Zoho Inventory Management Software: A Contractor’s Look

That frantic call from a technician is a familiar sound. They’re at a job site, ready to go, but missing one critical part. Now it’s a mad dash to the supply house, wasting time and killing the day’s profit. This is the exact problem inventory software is supposed to solve. The Zoho inventory management software is often mentioned as a solution for getting stock under control with features like reorder alerts and warehouse tracking. But can a system designed for a broad market truly handle the fast-paced, mobile nature of a trade business? We’ll examine its features to see if it can really stop those last-minute supply runs for good.

Zoho Inventory can be a practical starting point for contractors looking to replace spreadsheets and gain basic inventory visibility. However, as soon as inventory needs to be tracked across jobs, trucks, and technicians, the limitations of a retail-first system become more noticeable.

Key takeaways

• Master the basics of stock control: Zoho Inventory is a solid choice for centralizing your parts list, tracking stock across your warehouse and trucks, and setting up low-stock alerts to prevent last-minute supply runs.
• Recognize its retail-first design: The software is built with online sellers in mind, so you’ll find many features for e-commerce and shipping that may not apply to a service-focused business.
• Bridge the gap between inventory and job management: Zoho connects well with accounting software but lacks direct integrations with field service platforms, meaning you’ll need a separate process to link parts and costs directly to specific jobs.

What is Zoho Inventory?

Zoho Inventory is an online software designed to help businesses manage their stock, orders, and warehouses. At its core, the platform aims to automate inventory tasks so you can manage your materials with less manual effort. As a cloud-based tool, it gives you access to your inventory data from anywhere, whether you’re in the office or on a job site.

While many of its features are built with online retailers in mind (think e-commerce stores and multi-channel sellers), its fundamental system can be useful for some service-based businesses, too. If you’re a contractor, you know the headache of tracking parts, managing purchase orders, and making sure your trucks are stocked with the right materials. Zoho Inventory provides a framework for these tasks. It acts as a central database for all your items, from tiny fittings to large appliances, and helps you follow their journey from the supplier to the job site. The goal is to give you a clearer picture of what you have, where it is, and when you need to order more, reducing the guesswork that can lead to project delays and unnecessary costs.

That said, Zoho Inventory was not designed specifically for contractors. Its core workflows reflect the needs of product-based businesses, where inventory is primarily sold, shipped, and fulfilled rather than consumed across jobs in the field. For trade businesses, inventory doesn’t just move out the door, it moves between trucks, job sites, technicians, and work orders throughout the day.

This difference becomes more noticeable as operations scale. When inventory needs to be tied directly to individual jobs, updated automatically from the field, and reflected accurately in job costing, general-purpose tools often require manual steps or workarounds. Contractor-first platforms like Ply are designed around this reality, connecting inventory directly to jobs, trucks, and technicians instead of forcing teams to adapt retail workflows to field service work.

Zoho Inventory was not designed specifically for contractors. Its core workflows reflect the needs of product-based businesses…

How it works and who it’s for

Zoho Inventory works by centralizing inventory-related activities. You start by adding your items to the system, and from there, you can track stock levels, create purchase orders for suppliers, and manage sales orders. When materials are used for a job, the system updates your stock counts to reflect the change.

The software is primarily designed for businesses that need to manage inventory across multiple locations or sales channels. It’s a strong fit for companies that sell products on their own website, on marketplaces like Amazon, and in a physical store. For contractors, its value lies in its ability to connect your warehouse, service trucks, and purchasing process into one system, giving you a unified view of your parts and materials.

The key thing to understand is that Zoho Inventory is designed around a centralized inventory model. Inventory is added, stored, transferred, and fulfilled in a relatively linear way, which works well for businesses selling products across channels. For contractors, however, inventory usage is far less linear. Parts are consumed on jobs, adjusted in the field, moved between trucks, and tied directly to labor and job profitability.

As a result, contractors often need to layer additional processes on top of Zoho to make it work in real-world service environments. Updating truck stock after a job, assigning parts accurately to work orders, and reconciling inventory with job costing typically requires extra steps or manual oversight. Platforms like Ply are designed specifically to eliminate this friction by aligning inventory workflows with how trade businesses actually operate day to day.

Click here to read more about how Nigel Mulgrew Plumbing used Ply to organize and optimize its inventory

A snapshot of key features

Getting familiar with a new tool starts with understanding its main components. Zoho Inventory is built around a few core functions that help you manage the lifecycle of your stock. While the platform is extensive, most of its capabilities fall into these key areas.

Here are some of the main features available:

• Inventory Management: You can create detailed profiles for each item, add images, organize them into groups, and track bundled products or kits.
• Order Management: The system allows you to create and manage both sales orders (for customers) and purchase orders (for suppliers) from one place.
• Order Fulfillment: You can generate packing slips, create shipping labels, and send customers real-time updates on their shipments.
• Multi-channel Sales: If you sell parts online, it automatically syncs your orders and updates stock levels across different e-commerce stores.

