Zoho One Top 10 Most Useful Apps

04.10.22 09:10 AM By Andy

Zoho One is a suite of 40 plus apps that you can use to run your business, but today we are going to focus on the 10 most useful ones in my opinion.

I've been using Zoho One for 2 years now, and helped 7 different companies to implement Zoho One from scratch, so in this list I'm sharing the apps that most of my clients want to use.

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#1 Zoho CRM or Zoho Bigin

We have two apps but the category is CRM. Depending on what business you have, you can either use Zoho CRM or Begin. Zoho CRM is more advanced and can do a lot, but Begin has the basis covered. You can use this to keep your leads, contacts, accounts and deals in the same place, as well as manage your sales process, track your leads, keep conversations with your contacts in one place, and a lot more. If you are not using a CRM yet, this could be a game changer for your business. Apps similar to zoho CRM are hubspot, salesforce and pipedrive.

#2 Zoho Books

This app lets you manage your finances in one place. It's similar to apps like Quickbooks or Xero. You can have all your clients in one place, and send them invoices, create estimates, track expenses, register payments, and it integrates with a lot of banks and electronic payments like paypall or stripe. It's very customizable, allowing you to add your own branding to the invoices or any other document you send, as well as creating email templates, editing the document layout, and a lot more. It also integrates really well with other zoho apps, like Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects.

#3 Zoho Projects

You will use this app if you want to track any projects that you do for your company. It can be an internal project, like moving to a new office, or a work project, for example, if you work for a construction company, you can plan how to build a house for a client. You can add milestones, tasks and subtasks, and they will have start dates, due dates, priority, and a lot more relevant information that will help you track all you need to do to complete the project. Another feature is budget and time tracking. You can set up a budget for each project, and also track time against each task, so you can see when you're approaching to the budget limit. Apps similar to Projects are Asana, ClickUp and Monday.com.

#4 Zoho Sign

With Zoho Sign you can send documents that require a signature, like contracts, agreements, proposals, etc. You can upload your own documents and add the signature area to them. You can also add fields that you can manually complete when signing the document, or automatically populate if you use Zoho CRM and have the integration set up. Zoho Sign is similar to DocuSign, but it's not a proposal management software like PandaDoc. The difference is that with PandaDoc you can add dynamic content, like optional items on the price table, and the signer can interact with the table before signing. When you send a Document with Zoho Sign, the signer can only fill out the required fields, if any, and sign the document.

#5 Zoho Desk

With Zoho Desk you will be able to set up a ticket system that lets you centralize and solve any open tickets that your customers generate. For example, if you offer IT services, your clients can use your portal to submit issues or questions that they have, and your technicians will be able to tackle the incoming tickets one by one. You can also create a knowledge database where you can create articles that show solutions to the most common issues, so your customers can troubleshoot those issues on their own. Apps similar to Desk are ZenDesk and Freshdesk.

#6 Zoho WorkDrive and Writer, Sheets and Show

This is a cloud storage solution where you can upload any files you want, so you can access them using the internet, either from your computer, tablet or phone. Here you can create personal folders as well as tam folders, so you can easily share files with your coworkers. Similar apps are Dropbox or Google Drive. Also in Zoho WorkDrive you can create word documents, spreadsheets and presentations using the Zoho Office suite apps that are included with WorkDrive. It has a windows and mac client if you want to sync your files with the computer.

#7 Zoho Flow

This is a connector app that allows you to connect other apps to each other so they can share data and perform different actions. For example, you can automatically add a lead to Zoho CRM when a person registers to an event in Calendly. A new invitee in calendly would be the trigger of the workflow, and the lead creation in Zoho CRM is the action. You can add multiple steps to the workflows you create, as well as connecting different apps. So far it works with more than 600 apps and they keep adding more and more. Zoho Flow is really helpful when there's no native integration available between two apps that you need to connect.

#8 Zoho Campaigns

With Zoho Campaigns you can automate your email marketing campaigns as well as create email workflows so you can send the right emails to your customers or leads. If you send emails to your contacts database, you can automate the entire process using Zoho Campaigns. Create your email templates, create your contact list or segment, and send the campaign that will track when someone opens or clicks on an email you sent. It integrates with Zoho CRM so you can see what customers interacted with your emails and take action in the CRM. Also with workflows you can perform different actions depending on the user behavior. For example, if the user clicks on a link about shoes, the next email to be sent is going to be about shoes, or if the user clicks on a shirt, the next email should be about shirts. Similar apps are ActiveCampaign and Hubspot Marketing Hub.

#9 Zoho Cliq

This is a great chat app that you can use to chat with your team, as well as creating group chats, organization channels, start voice calls, video calls and screen sharing sessions. You can even do broadcasts. It's very flexible and customizable, and you can do a lot at a chat level, like sending gifs, emojis, pictures and files, and even add chat bots that will help you with automations or getting information from them. This app is being adopted by users more and more, and it integrates with a lot of other Zoho apps, so you can access your chats while you are using the CRM or Projects. Similar apps are Slack or Microsoft Teams.

#10 Zoho Bookings

With Bookings you can create a booking page that your clients or contacts can use to schedule meetings or phone calls with you. The app will make sure there are no double bookings, and that you have enough time between your meetings. You can customize it a lot, creating different pages based on the type of meeting, as well as the meeting length, and you can even process payments if you use the app for consultations. It integrates with other Zoho apps like CRM and Zoho Meetings, as well as with some video conferencing apps like Zoom or Google Meet.