Category: Zoho

Each typeface has its own unique personality and purpose. Serif is more traditional and sophisticated while Sans Serif has a modern and clean personality. Script is elegant and classic while Slab Serif is bold and contemporary.

Arial Black screams and can’t be ignored. Times New Roman can’t tell you a joke. Can you imagine Comic Sans on a legal document?

Each font has its own characteristics, designed by people with unique design approaches, for their own target audience and intended use. One doesn’t necessarily play well with the other.

 

With Our Hands Tied Behind Our Backs

In Zoho, text is the primary medium of communication with our users but we have always had one problem with it.

In all of our written content, we were only able to control what words we used and where. But, how the words appeared and how they were perceived was dictated by the font. Some fonts worked well on our websites, billboards and some worked well inside our products. Some look good when they’re big and some when they’re small. So, there was an obvious inconsistency in our font choices and more importantly, they didn’t gel well with our design thinking. We couldn’t dress our words up with Zoho’s visual language. It started becoming obvious that we needed a typeface crafted by the same minds that designed our products, with the same attention to detail and love for wow. Simply put, we wanted the font to be made in Zoho!

 

Connected by Words

Zoho has 50M+ users who read thousands of pages of text from Zoho. That amounts to millions of words conveying a variety of information. We use words in different places in different ways. These words evoke emotions. Emotions like curiosity, satisfaction, caution, concern, happiness. Despite these diverse avatars and applications, they all have one thing in common: they carry Zoho’s message. These messages form the fabric of our relationship with our customers.

 

Hot Off The Press

We’re known for building world-class products. Everything we create here is the ultimate product of the mind and the hands, the new typeface was no exception.

It started with extensive research into popular typefaces, their design signature, and deliberating where changes can be made to suit our vision. We forged the final shape by tuning six foundational parameters—the ascender, descender, aperture, cap height, x-height, and stroke contrast.

We designed it to be fluid, open but structured with a consistent visual tone.
The creative process involved addressing feedback around curves, consistency, relationships of forms, legibility of glyphs at certain sizes, tracking and leading, and various other granular tweaks.

We paid special attention to kerning to achieve that optimal spacing between the letters for perfect legibility, no matter the size or weight. 

Our typeface stands tall with an increased x-height for better legibility, a stylized angular cut to enhance the visibility of the aperture, and a designed stress on high contrast for overall aesthetic appearance.

Our typeface is functional, scalable, and dynamic. It is transmutable across different formats and environments. So you can see it sitting comfortably within a pop-up box alerting our users, inside our product or maxed-out on a billboard that scales an entire building, catching attention. Every pixel of the new font was perfected to make our users’ reading experience better.

 

A Name With A Message

We are on a mission to define our visual identity. We’ve already transformed our product logos based on our new design language, Logolinism, which embraces simple, linear shapes to create easily recognizable product metaphors.

Our new logos had a minimal, understated nature of design, which we believe reflects our brand itself and also gives us the flexibility to adapt our logos across colour palettes, media, and platforms.

We took a similar approach to build our typeface as well. The angular cut needed to be unique, but not jarring. We kept looking at various angles. We played with it. We fought with it. We lived with it. Finally, one angle seemed to look perfectly right. The winner was 23.5 degrees.

Simple, appealing, and evocative are on the checklist for any good name. We wanted our name to be all those things but also contextual to our design and aligned with Zoho.

Our angular cut came in handy while choosing a suitable name. Coincidentally, 23.5 degrees also happens to be the angle at which the Earth’s axis is tilted to its orbital plane. So, we named it ‘Puvi’. It’s a word from the language Tamil, which means ‘Earth’. It resonated deeply with Zoho’s philosophy to build powerful solutions by taking humble approaches.  

So, is it any wonder that we describe Puvi, our first font, as a down-to-earth font? We’ll take ten points for creativity. Once we complete our transition to Puvi, it will be made available for the public. Meanwhile, here’s Puvi flexing its muscles in a video:



 

For anyone who runs a business, the priority always is to get more customers, and the best way to do that is to increase traffic to your website. Email marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways to achieve this, and an essential part of these campaigns involves sending email newsletters peppered with links intended to take people to your web pages. The journey of a prospect that began with a newsletter signup form ends with them converting into customers and then into loyal customers.

What is a newsletter?

A newsletter is a mass email sent to a mailing list informing them about the latest news, tips, and updates related to a brand or company. Newsletters are shared at regular intervals and only with those who have given their consent.

What is a newsletter’s purpose?

Newsletters are not necessarily meant for a hard sell. Instead, they’re a medium to build brand awareness and develop a strong relationship with the audience. While some brands do promote their latest products and offers in their newsletter, they are often packaged as a larger campaign alongside other important information.

