Month: June 2020

The Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has announced a cut in the living allowance and an increase in the VAT rate from 5% to 15%, effective from 1 July 2020. The triple hike has been implemented to balance the sudden drop in the economy caused by cutbacks in commercial spending, the decrease in oil prices, and the global crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Based on the new tax guidance, all contracts with the date of supply on or after 1 July 2020 will be taxed at 15%.

Transitional provisions

To combat the sudden hike, the government has levied certain transitional provisions based on the date of contract and the date of supply.

In case of imports, VAT will be applied at 5% if the goods are imported on or before 30 June 2020, and 15% if imported on or after 1 July 2020.

To comply with the revised VAT rates, you will have to make the required changes in your Zoho Finance organization(s).

Update the VAT rates in Zoho Books, Zoho Invoice and Zoho Inventory

 If you have created items, recurring invoices, bills, or expenses with 5% VAT, you can update the transactions with the new tax rate, using our simple update tool. Click the Update Now button in the organization’s Dashboard to get access to this Update tool.

Modules in the Update tool based on the product:

 Zoho Books: Change the VAT rates of items, recurring invoices, recurring bills, and recurring expenses in the Zoho Books update tool.

 Zoho Invoice:  Change the VAT rates of your items, recurring invoices, and recurring expenses in Zoho Invoice update tool

 Zoho Inventory: Change the VAT rates of your items using this Zoho Inventory update tool. However, if your Zoho Inventory organization is integrated with your Zoho Books organization, you will have to update your recurring transactions using the Zoho Books update tool.

To simplify the process, the update is segregated into 4 sections:

• Goods and Services

• Recurring Bills

• Recurring Invoices

• Recurring Expenses

 Here’s how you can change the VAT rates of each module:

Goods and Services: In this section, all the items with 5% tax will be displayed. Change the tax rate to 15% for each item, or bulk update the tax rate by selecting the checkboxes to the left of the items and clicking Save. You can choose to Skip an item if you do not want to make any changes or click Skip this Step and not change any items. If you want to change the items’ tax rate later, you can do so manually from the Items module.

 

The list of the items Processed, Skipped, and Updated will be displayed in the following page.

Recurring Invoices: This section lets you change the VAT rates of all the recurring invoices created with items that have 5% VAT rates. Select the recurring invoice in which you want to update the VAT rates. The tax rate will be auto-populated to 15% in the tax column of the item line, and you can change it to 5% if you want to. Once the changes are made, verify the information, and click Save. If you do not want this recurring invoice to generate child invoices anymore, click Stop Recurring Invoice. Make the changes in the same way to all of your other recurring invoices to go to the next step.

 

Recurring Bills: In this section, all the recurring bills with 5% tax will be listed. Similar to the previous step, select each bill to verify the VAT rates and click Save. If you no longer want a bill to recur, click Stop Recurring Bill.

Recurring Expenses: Once you have updated the recurring bills’ VAT rates, you will be taken to your recurring expenses. Here, verify the auto-populated VAT rates and click Save. Follow the same process for the rest of the expenses. If you do not want a recurring expense to generate any further transactions, click Stop Recurring Expenses.

Once you have changed the VAT rates in the above sections, click Continue with Zoho Books/Zoho Invoice/Zoho Inventory.

You will be redirected to your organization with the updated VAT rates.

We have come up with this tool to simplify the process of updating the VAT rates in each item and transaction. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. We are happy to help!

Introducing Zoho’s Digital Jumpstart Program

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced hardships in multiple areas of business, government, and everyday life. Small businesses in particular have been subjected to increased challenges as the way we do business has changed.

There are many types of small businesses: SMEs, MSMEs, local shops, and more.

We at Zoho know small businesses are a vital part of our communities across the world, so we’ve compiled some actionable tips for supporting small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond.

We’re also pleased to announce our new Digital Jumpstart Program to help small businesses adapt to the changing business landscape.

 

Let’s take a look at the ways small business in different parts of the world have been affected by this current crisis: 

• According to a survey done by the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI), 50% of micro, small, and medium companies (MSMEs) in India are struggling to pay salaries and rent.

• According to a University of California at Santa Cruz study, 41% of minority-owned small businesses in the US shuttered their company for good.

