Chapter 12: Working with Products

Products can be either goods or services, which are sold or procured by your organization. In the Zoho CRM system you can manage your company- wide products that are sold to the customers as well as procured from the vendors. Hence both sales and purchasing departments can use the Products module effectively according to their department process. In case your organization procures products from vendors and sell to customers with a markup, both sales and purchase departments can coordinate in a better way.

Sales department can use the products module along with other modules, such as leads, accounts, potentials, quotes, Sales Orders, and Invoices where as purchasing department can use along with Vendors and Purchase Orders. In general Product details page contains the product name, manufacturer/reseller name, part numbers, sales start/end dates, support start/end dates, price, stock position and others.

The Products home page contains,

• Products List
• Product Reports
• Tools such as Import, Export, change owner, and delete
• Quick Create pane
• Search
• Alphabetical Search
• Custom Views
• Page Navigation

You can perform the following operations in Products module:

• Navigate products
• Search products (Alphabetical or advanced search options)
• Create List views
• Create new products (Form filling, quick create, or duplicate options)
• Associate products with other records
• Changing Product Owner (individually or in bulk)
• Export Products
• Print products details
• View Reports
• Delete products (individually or in bulk)
• Customize products

Navigating Products

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can navigate products available in the Products List.

To navigate products

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products Home page, under the Products List section, click the Start, Previous, Next, or End link to access the list of products.

Searching Products

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can search the sales orders alphabetically or filling the required information in Search box.

To search products

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products Search section, do one of the following:
3. • Specify the search criteria in Search box and click the Go button. Or
   • Select one of the alphabetical search links.
3. In the Products List page, list of products are displayed as per search criteria.

Creating List Views

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

In the Product List you can create/modify/delete the custom views, sort columns in the list view (ascending/descending order), search the records available in the current list view. In addition, you can modify some of the columns in standard list views. By default, the following standard list views are available in the Products module:

• All Products
• My Products
• Active Products

Note: User created list views are displayed under User Created Views category in View drop-down list.

To create custom views

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products Home page, under Product List section, click the Create View link.
   
   

   Note: Under the Product List section some of the standard list views are displayed. You can only rearrange the order of columns and more columns.

   
   
3. In the Create New View page, do the following:
   • In the View Information section, specify name of the custom view in the View Name (mandatory) field. The custom view name appears in the View drop-down list. You can also set the custom view as a default list view by selecting the Set as Default View check box.
     
   • In the Specify Criteria section, specify the filter criteria. For more details refer to the Specifying List View Criteria section.
   • In the Choose Columns section, select the columns to be displayed in the List View. For more details refer to the Selecting List View Columns section.
   • In the Accessibility Details section, select the users to whom custom list view has to be enabled. For more details refer to the Enabling View Access section.
4. Click Save. The custom list view is displayed in the View drop-down list.

Creating Products

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

In Zoho CRM, you can store product details by entering data in product detail form.

Note: Some of the standard fields listed below may not be visible/editable depending on your organization business process and field-level security settings. In case your organization added/modified fields please contact your System Administrator for more details about usage of the other fields.

In the Product: Edit form, you need to specify the product-related information. The following table provides descriptions of the various fields in the form.

List of Standard Product-related Fields

To create products individually

1. Click the New Product link.
2. In the Product: page, specify the product details.
   
   

   Note: Product Name is a mandatory field. Refer to the List of Standard Product-related Fields section for more details.

   
   
3. Click Save.

Importing Products

(Access Privilege: Data Import permission)

Importing product details from external source to the CRM system is one of the most important activities while migrating data from legacy systems to Zoho CRM.

You can import products, if you are authorized to perform this operation. Otherwise, Import Products button in Products Home page will be hidden in your user interface. By default, product ownership is held up with the users, who import the products. You can change the product ownership while importing by adding a product owner column in import (CSV/XLS) file and map to the Assigned To field. This will automatically assign products to particular users. Use the exact Zoho CRM users' names while creating the product import file, otherwise product details are not created in Zoho CRM.