Here are some common reasons why newsletters are sent:

• Provide regular updates

• Improve website visits

• Motivate customers to make purchases, write testimonials, and check blog posts

• Share brand ideologies

• Send clarifications during crisis management

• Raise funds

• Promote upcoming events/sales

How often should you send a newsletter?

There is no definitive answer to this. It depends on the content and the audience. The trick is to hit that sweet spot—getting good open and click rates without annoying the subscribers. The best way to determine this is through testing different options and comparing the results.

Some brands send weekly newsletters, others choose to send once a month, and some even choose to connect with their subscribers fortnightly (every two weeks).

You can choose the frequency by analyzing the performance of your previous campaigns in the reports section of your email marketing software and see what gets you the best open and click rates.

What does a newsletter contain?

Before we dive into the kinds of content, let’s talk about a welcome email. This is often the first email one receives after they sign up for your newsletter, though it’s rarely part of the actual newsletter itself given that a newsletter is typically an ongoing series that people are opting to start receiving. Readers are likely to interact with your brand more if they receive a well-crafted welcome email that thanks them for joining the newsletter list and maybe even gives them an idea of what to expect in a typical newsletter. It’s the first impression that your brand makes.

Usually an automated email, it is a friendly hello to connect with new customers and encourage them to interact with your product or service.

While email newsletters can feature a variety of information, let’s look at five key pieces of content that are effective at helping inform readers and, eventually, converting them into loyal customers.

Announcements

Newsletters are an ideal place to include announcements related to products, services, or initiatives. If the announcement is of the utmost importance, a separate email specifically devoted to the news might be necessary as well so the announcement doesn’t get lost in the mix or just in case someone decides to skip that particular issue of your newsletter.

Including announcements in your newsletters also gives you control of the narrative surrounding the announcement. To build a long-lasting and trustworthy relationship with your subscribers, it’s important to ensure that all the vital communication regarding your brand comes directly from you first. Prompt notification about any new product or feature release will assure them that the information is accurate. Newsletters are a great way to create excitement among subscribers about an announcement and the perfect place to include special offers for those who register or purchase first.

Company news

 If you or your company have received an award or crossed a milestone, a newsletter can be the best way to inform your audience about that. This is another type of content that helps build trust and loyalty, because companies that share important internal news with subscribers are in a sense inviting their audience to become part of their family.  Details on company events, achievements, or changes can also be shared, but always keep the audience in mind first.

Remember to always ask, “Why will our readers care about this news?”

 If you’re a large company, changes at the top will have a direct impact on your products or services, so these might be of interest to your audience. But a slight promotion or job title change for someone they’ve never heard of might not be significant to them. Meanwhile, if your team is small and your customers interact with them regularly, they would be more inclined to be interested in their well-being. If you’re sharing about an important company event, remember to provide links and info that can take readers directly to a registration or contact page.

Educational content and industry insights

Another important use of the newsletter is to educate. In fact, this might be one of the most popular reasons for someone to opt in and receive a newsletter—learning how to use your company’s products better. Understanding the pain points of your customers can help you give them useful and actionable information. This could include tips and tricks or hacks to overcome certain difficulties.

Newsletters are also often packed with industry-specific knowledge related to your business or product. Though this may not be directly linked to your brand, it will help you project yourself as an industry leader. For instance, a pet grooming studio doesn’t necessarily have to talk about their clients or services all the time. Once in a while, they can discuss the health risks faced by animals during certain seasons or share links to shelters that need financial support.

User-generated content

If you are a news portal, a specialized blog, or a subject specialist, you can share content written by others with your audience simply by linking to it and maybe including a brief introduction. Not only does this help if you don’t always have your own content to share, but it also generates goodwill with those you’re linking to. Many blogging platforms use this format to dish out the best piece of writing they come across on their website.

Promotional content

 Be it promoting your latest product or letting your subscribers know about an upcoming sale, including promotional content in your newsletter is a go-to strategy for any marketer. It’s also where a marketer needs to be the most careful, which is why we’ve placed it at the bottom here. When an audience signs up for a newsletter, it means they’ve already bought in on your product or service to a certain degree. Often they’re trying to learn how to use it better or want to know more about what’s going on at your company. The one thing they’re not looking for is to be sold to over and over again. This is why promotional content should be used sparingly. Less is more.

Promotional content tends to be picture-heavy and conveys a sense of urgency. As this is often the hardest sell you’ll see in a newsletter, keep this sort of content brief. People will often skim newsletters, so getting to the point of the offer quickly and then offering an appropriate Call to Action (CTA) button will net you the best results.

How long should a newsletter be?