• 67% of African business owners said their business has been hit hard since the introduction of social distancing, lockdowns, and curfews on the continent – as per an African Management Institute (AMI) report.  

• Department of Education, Skills and Employment  reported that nearly 30% of Australian businesses have reduced staff since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

If we step up and support small businesses now, they will stand a better chance of surviving.

Small businesses offer a positive impact on their communities by creating more job opportunities and keeping money circulating in their local economies.  

Small businesses can create a huge impact on a national economy as well. For example: Indian MSMEs contribute close to 30% of India’s GDP.

Small businesses preserve the unique character of our local communities and create a multiplier effect. Locally made products can attract customers and tourists to a community, adding to that area’s incoming revenue. For example: Some Indian MSMEs preserve India’s textile legacy, including world-famous silk sarees and fabric prints.

 

MSME Day is celebrated across the world on the 27th of June every year. Zoho applauds and thanks MSMEs for their contribution to the world.

 

Wondering how  you can support small businesses now during the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn? Here’s some tips on ways to help beyond simply spending money:

Go local

Buy locally made and sold products over those from a bigger brand. Need a household device or a new piece of clothing? Skip ordering from international brands and look at local shops first.

Show them some love

Find small businesses in your area or even online. Like and comment on their social media posts, or even re-share on your own account. Leave a positive review on their website or other business review sites. Tell your friends and family about them and encourage them to shop small as well.

Go the extra mile

If possible, don’t cancel current memberships during your area’s lockdown or limited-capacity periods. Buy gift cards from them to use later when business in your area is more stable. Purchase some of their products in bulk now to use over time to give the business revenue now when things are tough.

 Uplift them

Offer your services for free. If you have free time at the moment and can offer needed services like web development, device repair, or even social media advice, consider volunteering your services to support local businesses. Some local organizations may even be able to accept monetary donations.

Small businesses are going digital       

One of the positive responses the business world has seen during the COVID-19 pandemic is a growing digital transformation as many businesses of every size learn that digitization is essential to keep their business going. Small businesses owners are putting in extra effort to improve their digital literacy.

According to a report by Connected Commerce Council (3C), 76% of small businesses in the US are relying more on digital tools than before.

Small businesses especially must adapt to digitization faster to navigate this new normal of remote work and limited-capacity social distancing.

Zoho is proud to offer multiple apps that can help small businesses not only survive these hard times but thrive in our changing world.

Small businesses can use our apps to:

• Work remotely and get things done from anywhere. This way, they will be able to adapt to new working conditions easily

• Build their online store and start selling their products faster

• File taxes, do accounting, generate invoices, manage inventory, collect payments, and more to improve their cash flow position

• Increase their marketing efforts, expand their reach and, build customer pipelines

• Manage their employees, measure their productivity, and find new talent

• Build better customer relationships
• Serve their customers better
• Manage all aspects of their business

Zoho is passionate about empowering small businesses to succeed. This has been one of our driving motivations for the past 23 years.

 

Zoho’s contribution: MSME Digital Jumpstart Program

 If you are a MSME business owner and looking at digital tech adoption, we at Zoho are happy to help you with our new Digital Jumpstart Program.

Through this program, Zoho will help launch the digital transformation journey for ten winning companies and provide any necessary support to help them succeed.

To submit your business into our drawing for a free Digital Jumpstart, please fill out this form before July 5, and choose your primary business goal.

Some of the goals available to choose are remote working, build an online store, manage finances, manage employees, improve online presence, support customers better, and handle all business aspects.

We will draw ten winners from all submissions. Submissions are limited to one per business. Please complete your business submission before July 5, 2020.  

After the ten winners are drawn, Zoho will then set up digital solutions for their businesses based on the primary business goal they registered in the form.

 

A note to all small business owners :

Thank you for being the beating heart of our economy. We’re here to help you.

Get in touch with us if you need to talk to an expert about digital technology. You can start with a comment right now.

When you shop small businesses, you support someone’s big dream.

Stay strong. Stay compassionate. Stay safe.

This is a guest blog post by Mary Hart, ConnectLeader.

No matter if you’re working out of your office surrounded by your sales team, or working from home and only see your sales reps in video meetings, your sales metrics don’t change. As a sales manager or a sales rep, you’re still tasked with delivering revenue, meeting and exceeding your sales quota, and connecting with potential customers in order to set up meetings.

