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I'm currently part of a wider delivery team at Ascent Business Solutions, recognised as a leading Zoho Premium Solutions Partner in the United Kingdom.

Ascent Business Solutions support organisations with everything from targeted technical fixes through to full Zoho CRM implementations and long-term platform adoption. Working as a team rather than a one-person consultancy allows projects to move forward consistently, with access to the right skills at each stage.

The team I manage specialises in API integrations between Zoho and third-party finance and commerce platforms such as Xero, Shopify, WooCommerce, and eBay. Much of our work involves solving integration challenges that fall outside standard documentation, supporting new ideas, new sectors, and evolving business models.

Success is measured through practical outcomes and return on investment, ranging from scaling small operations into high-turnover businesses to delivering rapid gains through online payments, automation, and streamlined digital workflows.

If you are looking for structured Zoho expertise backed by an established consultancy, you can contact Ascent Business Solutions on 0121 392 8140 (UK), email info@ascentbusiness.co.uk, or visit https://www.ascentbusiness.co.uk.

Zoho Analytics

Zoho Survey & Zoho Analytics: Query to generate individual responses and grouped pages

What?
An article on some Zoho ANSI-SQL (in other words, queries that work in Zoho Analytics) as I couldn't find any examples online on how to do this.

Why?
I've been tasked with generating a radar/spider/web chart based on the results from a survey. Apparently this will be done in Zoho Analytics.

The Brief:
We would like the survey data to be generated as a chart and embedded in a PDF brochure we send out to our customers...

How?
Well fulfilling the brief (whether it's the right tool for the job is a different issue), let us synchronize Zoho Surveys into Zoho Analytics. I found I need to edit the setup of the sync every time a new survey is added... but at least it lets me synchronize every hour.

Then I'll write the SQL queries to get the individual responses into a table with labels and columns that can help me group them (and identify which responses belong to which survey attempts).

Then I'll write the SQL to sum up the responses per page per survey attempt.

Finally, I'll see if analytics can be used to generate the radar chart.
Zoho Analytics: Create a Monitoring System with Images

What?
This is an article to remind me how I did this for a customer and images help visualize the health of the system.

Why?
The use-case here is to build a system which monitors a Zoho App for when records were last modified and if a synchronization process starts to fail, there should be images or icons warning or advising of failures.

How?
The key trick to use here the ability for Zoho Analytics to display different images based on a criteria or a value within a data table. As documented in an earlier article, put the URL of the image, then change it's format to show the image and not the URL text. In this example, we are using images uploaded in the Zoho Analytics image library but you would need images either uploaded in Analytics or a publicly accessible image without a user wall.
Zoho Analytics & Zoho People: Monitor DataSource Sync

What?
A quick article on how to setup an automation that checks if a datasource synchronization between Zoho People and Zoho Analytics failed. This can be adapted to any data source for Zoho Analytics.

Why?
We're assisting a client implement Zoho People as their new HR solution. Zoho Analytics is used to generate specific spreadsheets for a feed into their third-party payroll system. If the data is incorrect in Zoho Analytics, and payroll gets run with these discrepancies, then they will have a fair few disgruntled employees who may have been paid incorrectly. As such this system has to be reliable and the system managers need to be notified in advance of any errors with the intention to be able to correct any inconsistencies themselves.

How?
We're going to add a scheduled workflow on a daily basis at 1am in the morning every day. This will be added to the client's Zoho People instance which will check the datasource metadata via the Analytics API.

ZohoAnalytics: Pivot Campaigns vs Contacts

What?
A very quick article of a quick solution but at least a working example of an ANSI-SQL (ZohoSQL) query pivoting campaign results vs contacts.

Why?
Simply the client wanted a report on customers on each row and then the campaigns as columns.

What we want:
Contact Name     Lead Source     Campaign 1     Campaign 2     Campaign 3
---------------- --------------- -------------- -------------- --------------
Joel             Google Ads      Accepted       Invited        Sent
Me               Web             Invited        Accepted       Sent
Myself           Walk-In         Accepted       Sent           Invited          
The catch is that our campaign names are in data rows not individual columns.

How?
There may be ways of doing this using the GUI and a "Pivot View" report but I always resort to a query when I get confused with the GUI:

Zoho Analytics: Determine profits from invoices and purchase orders

What?
An article on the reasoning and steps to generate a dataset using Zoho's ANSI-SQL queries to generate the margins of each invoice in ZohoBooks.

Why?
We need to create a profits/losses dashboard in Zoho Analytics as we can't control the out-of-the-box PNL report that comes with Zoho Books. We needed a dataset that took into account "Delivery" as a separate line item on the purchase order.

I'm writing this article as it had gone through several partners before us and even Zoho themselves without a solution. This took my team the best part of two months to find a solution.

How?
Disclaimer! There may be many ways of doing this, this is just one way that we used that worked for 90% of the invoices. There are invoices that may be associated to sales orders changed after being confirmed or missing associated purchase orders altogether.


Zoho Analytics: Set Up Widget Displaying Sales Person

What?
A quick article to display a value in a column in a widget in Zoho Analytics.

Why?
Because I keep forgetting how to do it.

How?
I've done this for a query that amalgamated all the deals against a deal owner and needed to repeat this for all the invoices against a sales person.

It adds to the effect on loading the page that a widget has clearly defined values based on the filters I select on a dashboard.

Zoho Analytics: Setup DataSource via FTP Connection

What?
So this is going to be an article with a bunch of pictures showing step-by-step of how I setup a recurring data source in Zoho Analytics via FTP.

Why?
The use-case here is that I have a client who wants to import data via FTP (SFTP - to be precise) and have this available to their Zoho apps. My aim(s) are:

  1. Setup recurring FTP connection.
  2. Make data readily available to ZohoCRM.

How?
Well, let's setup the FTP connection first in Zoho Analytics:

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Thank you for visiting and, as always, we hope this website was of some use to you!

Kind Regards,

Joel Lipman
www.joellipman.com