Here Are 5 Reasons Why I Love Zoho One
Running a small business is no easy task. There have been times I felt that I could work 24/7/365 and still have things left to do. When I am really under pressure, I rely heavily on my business software to get things done. 18 months ago I went throught the process of migrating my business across to Zoho One and I have never looked back. So, why did I do it? Here are 5 reasons why I did it and why perhaps you should too.
- 40+ Applications For My Business
- Everything integrates with everything else
- It integrates with other things
- The Price
- The Company Ethos
40+ Applications For My Business
Typically, I found Zoho because I needed to solve a problem. Specifically, I had just started my business and I wanted to be able to produce invoices. I did most of my financials in a spreadsheet but wanted to look professional. Zoho has invoicing software that has a free tier and so to start with I used that. I then ran into problems trying to keep track of the finances. I could do the basic daily tasks of income and expenditure, but forecasting and reporting in a spreadsheet started to become a bit of a chore. I wanted one-click reporting. Zoho Books is the business accounting package and the reporting is easy to setup and automate. I looked at that and saw that it was part of a wider suite of applications that fell under the Zoho One product line and I was very excited.
There were over 40 applications that covered productivity, finance, sales, marketing, HR and development. In fact, it is hard to think of a business function not covered by the Zoho One offering. Need to manage your social media? Zoho Social has you covered, what about your Events management? Zoho BackStage can do that.
Everything integrates with everything else
What is really useful is how you can link all of the applications together so that they talk to each other as a unified system. This was a game changer for me. It saves so much time knowing that is someone makes a payment via Zoho Subscription, that wil automatically be reflected in Zoho Books.
It Integrates with other things.
Zoho One does not operate in isolation, it has its own Zapier like automation software called Zoho Flow to integrate with external software too. This allows data to be sent between software packages allowing you to connect key applications together. You can create automated workflows triggered by customer interation. This is a very powerful platform, one which will become more and more important as time goes on.
The Price
Software has a habit of getting very expensive, very quickly. I was amazed to find, I could use 40+ enterprise applications for £30 per month. As soon as I started to add up all of the payments I was making to the likes of Hootesuite, Google, Microsoft et al, It was a no brainer. I took the opportunity to test it out free of charge for 30 days but from day one I was pretty much convinced.
Zoho have two licensing models - A per seat price and a per employee price. Some businesses do not need all of their employees to have access to the software and so they can just purchase the number of licences they need. They are priced at £70 per month. On the other hand, the per employee pricing is based on £30 per employee but you must pay for ALL employees. For a solo operator like myself, £30 per month represents great value. Considering everything included in Zoho One, £70 per month is still cheap.
The Company Ethos.
Having spent time looking at the products and keeping up with developments, I have been impressed not only with the software, but also the way the company operates. Formed in 1996, Zoho are a private company that has built up a user base of nearly 50 million users worldwide. Rather than satisfy the requirements of shareholders, they have concentrated on building a business to support a userbase made up of large and small businesses around the world.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, they were the first company that I was aware of to offer free remote working software to enable people to work from home. Zoho Remotely was a suite of 9 applications for productivity and collaboration and was exactly what they had given to their own employees to allow them to work from home.
The second example is more personal. Like many small businesses the threat of lockdown put my business under severe pressure as far as cashflow was concerned. Zoho offered support for small businesses by waiving 3 months worth of fees for Zoho One. I was grateful to recieve this grant and it was one less thing to worry about during the crisis.
I had been looking forward to attending the ZoholicsUK2020 user conference in London this week, but of course this was cancelled due to COVID 19. I hope to catch up with them at next year's conference where I will be able to say thank you in person.