The “ideal length” is not a hard-and-fast rule. It depends on the content and, mostly, the frequency. For instance, if you’re sending your newsletters out once a month, you’ll likely have multiple sections containing a mix of the types of content we mentioned earlier.

 If you’re an ecommerce company sending out the best deals every week, you might have fewer sections and will be more reliant on images.

 Regardless, leverage the power of linking out to content. Keep any body copy in your newsletter brief—maybe two or three sentences—and then provide a link readers can follow to read more on the subject. Obviously an exception to this is if you want to open your newsletter with a message from someone on your team. Even then, keep that short and to the point.

 The best way to gauge the impact of the length of the newsletter is through A/B testing. Try different variations and study the results to see which version gained more engagement.

Newsletter tips

Choose double opt-in

A double opt-in subscription system means that people have to confirm they’ve subscribed to your newsletter before they receive it. This guarantees that your list only has valid email addresses by automatically eliminating typos made by people in the signup form and other issues. In the long term, this will help improve your domain reputation.

Personalize the content

Personalizing your email campaigns is a proven way to increase your open and click-through rates and can have a measurable impact on your ROI. You can do this by using merge tags, dynamic content, and segmenting your list.

Use CTA

A CTA button encourages your audience to take a tangible step—click here, read more, or sign up now are all great examples. They lead your audience towards becoming a customer or client. Every newsletter should have a key CTA you want to emphasize. Without one, your newsletter won’t make an impact because there will be no hook that inspires customers to take the next step.

The best part about newsletters is that they can be designed quickly. The ready-made newsletter templates of today’s email marketing software makes your job all the more easier. There are plenty of categories available, and you can use them without any coding knowledge. 

So get started creating your first newsletter today!

Hiring candidates is not only tedious but also very time-consuming, especially when you’re hiring programmers. From sourcing a pipeline of potential candidates and shortlisting the right ones to conducting numerous rounds of interviews, this process can take a substantial amount of time and effort. 

Even after jumping through so many hoops, there is no guarantee that you have hired the right candidate. So how can you minimize your risk and consistently hire better talent?

Presenting HackerEarth: The suite of assessment products that helps you reduce the time and effort involved with hiring and ensure that you hire only the best developers for your organization.

Here’s why recruiters should start using HackerEarth for Zoho Recruit:

Increase productivity and functional efficiency

HackerEarth is always innovating to help recruiters hire more efficiently while maintaining the highest quality standards. Recruiters can accelerate their hiring by applying preliminary assessment rules through the platform. Companies can save time and money with advanced screening features, which helps prevent unnecessary screenings for candidates that recruiters disqualify early in the screening process.

Mitigate risk and maintain compliance

HackerEarth’s platform supports a high standard of compliance to ensure data is  reportable, accurate, and not reliant on manual processes. This makes hiring processes more consistent and leaves less opportunity for human bias and error, so hiring teams can maintain compliance while saving time.

Improve candidate experience and conversion

Today’s candidates expect accessibility, visibility, and speed. HackerEarth and Zoho Recruit are continually innovating to help you meet those expectations. Mobile-friendly candidate portals accelerate the assessment process with easy-to-use forms while also providing candidates with all the resources they need.

Expand and optimize your candidate pool

With HackerEarth’s advanced analytics, recruiters can now make better hiring decisions and employ more effective recruitment strategies. Based on this data, recruiters can use HackerEarth’s platform tools to optimize preliminary assessment rules and make their pool of qualified candidates both more inclusive and more targeted to their needs.

Differentiate your brand to attract candidates

Diversity and inclusiveness in hiring are both high-profile issues for companies, and fair chance hiring practices can draw new customers, talent, and partners. Join a thousand other companies that align with HackerEarth’s inclusiveness mission to help attract diverse talent and raise your brand profile.

Until recently, many small businesses have been reluctant to adopt new software because of the upfront cost involved in setting it up. Only enterprise-level players could really imagine being able to implement software to optimize their operations. However, disruptions in cloud-technology have made business software easily affordable for businesses of all sizes.

The global cloud-based payroll software market is expected to be worth US $ 17.39 billion by 2027, and the benefits of cloud-based software are unparalleled in terms of operational efficiency and cost savings. Businesses are able to improve their efficiency by deploying new software with minimum risk and reduced internal staffing requirements. It also allows them to pair greater reliability, security, and privacy with higher productivity, reduced cost, and quicker return on the minimal investment incurred.

In this article, we will look at the benefits of cloud-based software and what it brings to the table for optimizing your payroll operations.

Operational advantages

Saving upfront costs

Embracing a cloud-based payroll system frees businesses from the complexities and expense of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading legacy on-premises systems. From the perspective of your head of finance, there is no capital expenditure and huge savings in cost, regardless of the size of your business.

