Set up Zoho Books alerts for your finance team

Connecting Zoho Books (or Zoho Invoice) takes a couple of minutes, and most of the value comes from where the alerts land. Here’s the order that works, from connecting the organization to the first week.

Before you start

• Pick who connects it. Freesbe works as the person who connects it and sees only the invoices and payments they can see, so connect as someone who sees all of them, like a Zoho Books admin. Freesbe only reads: it never makes, changes or sends invoices.
• No need to know your data center. Zoho sends you to your own (the United States, Europe, India, Australia and so on) when you sign in, and Freesbe keeps to it.
• Zoho Books or Zoho Invoice? Connect the one your company uses. If you use both, connect each: they’re separate apps with their own alerts.

Connect the organization

1. In Freesbe, open Workspace settings → Integrations → Finance and find Zoho Books (or Zoho Invoice), under the payment alerts.
2. Click Connect Zoho Books.
3. Sign in to Zoho and click Accept.
4. Back in Freesbe, Zoho Books shows Connected, your organization’s name and its data center.

Send alerts where people act on them

Make a channel for each kind of news rather than one channel for everything:

Channel	Alerts to post	Smallest amount
#finance	Payments received, invoices paid	Empty
#collections	Overdue invoices	500
#sales	Invoices sent	5,000

For each one, click Add alert under Zoho Books alerts, pick the channel and the kinds, and type the smallest amount if you want one. Then use Send a test alert from the alert’s ⋯ menu to check the card lands where you expect.

Freesbe checks Zoho every ten minutes, and overdue invoices once an hour, so a payment shows up in #finance within about ten minutes. Alerts start from when you add the first one: older invoices and payments aren’t posted.

Share invoices with a preview

Tell the team they can paste a link to an invoice from Zoho Books into any conversation: everyone sees the customer, amount, status, balance due and due date under it, without opening Zoho Books. If amounts shouldn’t be seen by guests in shared channels, turn Show a preview under Zoho Books invoice links off.

The first week

• Too many cards? Raise the smallest amount, or move Invoices sent to a quieter channel.
• Missing a payment? See Zoho Books alerts aren’t posting.
• The person who connected it leaves? The app shows Needs reconnecting. Someone else clicks Reconnect and alerts carry on.

See Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice for everything the apps do.