1. Books: Profit Margin Feature
Zoho Books has released its April 2026 product update roundup, with enhancements spanning inventory, banking, reporting, and more. The headline feature for us is Profit Margin for sales transactions.
You can now see an estimated gross profit margin in real time while creating or editing a Quote, Sales Order, or Invoice — at both a line item and total level. The margin is calculated from the selling price, discount, and the selected cost, so you can ensure that any creative discounting doesn't leave you losing out.
How to enable it:
Go to Settings > Setup & Configuration > General and enable the Profit Margin estimation for a specific line item or transaction option.
2. CRM: Cross Module Filtering
Zoho CRM now lets you filter records using fields from associated lookup modules, directly in Advanced Filters and Custom Views.
Previously, filtering contacts based on their linked account's industry, or narrowing products by a vendor's rating, required creating reports to get the data you needed. Now those lookup fields are available as filter conditions right inside the native module.
Some practical examples of what this unlocks:
Build a custom view of contacts in the IT industry for a targeted email campaign from within the Contacts module
Filter your products list to show only items linked to five-star vendors before raising a purchase order
Pull up policyholders whose associated policy has a tenure of 5 years and a premium above a set threshold
Once you've filtered your list, you can act on it directly, Run a macro, send a mass email, or update a field across the whole result set.
Limits to know:
Up to 3 lookup fields can be used in your filters (including related module and subform fields)
Up to 5 fields from each lookup module
Availability:
AU, CN, and JP data centres: available up to Enterprise edition
EU, US, and IN data centres: available up to Professional edition
Broader rollout is in progress
3. Bookings: Centralised Customer Form
Zoho Bookings has introduced the Centralised Customer Form, a new way to standardise how customer information is collected across all your event types.
Previously, booking form fields had to be configured separately for each event type, a repetitive process that made consistency difficult to maintain. Now you can define a shared set of fields once and have them applied automatically across your entire organisation.
You can still add event-specific fields on top of the shared form for anything unique to a particular booking type, so you're not locked into a one-size-fits-all approach.
How to set it up:
Enable: Admin Centre → Organisation → Basic Information → Enable Centralised Customer Form
Configure shared fields: Admin Centre → Customer Settings → Centralised Customer Form
Add event-specific fields: Individual event type → Booking Form
Important note on existing event types:
For event types created after 17 April 2026, the centralised form is applied automatically when enabled. For event types created before 17 April 2026, you'll need to enable the toggle individually under each event type: Event Type → Booking Form → Enable the toggle in the Fields section.
4. Deluge: PDF Conversion
Deluge now has a built-in task for converting HTML content or URLs directly into PDF files, without needing external tools or third-party integrations.
The new convertToPDF task takes either HTML markup or a publicly accessible URL as input and generates a formatted, high-quality PDF. It preserves text, images, styles, and page layout, and supports multi-page documents. Over 20 optional parameters are available, including scale, orientation (landscape/portrait), and margins, giving you precise control over the output.
Syntax:
zoho.file.convertToPDF(content/URL, <options_collection>);
A practical example worth highlighting:
One particularly powerful use case is using this task to bypass Zoho Writer for highly customisable document creation. Instead of building your document template inside Zoho, you host it as a page on your website. Because it's just a standard webpage, you have complete design freedom: Google Fonts, pixel-perfect layouts, custom brand colours, anything a web designer can build.
When Zoho needs to generate a PDF, it calls that page with your record data appended to the URL as query parameters. The page reads those values, slots them into the design, and renders a polished document. Zoho then converts that rendered page straight to a PDF, ready to attach to a record, send via email, or use anywhere else in the system.
Anywhere you're currently generating PDFs manually or relying on a third-party tool, this is worth evaluating.
Stay Updated
That's it for Episode 11 of The Zoho Report! We hope these updates help you work smarter with your Zoho applications.
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