 Cloud systems are also easier for your IT department. Unlike legacy on-premises systems that require significant in-house work to update every few years, cloud payroll systems are updated by their vendors as often as needed, often several times a year, with virtually no implementation work from your internal IT department.

That’s in addition to the massive cost savings associated with not having to invest in servers and other hardware to run on-premises systems, or the people needed to maintain them.

Empowering businesses to be faster and more efficient

When one of our prospective clients was recently asked why he wanted to switch to a cloud-based payroll system, he replied, “We absolutely have no issues with the way our current system is calculating payroll, but it is aging badly. The system is not up to the needs of today’s fast-paced mobile, interconnected, and data-dependent world. Additionally, the customisation of the system once used to be a strong point now proves to be a double-edged sword, as making upgrades are incredibly time-consuming, resource-intensive, costly, and risky “

This is typical of the reasons that businesses choose to make the switch—even a high-quality legacy system often ages poorly and takes up significant resources to complete routine payroll tasks compared to a cloud system. Also, cloud payroll software allows business owners to access their payroll information from wherever they are, allowing payroll professionals to respond faster to employee requests, and to get their own work done faster.

Core payroll advantages

Employee data is centralized

Payroll is more than just about calculating your employees’ paychecks. If you don’t organize all your employee records in a central place right from the employees’ first day at work, it can affect the paychecks’ accuracy. For example, a wrongly entered or misremembered Date of Joining could mean an employee losing out on a whole day’s wage. For the employer, that is a compliance nightmare.

With cloud payroll software, you can track and manage the information related to all your employees’ life cycle events, such as onboarding, benefits, salary revisions, leaves, and investment declarations, using one centralized source of data. You can also manage all employee communications from a centralized location.

Compliance is simplified

Unlike legacy software, the cloud payroll system allows you to adapt to compliance changes on the fly. Regulatory changes, new budget announcements, revised deduction percentages, and other changes can now be handled faster. With one update to the central server, you ensure that your business stays compliant with all the statutory compliance laws for PF, ESI, PT, LWF, IT, and other updates made by the Government.

Reduced workload for payroll staff

Maintaining employee records, collecting proofs, and validating submitted proofs takes up a major chunk of every HR’s time month by month. Additionally, responding to clarifying questions with back-and-forth emails is extremely time-consuming. Cloud payroll software with employee self-service portals allows you to delegate some of your routine work back to your employees. Employees can submit their proofs themselves, while employers can validate them and approve or reject the submitted proofs online. If something is missing, you can send real-time messages to request supporting documents from your employees, avoiding the hassle of back-and-forth emails.

Complex business processes unified by technology

It is well known that the HR, payroll, and finance teams of any organization have to come together to implement payroll successfully each month. Your employees’ personal information, tax-related data, leave and attendance data, bonuses and other information has to flow into your payroll system automatically for a flawless payroll. Business departments used to work in silos to bring all this information together, but with cloud technology, integrating complex business processes is a lot easier. A tightly integrated HR, payroll, and accounting system make real collaboration possible.

Single sign-on enables your staff to switch between multiple systems without the need to remember multiple passwords. Secure access controls improve cross-department collaboration without sacrificing security or usability. The information flows between departments in real-time, effortlessly.

Real-time data, anywhere in the world

In a recent survey of senior finance executives by CFO Research, nearly 41 percent of respondents said their management teams cannot access the data they need when they need it. Nearly two-thirds said their information systems are duplicative and complex, and that the financial and performance information used for decision-making is not as useful as it should be.

The biggest reason for these problems is that most businesses are using redundant systems with technology that’s many years out of date.

Cloud payroll software delivers information, insights, and consolidated payroll metrics in real-time, without the need for separate business intelligence systems, separate data warehouses. From getting a view on consolidated payroll expenses to overall tax-liabilities, the information is available in a single click.

The way forward

Cloud payroll systems offer numerous advantages over traditional systems like spreadsheets or on-premises payroll software. With the future of getting back to work uncertain, many companies would benefit from considering remote work as an option for their employees, including remote payroll management.

With Zoho Payroll business owners can manage their payroll operations end-to-end. The in-house accounting and HRMS systems allow them to eliminate multiple vendors for these functions. Self-service portals in both web and mobile app allows the payroll staff to digitize time-consuming paperwork. Zoho Payroll also has the power to manage a distributed workforce with ease, allowing your staff to continue your payroll operations from wherever they are.

 

Until recently, many small businesses have been reluctant to adopt new software because of the upfront cost involved in setting it up. Only enterprise-level players could really imagine being able to implement software to optimize their operations. However, disruptions in cloud-technology have made business software easily affordable for businesses of all sizes.

