Month: September 2020

Amazon Business is a purchasing solution that provides business owners with access to a vast network of suppliers, an easy ordering experience, and savings designed for business purchases. However, reporting these business purchase expenses on Zoho Expense was a manual process.

So, if you are a business owner who is:

• Wondering how to keep track of your Amazon Business purchases or
• Looking for an easy way to convert your business purchases into business expenses or
• Trying to cut down your lengthy expense reporting process — Zoho Expense’s integration with Amazon Business is for you.

With this integration, Zoho Expense fetches the invoice details of all the purchases you’ve made through your Amazon Business account and creates expenses automatically.

This helps you manage all your business purchases in one place, and save your employees the trouble of recording expenses manually. Here are some of the ways this integration will benefit your business:

Convert business purchases into expenses without breaking a sweat

When you make business purchases through Amazon Business, reporting these expenses manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. With this integration, this process is completely automated. Every time one of your employees purchases on your Amazon Business account with their corporate card, an expense will be automatically created for that employee in Zoho Expense.

Also, if you have enabled Report Automation for your Zoho Expense organization, an expense report will be created consolidating all the Amazon Business purchase expenses for each employee and will be submitted for approval. Thus, the process will be automated end-to-end and the employees need not worry about manual intervention at any step of the way.

Get insights on your business purchases

Keeping a close eye on your business purchases is an essential part of controlling your spending. Spending patterns help you monitor your business performance and arrive at important financial decisions.

By integrating with Zoho Expense, you will get a bird’s-eye view of all the purchases made in your Amazon Business account. The number of purchases made, the total amount spent, and the expense trends are graphically depicted on the dashboard. Getting a precise picture of your business purchases made via Amazon is now quick and simple.

So, what are you waiting for? Try the Amazon Business integration right away and manage your Amazon Business purchases efficiently.

Note:

• This integration works only with your Amazon Business account and not your personal Amazon account or Seller account. Don’t have an Amazon Business account? Create a free Amazon Business account.
• The purchase transactions will be fetched into Zoho Expense once the order is shipped on Amazon Business.

This is a guest post by Mapsly

Location data in your CRM records is a valuable resource, which when used with the proper tool can help dramatically increase sales and operational efficiency. You can extract actionable insights and optimize productive work hours.

 Read on to identify the top 5 pitfalls of working with location data and how you can tackle them.

1. Inefficient routes for field sales reps

If visiting customers takes up a large portion of your sales reps’ time, planning optimal routes is a common challenge. Inefficient routes can waste ~25% of a sales rep’s potentially productive work hours compared to following an optimal route.

Solution: A good map integration for your CRM allows you to create optimal routes between your CRM leads or accounts while considering the real-time and historic traffic data as well as the planned departure times. Read locations directly from Zoho CRM records and eliminate the need to manually upload data into the route planner.

2. Laborious analysis of geodata and lack of fast actionable insights

“Where are my customers clustered that would justify new local points of sale?”

“From which areas did my leads come over the last week?”

“In which regions are my accounts with $10M+ lifetime revenue?”

If you’re asking similar questions that take more than 30 seconds to answer, you might be missing out on an opportunity to extract value from your location data and incorporate geodata into your decision-making process.

Solution: Viewing your CRM data visualized on a map reveals useful patterns. A quality integration such as Mapsly with Zoho CRM will give you the option to make map layers with custom markers based on your chosen criteria. You can also set up custom CRM modules and custom fields to make the most of your location data.

 3. Slow and inaccurate geo-matching of prospects solely based on distance

Running geo-matching process off of Google Maps and CRM workflows that match the parties by zip codes alone can decrease team’s efficiency.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

• A call-center of a medical insurance company connects patients with the closest clinics that provide the service they require, considering the patients’ ability and mode of transport.

• A network of schools that connects their graduating students with entry-level jobs in their area based on the type of transportation available to them and the amount of time they’re willing to spend on their daily commute.

• A lead generation company that connects financial advisors to businesses in their area based on the type of business they specialize in and the maximum travel distance they’re comfortable with.

In any of these cases, the organization would like to assign new leads to a sales rep living closer to them based on the business metrics the sales rep is best at.

Solution: Integrating an app like Mapsly with Zoho CRM will let you set a base point (like a patient, a student, or an advisor in the examples above) and it will calculate the distance to and from all the service providers at once, thereby incorporating distance metrics into the criteria to match the provider to consumers.

It will also support viewing and updating multi-select lookup fields, allowing you to assign selected providers to their matching consumer right on the map. You can make any other necessary updates to your CRM data without leaving the map, and the integration will sync changes to the CRM in real time.

4. Inefficient sales territories (including those defined through zip codes)

Businesses that manage geographic sales or service territories usually resort to defining their territories by a list of zip codes, making zip code boundaries inevitable. Zip code boundaries are hard to maintain because you can’t visualize them to troubleshoot issues like missing or duplicate zip codes. 

Solution: Having relevant contacts and accounts plotted out on a map in the right app gives you the option to hand-draw territories, automatically assign CRM records to the assigned territories and save them, allowing you to utilize them in your territory assignment rules.

5. Disjointed processes involving the map—viewing data on a map, but editing in the CRM

Using separate geo-tools can make it time-consuming to modify your CRM data, forcing you to frequently switch back to your CRM to find the records you’re interested in. Finding records without geo-filters will take longer than needed.

Solution: Update Zoho CRM records individually or in bulk from your map. Trigger CRM workflows in the Mapsly App, both on desktop and mobile. Build your process around the map and input the location data, making work more efficient.

Address the challenges gracefully with Mapsly’s interactive maps seamlessly integrated with Zoho CRM. Visualise, organize, and analyze location data to make the best use of your team’s time and resources.

Try Mapsly for Zoho CRM

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