for the particular module. This helps you to use the custom fields wisely based on the availability.

Custom Field Usage Option Custom Field Usage Stats

Custom Buttons

In Zoho Inventory, you can create additional buttons within a module to perform customized actions. You can create these buttons by writing a Deluge script for the functions you want them to execute.

Note: This feature is available only for selective pricing plans.

In this section:

Scenarios

Scenario 1: Peter sells goods on credit to selected customers. At the end of every month, he emails the invoices to his customers whose payment is due. To do this, he creates a custom button that, when clicked on, sends the statement, rather than him having to apply multiple filters.

Scenario 2: Peter decides to charge a 2% late fee on overdue invoices. To make this simple, he creates a custom button and executes it on the invoices when they are overdue.

Scenario 3: Peter wants to provide a 5% discount for his regular customers who pre-order goods. To do this, he creates a custom button and applies them on the invoice when he creates one.

Create Custom Buttons

You can create custom buttons for the following modules:

Note: You can create a maximum of 10 buttons for each module.

To create a custom button:

  1. Go to Settings > Preferences.

  2. Select the module that you want to create a custom button for.

  3. Go to the Custom Buttons tab.

  4. Click + New in the top-right corner.

    New Custom Button
  5. Provide a short and suitable name for the button.

Warning: The button name cannot exceed 25 characters.

  1. Select who can view the Custom Button: Only Me or Everyone.
  2. Drag and drop the required Deluge functions from the left side bar, and describe the action to execute upon clicking the button.
  3.  New Custom Button
    
    

Insight: Deluge is an online scripting language integrated with Zoho Services. It allows you to write your own functions in the application to suit your needs, incrementally, making it a powerful tool.

  1. Either click Save to create the custom button, or click Save and Execute to save the button and execute the action immediately.
  2. In the pop-up, depending on the module, enter the Transaction ID, Contact ID or Item ID and click Execute.

Note: The ID is a combination of numbers in the URL of a particular transaction, contact or item.

Execute Custom Actions

To view and execute the custom button:

  1. Go to the module with the custom button.

  2. Open a transaction, contact, or item.

  3. Click More, then More Actions.

  4. Click the custom button to execute it.

    Execute Custom Button

Zoho Inventory allows you to open external links from your application by attaching links to the button you create. You can also insert placeholders in the links and drill down to the details.

Scenario 1: Peter sells his goods on an e-commerce website. He would like to link the e-commerce website’s URL with his items in Zoho Inventory. He immediately adds the custom button for the Items module with a link to the e-commerce site and views them.

Scenario 2: Peter has an external software with all the details of his customers. When customers request for his services, he refers his data base for details about all the previous services. Looking up for such data and identifying a customer can be pretty tedious. He creates a custom button with the Customer ID as a placeholder to his external application’s link. He clicks the button in his contact details page to open an external link with the specific contact’s details.

To create a custom link:

  1. Go to Settings > Preferences.

  2. Select the module for which you want to create a custom link.

  3. Go to the Custom Buttons tab.

  4. Click the drop down near the + New button in the top-right.

  5. Select the Custom Link option.

    New Custom Link
  6. Enter the Custom Link Name.

  7. Select who can view and execute the Custom Button - Only Me or Everyone.

  8. Enter the URL of the external website and insert placeholders if you want to look up specific details in the page.

    Create Custom Link
  9. Click Save.

Insight: Links can be differentiated from buttons with a link icon displayed near the button name.

To open a custom link:

  1. Go to the module for which you created a custom link.

  2. Open the transaction, contact or item from which you want to open the link.

  3. Click More > More Actions and click the custom link to open it.

    Open Custom Link

To edit or delete a custom button or link:

  1. Go to Settings > Preferences.

  2. Select the module for which you had created a custom button or link.

  3. Go to the Custom Buttons tab and all the buttons and links created previously will be listed there.

  4. Place your cursor over the buttons.

  5. Click the Edit button or the Trash icon to edit or delete it.

    Edit/Delete Button or Link
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