So, how can you improve sales engagement and productivity? Read on to learn the top ways to have contextual conversations, send out emails that convert, and ultimately make more sales.

#1 Know your audience

You might wish that every person is a potential customer for your product, but that’s rarely the case. Work with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas to improve the chances of your marketing and sales efforts’ success, as you can tailor your efforts towards prospects who are more likely to convert.

#2 Look at your customers

Don’t have an ICP or buyer persona? Your customers have purchased from you, so figure out what they have in common (and this can be more than one thing). Do they all have the same title? Are they all in the same vertical? Are they located geographically close to each other? These similarities are the starting point for figuring out what kind of person is your Ideal Customer.

#3 Understand pain points

As you’re assessing your current customers and ideal customers, consider the challenges they face. What is keeping them from being their most productive? Technology? Budget? Processes?

#4 Create the right cadence

As you’re creating your sales cadence to contact prospective customers, make sure it includes seven to twelve touches total. These should be in the form of email, phone, texts, video, and social outreach.

#5 Personalization is key

Remember those pain points I mentioned above? You’re going to use them to create targeted, personalized messaging for each of the seven to twelve touches. No one wants to get a sales pitch that could be delivered to anyone passing by. Add personal aspects to it, including the pain points that person could be facing, the name of someone you know in common who referred you, or something that person posted on LinkedIn recently.

#6 Include success stories

Your happy customers are the best people to promote your products because they’ve already chosen them and are seeing the return on investment. Sending a potential customer who is in the consideration stage of the customer lifecycle, a case study or a customer quote that shows how it’s helped them increase revenue or productivity—or even better, both, can motivate them to buy.

#7 Use the right tools

This seems like a no-brainer, but it isn’t. Take a look at the crowded sales engagement market and narrow it down to exactly what your specific company needs to increase productivity and drive sales engagement.

Once you have the right sales engagement tools and have done your research to create personalized sales outreach messages (be that a cold call, cold email, text, or social message) you’ll have everything you need to boost your sales engagement and productivity.

Try Connectleader TruCadence Sales Cadence for Zoho CRM

Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho CRM with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace.

In our recent webinar, we discussed a question that’s currently on the lips of many ecommerce marketers: “How do I stay at the top of my customers’ minds while still being considerate of the global situation?” The key to this lies in the relevance of your communications.

You’re likely seeing the phrase “We’re here for you” everywhere in current marketing, but the better thing to communicate is actually how your service can make their lives better. That said, this has to be subtly connected with your customers’ shopping sensibilities and profile.

For example, if you have a fitness-based online store, you can send your customers tips and tricks for home workouts using the equipment they bought from you. This way, your content becomes both relevant and actionable.

To achieve this, you should obviously turn to your customers’ sales interactions and information collected from signup forms like region, country, gender, and more. Once you sample the available data, you can segment your users based on different criteria. This, in turn, indicates what content to create for whom. (This is why segmentation is touted as a technique for all times.)

Now comes a question: “Do you need an additional tool to meet your segmentation needs?” Not at all. Your email marketing software comes in with a built-in feature to achieve this purpose. We dissected the nuances of email segmentation in our  webinar by joining hands with Zoho Commerce, our in-house ecommerce software.

In case you didn’t get a chance to attend, you’re just a click away from watching it now.

Here’s a rundown of the discussions we had during the webinar:

Q1. How do I add the link to my landing pages in an email?

You can do this by:

1. Superimposing your links on a certain portion of your text

2. Embedding your links as call-to-action (CTA) buttons on an email template

Note: The pre-designed newsletter templates have strategically-placed CTAs to help you save time. The template editor allows you to create CTAs on your own as well.

Quick tip: Make sure your CTAs are clearly visible and definitive.

Q2. How do I segment my users based on their sales interactions?

Ideally, your e-store has to be integrated with your email marketing software. With Zoho Campaigns, your store’s sales data gets automatically imported to the mailing list you define.

Furthermore, you have seven ecommerce-based segmentation options at your disposal:

• Total number of orders made by a user
• Items purchased
• Items not purchased
• Total amount spent
• Average amount spent
• Average amount spent per order
• Date of last order

Note: You can create advanced segments by combining these options with the regular profile-information-based ones.

Q3. Can you explain the other (ecommerce) integration capabilities of Zoho Campaigns?