The global cloud-based payroll software market is expected to be worth US $ 17.39 billion by 2027, and the benefits of cloud-based software are unparalleled in terms of operational efficiency and cost savings. Businesses are able to improve their efficiency by deploying new software with minimum risk and reduced internal staffing requirements. It also allows them to pair greater reliability, security, and privacy with higher productivity, reduced cost, and quicker return on the minimal investment incurred.

In this article, we will look at what cloud payroll is, and the benefits of cloud-based software, and what it brings to the table for optimizing your payroll operations.

What is cloud payroll software?

A payroll management system where you can access, operate and control everything about your payroll from onboarding employees to ensuring compliance to handling exit processes over a remote system – the cloud – with nothing but a computer connected to the internet.

A cloud-based payroll system is a massive support for employers who are still operating remotely, including the payroll department. It allows employees to work from any location, and have access to the same information that they’d have access to from their office. All this, while ensuring safe payroll transactions and data maintenance with fine grained security protocols, preventing data breach or unauthorized access.

Benefits of cloud-based payroll software

Operational advantages

Saving upfront costs

Embracing a cloud-based payroll software frees businesses from the complexities and expense of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading legacy on-premises systems. From the perspective of your head of finance, there is no capital expenditure and huge savings in cost, regardless of the size of your business.

 Cloud systems are also easier for your IT department. Unlike legacy on-premises systems that require significant in-house work to update every few years, cloud payroll systems are updated by their vendors as often as needed, often several times a year, with virtually no implementation work from your internal IT department.

That’s in addition to the massive cost savings associated with not having to invest in servers and other hardware to run on-premises systems, or the people needed to maintain them.

Empowering businesses to be faster and more efficient

When one of our prospective clients was recently asked why he wanted to switch to a cloud-based payroll system, he replied, “We absolutely have no issues with the way our current system is calculating payroll, but it is aging badly. The system is not up to the needs of today’s fast-paced mobile, interconnected, and data-dependent world. Additionally, the customisation of the system once used to be a strong point now proves to be a double-edged sword, as making upgrades are incredibly time-consuming, resource-intensive, costly, and risky “

This is typical of the reasons that businesses choose to make the switch—even a high-quality legacy system often ages poorly and takes up significant resources to complete routine payroll tasks compared to a cloud system. Also, cloud payroll software allows business owners to access their payroll information from wherever they are, allowing payroll professionals to respond faster to employee requests, and to get their own work done faster.

Core payroll advantages

Employee data is centralized

Payroll is more than just about calculating your employees’ paychecks. If you don’t organize all your employee records in a central place right from the employees’ first day at work, it can affect the paychecks’ accuracy. For example, a wrongly entered or misremembered Date of Joining could mean an employee losing out on a whole day’s wage. For the employer, that is a compliance nightmare.

With cloud payroll software, you can track and manage the information related to all your employees’ life cycle events, such as onboarding, benefits, salary revisions, leaves, and investment declarations, using one centralized source of data. You can also manage all employee communications from a centralized location.

Compliance is simplified

Unlike legacy software, the cloud-based payroll software allows you to adapt to compliance changes on the fly. In India, there are various regulatory laws such as new budget announcements, revised deduction percentages, and other changes that can now be handled faster. With one update to the central server, you ensure that your business stays compliant with all the statutory compliance laws for PF, ESI, PT, LWF, IT, and other updates made by the Government.

Reduced workload for payroll staff

Maintaining employee records, collecting proofs, and validating submitted proofs takes up a major chunk of every HR’s time month by month. Additionally, responding to clarifying questions with back-and-forth emails is extremely time-consuming. Cloud-based payroll software with employee self-service portals allows you to delegate some of your routine work back to your employees. Employees can submit their proofs themselves, while employers can validate them and approve or reject the submitted proofs online. If something is missing, you can send real-time messages to request supporting documents from your employees, avoiding the hassle of back-and-forth emails.

Complex business processes unified by technology

It is well known that the HR, payroll, and finance teams of any organization have to come together to implement payroll successfully each month. Your employees’ personal information, tax-related data, leave and attendance data, bonuses and other information has to flow into your payroll system automatically for a flawless payroll. Business departments used to work in silos to bring all this information together, but with cloud technology, integrating complex business processes is a lot easier. A tightly integrated HR, payroll, and accounting system make real collaboration possible.

Single sign-on enables your staff to switch between multiple systems without the need to remember multiple passwords. Secure access controls improve cross-department collaboration without sacrificing security or usability. The information flows between departments in real-time, effortlessly.

Real-time data, anywhere in the world

In a recent survey of senior finance executives by CFO Research, nearly 41 percent of respondents said their management teams cannot access the data they need when they need it. Nearly two-thirds said their information systems are duplicative and complex, and that the financial and performance information used for decision-making is not as useful as it should be.