To import product details from external sources       

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page under Product Tools section, click the Import Products button.
3. In the Import Products page, browse the Products-related data in CSV/XLS format and then click the Submit button.
4. In the Fields Mapping page, map the CSV/XLS column header with product related fields in Zoho CRM.
5. Click the Import button. It will take a few seconds to complete the importation.
6. In the Products: Home page, imported products are displayed under the Products List section. You can continue the importation further or complete the operation.

Associating Products with Other Records

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can create a 360-degrees view of the product to display all the associated details, such as products, trouble tickets, open activities, history of the completed activities, attachments, and notes:

• Price Books: To add different list prices to the product.
• Open Activities: To add tasks and events to product.
• Closed Activities: To display the closed tasks and events to product.
• Cases: To add cases to the product.
• Solutions: To add solutions to the product.
• Attachments: To attach documents to the product.
• Notes: To add notes to the product.

To associate Products with other Records

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products Home page, under the Product List section, select the required product.
3. In the Product: <Product Name> page, do the following:
   • Edit the Product details.
   • Create activities, such as tasks and events.
   • Attach documents and notes.
4. You can close the Product page once all the required information is updated for the product.

Changing Product Owner

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permissions)

It may be very useful to change the owner of some of the products when there are changes in your organization structure. You can change the owner of a single product or multiple products.

To change owner of products individually

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page, select the product.
3. In the Product: <Product Name> page, click the Edit button.
4. In the Product: <Product Name> page, change the product owner from the Product Owner lookup field.
5. Click Save to update the product owner.

To change owner of products in bulk

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page, go to the Product List section and select the check boxes corresponding to the products. You can also select all the products.
3. Click the Change Owner button.
4. In the Products: Change Owner page, select the user from the Select New Owner pick list and click the Update Owner button to change the owner of the products permanently.
   
   

   Note: Products ownership will be changed to another user, irrespective of its existing owner. Use this operation carefully, otherwise products belonging to different users will be changed to new user. To overcome this problem, first you may search the products with a required owner name then change the owner in bulk.

Exporting Products

(Access Privilege: Data Export permissions)

Occasionally, it is very useful to export the products from Zoho CRM to a spreadsheet programs for further data analysis.

To export products to external sources

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page under the Product Tools section, click the Export All Products button.
3. In the File Download pop-up dialog, click Save to save the Products files in *.CSV file format

Printing Product Details

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can view a printable form and print the product details using browser’s Print function.

To print product details

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page, go to the Products List section and select the required product.
3. In the Product: < Product Name> page click the Printable View link.
4. In the Product: < Product Name> page, click the Print Page button to print the document.

Viewing Reports

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can directly access some of the standard reports pertaining to products from the Products Reports section. By default, the following reports are displayed under Products module:

• Products by Category
• Products by Support Termination date
• Products by Cases

To view products report

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page, go to the Products Reports section.
3. Click the required report link. The report is displayed in Reports page, which can be further customized as per your requirements.

For more details about reports customization refer to Chapter 19: Working with Reports.

Deleting Products

(Access Privilege: Read/Write/Delete permission)

Rarely, you may need to remove the unnecessary products, which are not tracked further. This will help you manage your products in a better way. You can delete products either individually or in bulk.

Warning: The deleted potentials are temporarily stored in Recycle Bin. If required you can restore the deleted potentials again. But if you delete potentials from Recycle Bin, you cannot restore again.

To delete products individually

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page, select the product to be deleted.
3. In the Product: <Product Name> page, click Delete.
4. In the Confirmation dialog, click OK to delete the product permanently.

To delete products in bulk

1. Click the Products tab.
2. In the Products: Home page under the Products List section, select the products to be deleted using the Select check box.
3. Click the Delete button.
4. In the Confirmation dialog, click OK to delete the selected products permanently.

Customizing Products

(Access Privilege: Customize ZohoCRM.com permission)

Customization of the Products module includes, renaming the tab name, modifying the pick list values in standard fields, adding new custom fields, modifying Product page layout, and show/hide the related list views according to your Product catalog management process requirements.

For more details, refer to Chapter 24 Customizing Zoho CRM