Zoho Campaigns integrates with as many as four ecommerce platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Zoho Commerce. The tighter integration between Campaigns and your store means you can track your store’s overall and
email-based revenue within Campaigns.

Your store’s cart gets virtually connected with Campaigns, enabling you to leverage email automation for abandoned cart and purchase follow-ups. What’s more, there are ecommerce-based, ready-made email templates (at no cost) to help you send quick promotions. You can also swiftly pull your store-generated coupons and product images into your newsletter templates.

Read more about Campaigns’ ecommerce email marketing solution here.

Q4. How does Zoho Campaigns’ automation helps recover abandoned carts?

This aspect of your business is taken care of by the drag-and-drop workflows of Campaigns. These workflows function on “if this happens, do this” basis. [You predefine an email to launch at or some time after the occurrence of an event (trigger).]

The drag-and-drop interface is designed in a way to help you easily visualize your follow-up strategies. You configure a series of emails by having “cart abandonment” as the trigger and completely automate them. The best part is you can create follow-ups based on different responses to an email: opens, unopens, link clicks, multiple link clicks, and more. In order to make your reminders/follow-ups clickworthy, the image and details of the concerned product are automatically added.

We hope this helps you in framing your engagement strategy. We also have a webinar on “email designs” scheduled for Thursday, June 25. Save your spot by clicking here.

Note: This story is part of #ZohoInfluence, a program focused on sharing experiences and advice from our customers, and is written by Amanda Dolan-Riddle of Purolite. Click here to see more from Zoho Influence. 

When it comes to dealing with the challenges presented by Covid-19, none are more apparent than those faced by essential services. Purolite supplies ion exchange resins to many industries including public drinking water supplies. This makes us an essential-to-life supplier and hence, we are fully operational during the pandemic.

As with many companies, Purolite is experiencing unique challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While our sales offices and administrations are all working remotely, our production staff are all reporting to work. We are focused on the safety of our employees and their families.

We’ve had to introduce new systems in order to adapt to this remote work. Issues like collecting employee information, expenses, and HR became much harder when administrators weren’t available on site. We’ve adapted to these new challenges by making the processes as easy to learn and automated as possible, reducing the time needed for training and the number of people required for an individual task.

In order to keep track of employee health, we’ve begun collecting employee temperatures. We are now using Zoho Forms as a way for employees to log their temperature each day when reporting to work. The form is easily deployed on mobile phones so that employees can record their temperature and we can be sure our employees are safe and well.

We’ve also implemented new procedures to ensure a clean and safe work environment for our production staff. The need to purchase supplies related to PPE and disinfection for Covid-19 required that we add new categories to our accounting ledgers. Zoho Expense made it easy to add the new accounts and categories so that our employees can be reimbursed for these important supplies.

May and June are a busy time for our HR department. Open enrollment for our healthcare benefits plans usually involve one-on-one meetings with employees and group sessions to help employees learn about the various plan options. This year we are using Zoho Meeting for our benefits webinars. Our HR team has also set up two computer stations, monitored by Zoho Assist so that they can offer live assistance to our employees who are signing up for plans. HR has also started using Zoho Bookings to allow employees to sign-up for remote HR discussions using Zoho Meeting. This offers our employees a way to communicate with HR in a private, secure setting remotely.

While our manufacturing teams are reporting to work, our sales teams are all working remotely. I have encouraged them to use time at home to focus on cleaning up CRM data, something I always like to prioritize.

Employees also need new ways to stay connected to each other and to continue learning. To help our employees stay in touch, our marketing team has used Zoho Campaigns to distribute a daily newsletter called The Exchange. Each day they include a different topic, sometimes business related or Covid-19 related as well as an employee spotlight segment. It has been lovely to learn new details and see how my fellow employees are managing all the changes and challenges of working from home. They often share fun details about their home life and even delicious recipes. We have also begun using Zoho Showtime to launch an educational series.

The most important thing in the transition to remote work was smoothing out any roadblocks in the software so employees could just focus on their work. This required automating and centralizing processes and making it as easy as possible for employees to stay connected and up to date. The ease of customization, integration and deployment of Zoho apps has made the transition to remote operation as seamless as possible. And while, like so many others, we look forward to the reopening and recovery from this pandemic, we’re happy to feel supported by our people and processes in the mean time.