The biggest reason for these problems is that most businesses are using redundant systems with technology that’s many years out of date.

Cloud payroll software delivers information, insights, and consolidated payroll metrics in real-time, without the need for separate business intelligence systems, separate data warehouses. From getting a view on consolidated payroll expenses to overall tax-liabilities, the information is available in a single click.

The way forward

Cloud payroll systems offer numerous advantages over traditional systems like spreadsheets or on-premises payroll software. With the future of getting back to work uncertain, many companies would benefit from considering remote work as an option for their employees, including remote payroll management.

With Zoho Payroll business owners can manage their payroll operations end-to-end. The in-house accounting and HRMS systems allow them to eliminate multiple vendors for these functions. Self-service portals in both web and mobile app allows the payroll staff to digitize time-consuming paperwork. Zoho Payroll also has the power to manage a distributed workforce with ease, allowing your staff to continue your payroll operations from wherever they are.

 

With the prevalence of email today, many of us are used to owning multiple email accounts—often hosted across different providers—for business and personal use. While we may still enjoy the specific benefits each of these providers offer, having to juggle the different accounts and hop from one email platform to another can be time-consuming. If you use Zoho Mail for your business accounts, if you’re looking for a richly featured platform to consolidate your accounts, or if Zoho is simply your favorite interface, then we have great news: Zoho Mail introduces IMAP client to help you configure, sync, and manage your other email accounts via IMAP.

Why IMAP? Choosing IMAP to transfer emails is advantageous because the communication is two-way synchronized between the email server and the email client. This means that no matter what device or client you use for email, and no matter how often you switch from one to the other, your folders and emails are perfectly synced across all of them.

How to set up IMAP syncing through Zoho Mail

As long as your email provider supports IMAP, the set-up process is simple and you will be ready to access your external accounts inside Zoho Mail in three easy steps—add, authenticate, and sync. First, select your email provider and add the email address of the account you want to access from Zoho Mail. Here’s how the workflow varies based on whether you are adding accounts authenticated with a password or through OAuth.

Authentication using OAuth

If your email account is either Outlook or Office 365, your configuration is authenticated via OAuth. After logging in successfully, enable read and write permissions for Zoho to add your account and begin the sync. You can further update other details like the Account name, Reply To address, and more, and each update will once again be verified by OAuth to ensure perfect security.

Authentication using a password

For accounts that need to be authenticated with a password, start by filling out the incoming and outgoing server details. This information will be easily available either in your email provider’s settings page or in the help documents. Even better, for popular services like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, MSN, or another Zoho account, these details are pre-filled, so you’ll only need to specify your password and the from date for the sync to begin. For detailed instructions, head over to our help page.

Note: If you have a Gmail account or any other service with TFA enabled, it is mandatory for you to create and use an app-specific password to begin the sync.

Once you’ve set up your account sync with IMAP, you can easily toggle between your primary Zoho account and any other Zoho and external accounts in the folder pane on the left. You can now enjoy reading all your emails in your Zoho Mail inbox and manage distinct settings for each account from a single place. Don’t forget to give us your feedback too! 🙂

This is a guest post by Xoxoday Plum.

Employees feel valued when their work is recognized and appreciated, leading to increased engagement and morale. Not only that, appreciation also helps employees focus on their day-to-day activities and motivates them to keep performing better.

That’s why incentives, rewards, and recognition hold a central place in the people management strategies of any organization. They can influence employee recruitment and retention and also have a huge impact on improving employee performance. Your customers will receive better experiences as well because your employees will be better engaged and ready to deliver their best work.

Here are five tips for rewards and recognition that will help you build a more engaged and motivated workforce.

ProTip 1: Explore the power of instant gratification

Incentive delayed is incentive denied. Employees find value in being acknowledged for their achievements sooner rather than later. If the appreciation is delayed, it can make your employees resentful. Taking advantage of instant gratification is not only a huge morale boost to the achiever—it also motivates others in the team to push harder to reach their goals sooner.

Xoxoday Plum, a cloud-based rewards and recognition solution, partners with several third-party services to provide a vast collection of reward experiences, digital gift cards, benefits, and more. Xoxoday Plum integrates with Zoho People, so you can incentivize your employees with scalable and fast rewards and recognition strategy based on employee performance.

ProTip 2: Provide employees with options and choices

Employees of today expect more thought to go into the rewards, incentives, and benefits they receive. Giving out a standard gift as a reward, limiting rewards to a narrow set of options, or limiting based on location can be extremely demotivating to employees.

