Make Informed Business Decisions with Financial Storytelling

The ability to visually analyze your business’s financial data is extremely valuable, allowing you to easily track key financial metrics in real-time, view your overall accounting performance, share reports that can be quickly understood by anybody on your team, and embed reports for wide consumption. Using Zoho Analytics to analyze financial data from Zoho Books can transform the idea of how your business handles financial storytelling, giving you unparalleled power over how your team develops and presents financial reports and dashboards.

Using Zoho Analytics to analyze data from Zoho Books

While Zoho Books allows you to generate financial reports, the level of detail offered by Zoho Analytics is just too good to pass up, offering much stronger visualization and a wider range of options for custom reports and dashboards – more than 50 ready-made templates, in fact. 

Add in the wide variety of components available to help you build more intuitive reports, and you have one of the most versatile financial reporting tools available. Analytics features a drag-and-drop interface that can be used by any member of your team to generate insightful reports and dashboards in minutes, no coding or calls to IT needed.

The flexibility of Zoho Analytics allows you to retrieve any data you need for monthly and quarterly reports, giving you and your team deeper insight into profitability, cashflow, and any other important metric you need access to. All this can be inserted into a well-presented report that far surpasses what Zoho Books is capable of, giving you a superior way to analyze financials visually, collaborate with colleagues, and even combine data from different sources.

There are many other incredibly useful reports that can be generated from Zoho Analytics, including:

• Gross Profit Margin by Month to give you a deep dive into your business’s profitability
• Your Top 10 Discounted Invoices to help you understand where deep cuts are being made and to allow you to review any discounts you weren’t previously aware of
• Accurate Profit & Loss Reports
• Accurate Balance Sheet Reports, effective only if your business is conducting regular bank reconciliations
• More powerful Custom Reports than those offered in Zoho Books

How to connect Zoho Books with Zoho Analytics for powerful visual reporting

In order to gain access to the superior reporting of Zoho Analytics, you’ll first need to connect your Zoho Books and Zoho Analytics accounts. Zoho One includes both software solutions with a subscription, along with a wide array of other useful apps such as Zoho CRM. In order to integrate Zoho Analytics with Zoho Books, navigate to Settings in Zoho Books. Under Settings, select Integrations and then Zoho Apps. Here, you’ll choose Connect beside the option for Zoho Analytics. Once this has been selected, your Zoho Books data will be integrated with Analytics. This same process can be used for Zoho CRM data if you wish to integrate CRM with Analytics.

After you’ve integrated Zoho Books and/or Zoho CRM with Analytics, your Books and CRM data should automatically populate within Analytics. It’s important to note that even for those on a Zoho One subscription, you’ll still need to manually set up the integration between Books and Zoho Analytics.

Analytics can also bring in data from other apps in the Zoho One ecosystem, including Zoho CRM and SalesIQ. This makes Analytics not just a powerhouse for financial reporting, but for powerful reporting for each department. Customized dashboards can even be set up tailored to each use in Analytics, so your sales manager will see something different than your accountant, and so on. 

In the tough economic climate all businesses are facing, real-time data is of more importance than it was a few months ago. You must be able to see where your business is being affected and where you have to pivot quickly. Analytics gives you the business intelligence you need to survive in tough times and thrive in good times. 

ion8 is a Zoho Advanced Partner with a full team of Zoho consultants and developers who can help you seamlessly integrate Zoho Books with Zoho Analytics, build customized reporting for your business that can be run regularly rather than set up manually, and so much more. To find out more about how ion8 can transform your business by implementing and integrating Zoho One with your entire workplace tech stack, contact us today.