What Zoho Projects Does, and What It Does Not Hold.

A services firm adopts Zoho Projects, and its delivery team finally knows what it is doing this week. That is a real gain. What the partners wanted, though, was something else: margin by project. And Zoho Projects does not give them that. This video explains what Zoho Projects holds, what it does not, and what sits around it. It is a good product, and this is not a complaint. It is a map. Everything on screen is a mock demo with sample data. Zoho Projects holds the work. What is to be done, by whom, by when, and, if people fill in timesheets, how long it actually took.

That includes tasks, milestones, dependencies, assignments and a Gantt chart, and it connects to the rest of Zoho. In accounting terms, that is the actual side of an engagement: the cost side, measured in hours. Zoho Projects holds it well, and for the price it is hard to argue with. It does not hold the estimate that the proposal was priced on, except as a number someone types into a budget field. It does not hold what the client is billed by role, or what each person costs the firm.

It does not raise the invoice; Zoho Books does, and the link between the two is a setting, not a flow. And it does not report margin, because margin is revenue minus cost, and it has neither as data. This is not a flaw. Zoho Projects is a project management tool, not a professional services automation system, and nothing on its feature list pretends otherwise. Zoho Projects does connect natively to Zoho Books. Approved time and expenses on a project can flow into Books as invoice lines, which covers time and materials billing, and it is worth turning on.

What the link does not do is handle fixed-price milestones alongside hourly work, apply billing rates by role, or record a write-down as a decision. So firms that bill by role and sometimes at a fixed price usually build the join themselves: a flow that values approved hours or completed milestones at the client's rates and creates the invoice in Books with the project reference carried, so the payment can be matched back. Four things attach to Zoho Projects before margin by project exists, and the order matters. First, the estimate, brought in from Zoho CRM as the project's budget, so that something exists to measure against.

Our video on project profitability at intake covers that one in full. Second, rates by role in one place, so that every hour on a timesheet can be valued twice, once at what the client pays and once at what the person costs. Third, the join to Zoho Books, so approved hours and finished milestones become draft invoices without an export. And last, a reporting layer that shows estimate against actual, margin and utilisation, because a view built before the data exists is a view of nothing. A firm that does the first two has margin by project on a spreadsheet within a month.

Why not buy a system that bundles all of that? A professional services system does bundle those four things into one, and if your firm is willing to move its sales, its delivery and its billing into it, that is a fair answer. Most firms are not, because the sales team lives in Zoho CRM, the delivery team lives in Zoho Projects and the accountant lives in Zoho Books, and each has reasons to stay. Bought to escape the four joins, a new system produces a fifth place that needs three joins to the other three.

That is the same problem in a new coat. Keep the applications you have, and build what sits around them. To sum up. Zoho Projects holds the work and not the money. Its link to Zoho Books covers time and materials billing and stops short of fixed-price milestones, rates by role and recorded write-downs. The estimate, the rates, the join and the reporting layer are the four things that give a firm its margin by project. We are CodeStringers, a Zoho authorised consulting partner. The article on Zoho Projects and the video on project profitability at intake are linked below.