With the Xoxoday Plum – Zoho People integration, you can give your employees access to a catalog of 5000+ experiences, 3000+ gift vouchers, and 12000+ perks. Employees are guaranteed to find something that motivates them to keep performing better.

ProTip 3: Automate your rewards and benefits program

Procuring rewards and managing the inventory is only half the challenge. The other half is making sure the process is fair and unbiased. Eliminate all manual processes and completely automate the rewards and benefits program in your organization using the Xoxoday Plum – Zoho People integration.

ProTip 4: Reward and recognize from anywhere

With the internet, mobile devices, smart workspaces, and more, employees now expect everything to be accessible through a variety of mediums. The Xoxoday Plum integration with Zoho People makes rewarding simple and accessible from any computer, tablet, or smartphone, anywhere across the globe. Managers can assign rewards and give recognition from any location while employees can access their incentive statuses, check balance information, and redeem points where and when they want and from the device of their choice.

ProTip 5: Make work fun for your employees‍

Stringent work cultures that focus only on clocking a fixed number of hours, always doing exactly what you did yesterday without any variation, can be detrimental to the morale of the organization. It’s essential to create opportunities from time to time where employees can relax, interact with peers more casually, and have fun at work. Be it Pizza Fridays or team dinners, quarterly outings or annual vacations, the Xoxoday Plum integration with Zoho People can help you build a culture of fun at your workplace.

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Here’s an interesting piece of trivia. IBM once reported that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created everyday, worldwide. However, nearly 90% of that structured data goes unanalyzed. This data is known as dark data.

Now let’s switch gears to your business. A sizeable volume of data flows in and out of your business everyday. But is your analytical infrastructure helping you harness the power of that data, or does it remain dark?

Even a marginal drop in the dark data percentage can unearth powerful insights for a business. But for this to happen, it’s vital for businesses to have a robust information ecosystem.

The dumbbell model is a simple framework that describes the key attributes of an information ecosystem:

The dumbbell model is made of five components—and in this blog, we’ll learn how KPI dashboards are instrumental in building these 5 components to create a robust information ecosystem. For this, we’ll be using Zoho Analytics. 

Adoption

The need for data-driven decisions is propelling the adoption of BI among business users who are often not very tech-savvy. BI and analytics are no longer limited to senior management staff, as businesses are witnessing a spike in adoption across hierarchies.

However, the technical know-how that some analytical infrastructures demand builds tremendous human dependency for analyzing data, leading to siloed analysis. So how can information ecosystems be built to cater to the data needs of non-technical users?

The answer lies in no-code. Give business users a platform to build their own dashboards without having to write a single line of code. For example, the drag and drop feature in Zoho Analytics helps users easily drag and drop all necessary reports into a dashboard builder. It gives them the freedom to add as many reports as they want, and resize, reposition, and align them however they please. This user-friendly dashboard builder can help business users build their ecosystem exactly how they want it to be.

One version of the truth

The adoption of multiple business applications by organizations is driving the need for cross-functional analysis. And the growing importance of end-to-end business insights is mounting pressure on this analytical machinery to provide a vantage point for effective decision-making.

However, multiple unconnected sources force users to use ad hoc applications to analyze data. This potentially localizes business efforts, leading to unsynchronized actions across teams. How can businesses create a vantage point in their information ecosystem for informed decision-making?

The key to this lies in the unification of data. The platform should enable users to visually analyze multiple variables from a single standpoint, to understand the impact of one variable on the other.

For example, by analyzing the customer satisfaction rate from a help desk application against the cancellations from a subscriptions application, within a single dashboard, businesses are able to see the impact one metric has on the other. Similarly, any data-agnostic platform can help you fetch data from multiple data sources to create a vantage point within a dashboard for better decision-making.

Insights

Teams see the value of managing an information ecosystem, if it can feed them with relevant insights. The ecosystem should help in extracting quick and precise insights for faster decisions.

However, a unidimensional approach towards analyzing data downplays the ability of a robust information ecosystem to provide diverse and powerful insights. Some day-to-day practices can lead to insights getting scattered across teams within an organization. So how can businesses turn an information ecosystem into a treasure trove of insights?

This is possible if businesses can adopt some best practices in building a dashboard. For example, you should have your mission-critical metrics analyzed in the form of widgets, stationed at the top of your dashboard. This can help users instantly understand things without having to scroll through the entire dashboard. The reports that follow the widget can then further unwrap the story.

Start with the most important set of reports that relate to the KPIs on the widgets. The dashboard can then include the other reports that complete your story, and be further customized by applying themes that make it more presentable.

One major takeaway is to have different dashboards for different users within the same team. For example, a country sales head may not track all the KPIs a regional sales manager would want to closely monitor. It’s good to have separate dashboards to keep your insights live and flowing.

Collaboration

It’s crucial to collaborate to achieve a common goal. Real-time collaboration can help teams make faster decisions. And though decisions can be made faster, they’re not made in a single step, but rather, they go through a series of steps. It’s essential to give contextual insights at every stage of decision-making. Furthermore, making your metrics available on-demand is a key factor in determining a team’s success.

However, long and inconclusive meetings, unanswered emails, and a lot more, can delay decisions. This lag in communication also contributes to ineffective decision-making. How can businesses build collaboration into an information ecosystem?

The advanced collaborative features on a dashboard make it possible. For example, these dashboards can be instantly shared with individuals or teams, and fine-grained access controls ensure high levels of data governance within organizations. These dashboards can be easily embedded in the context of an application’s workflow, websites, webpages, and more, to feed teams with contextual insights at every stage of decision-making. And contextual commenting enables teams to collaborate quickly and in real time. These can also help businesses build a culture of teamwork with an organization.

Accountability

An information ecosystem needs to have accountability built into it, as it’s important for business leaders to build data-backed accountability within teams.

However, the element of subjectivity plays a crucial role in building accountability within organizations. Some teams will spend time on building logic to build accountability. But this can potentially harm the businesses’ performance in the long run. So how can an information ecosystem build accountability within organizations?

If we can combine all the attributes of a robust information ecosystem, leaders have all they’ll need to build accountability. These data-driven dashboards can back leaders with the necessary insights to ensure data-backed accountability.

In today’s data-driven world, KPI dashboards are becoming an indispensable business enabler by helping businesses build robust information ecosystems. As business leaders, it’s important to look out for these attributes while choosing a platform that can help them build such a system. 

Learn more about our dashboards here. 

Sign up for a free Zoho Analytics account.

Watch our webinar on “KPI dashboards—an indispensable business enabler.”

Over the years, e-invoicing has been adopted by governments across the world to standardise the way B2B invoices are reported for taxation purposes. The Government of India is set to join this list by 1 October 2020, by when e-invoicing will be mandated for all taxpayers with an aggregate turnover of INR 500 crores and above.

At Zoho, we’ve always been at the forefront in helping Indian businesses digitally transform their back-office operations while staying compliant. Our recent feat as winners of the AatmaNirbhar Bharat app contest stands testimony to this. In line with this,  Zoho is now geared up to welcome the new regime with a comprehensive e-invoicing system, right from day one.

Why you should use Zoho for e-invoicing 

Here’s how Zoho helps you stay e-invoicing compliant:

Adapting to a new system might seem like a daunting task, but e-invoicing with Zoho is a straightforward process. Zoho lets you create mandated documents like invoices, credit notes, and debit notes according to the e-invoicing schema, so you do not miss out on any key details. At the click of a button, you can push these details to the Invoice Registration Portal (IRP).

To generate multiple e-invoices at one go, you can even bulk push them to the IRP. Once pushed successfully, an Invoice Registration Number (IRN) and a QR code will be generated and added to your invoice within seconds.

Made an incorrect entry? Cancel your e-invoice in Zoho within 24 hours of generating the IRN, and it will be cancelled in the IRP automatically. Visit our help document to read more on how e-invoicing is effortless with Zoho.

• Generate e-way bills along with e-invoices

For taxpayers who need to generate e-way bills, things just got a bit easier. Zoho automatically detects when you need an e-way bill for your invoice. You can push those details, along with your invoice, directly to the IRP from Zoho, cutting down the effort needed to generate an IRN and e-way bill separately.

As a buyer, you can check the Income Tax Credits (ITC) of the e-invoices you receive, right from Zoho. Since Zoho is a registered GST Suvidha Provider (GSP), you can connect to the GST portal and view your GST returns, including the GSTR-2A details, without logging in to the GST portal.

Which Zoho app should you choose?

Zoho offers e-invoicing in four apps. E-invoicing works the same in all of them, so you can choose whichever suits your business best.

• Zoho for accounting: If you’re looking for an end-to-end e-invoicing and accounting solution, then the GST-compliant Zoho Books has you covered.
• You have your own ERP: If you already have an ERP in place, you can connect the e-invoices generated in any of our other apps (Zoho Invoice, Zoho Inventory, and Zoho Subscriptions) to your ERP with the help of our REST APIs.

Want to see it work?

We’re excited to bring you a series of free webinars, where we break down e-invoicing in your own languages. Register now to get a deeper understanding of e-invoicing and see a live demo of how you can use Zoho to stay compliant.

Want to try them out for yourself? Write to us at [email protected] and we’ll provide early access for you! If you have any doubts or need clarifications on e-invoicing, you can always leave us a comment below.