For contractors, these features provide a solid foundation for basic inventory control. However, because they are designed to support sales, fulfillment, and shipping workflows, they often stop short of addressing how materials are actually used in the field. Inventory in a trade business is consumed on jobs, adjusted by technicians, and closely tied to labor and job costing. When features aren’t built around those realities, teams typically rely on manual processes to bridge the gap.

This is where contractor-first platforms like Ply take a different approach. Instead of treating inventory as a back-office function, Ply is designed to reflect how parts move through jobs, trucks, and technicians in real time. That alignment reduces reconciliation work and helps ensure inventory data stays accurate without adding extra steps for field teams.

What are Zoho Inventory’s standout features?

Zoho Inventory is packed with features, but it’s built for a broad audience, from online retailers to small manufacturers. For a trade business, some of these tools are game-changers, while others might feel like they were designed for someone else. The key is to sift through the options and see what truly applies to managing parts for jobs, tracking truck stock, and keeping projects on schedule.

Many of its core strengths lie in traditional inventory control: knowing what you have, where it is, and when you need more. It handles the fundamentals like real-time tracking, order management, and reporting. Where it really shines for a growing business is in its ability to manage stock across multiple locations and track specific items with serial numbers. However, since it also caters heavily to e-commerce, you’ll find a lot of functionality around online storefronts and shipping carriers that may not be relevant if your business is focused on service and installation. Let’s break down the features that will matter most to your contracting business.

For contractors, many of Zoho Inventory’s standout features work best in controlled, back-office environments. The platform excels at tracking inventory that is sold, shipped, or transferred in predictable ways. Field service work, however, introduces variability that general inventory tools aren’t designed around. Parts are used mid-job, trucks are restocked between calls, and inventory accuracy directly affects job completion and profitability. As a result, features that look strong on paper can introduce friction once they’re applied to real-world service workflows.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply are built with this variability in mind. Instead of adapting retail-oriented features for field use, Ply designs inventory workflows around how contractors actually operate, helping teams maintain accuracy without slowing technicians down.

Connect your e-commerce and sales channels

If you sell parts or equipment directly to customers online, this feature is a major plus. Zoho Inventory connects with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and marketplaces like Amazon or eBay. This allows you to manage your online sales and your service inventory all in one place, preventing you from selling a part online that a tech needs for a job tomorrow. For most trade businesses, however, this functionality might not be a primary concern. Your “sales channels” are your technicians in the field, not a digital storefront. While it’s a powerful tool for retail, it’s less critical for day-to-day service operations.

For contractors, this strength also highlights Zoho Inventory’s core orientation. The platform is optimized for managing inventory that is sold through digital storefronts and marketplaces, where demand flows through orders rather than service calls. In a trade business, however, inventory demand is driven by scheduled jobs, dispatch decisions, and technician activity in the field—not online carts or checkout workflows.

As a result, many contractors find that e-commerce connectivity adds little operational value compared to job-level inventory visibility. Contractor-first platforms like Ply focus less on sales channels and more on ensuring the right parts are available on the right truck for the right job, without requiring inventory teams to mentally translate retail workflows into service operations.

Track inventory in real-time with automated alerts

This is where Zoho Inventory really starts to become useful for contractors. The software gives you a live look at your stock levels, so you always know what you have on hand. You can set reorder points for every part, and the system will automatically alert you when you’re running low. This simple automation is huge for preventing last-minute runs to the supply house, which kill productivity and delay jobs. It helps you maintain the right amount of stock—enough to handle demand without tying up too much cash in parts that just sit on the shelf. This is a fundamental part of any solid inventory management system.

For contractors, real-time inventory visibility matters most at the moment work is performed. Knowing stock levels in the warehouse is helpful, but the bigger challenge is keeping inventory accurate as parts are consumed on jobs, adjusted in the field, or moved between trucks throughout the day. When updates rely on technicians remembering to log changes after the fact, accuracy can slip quickly.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply are designed to capture inventory changes as work happens, not after it’s complete. By tying inventory updates directly to jobs and technicians, Ply reduces reliance on manual reconciliation and helps ensure alerts, reorder points, and stock levels reflect what’s actually happening in the field.

Manage orders from start to finish

Zoho Inventory helps streamline the purchasing process. You can create and send purchase orders to your suppliers directly from the platform and then track those orders until they arrive. When the parts come in, you can easily receive them into your inventory, ensuring your stock counts are always accurate. The system also handles sales orders and packing slips, which is more geared toward businesses shipping products. 

For contractors, purchase orders are only part of the equation. The bigger challenge is ensuring ordered materials are accurately allocated to specific jobs and reflected in job costing once they’re used. When orders are received into general inventory without a clear job-level connection, teams often need to manually track where parts were intended to go and reconcile usage later.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply approach ordering with job context built in. Materials can be tied directly to jobs from the start, making it easier to track costs, prevent parts from being misallocated, and ensure purchasing decisions stay aligned with actual field demand instead of generic stock levels.

Handle multiple warehouses

For any trade business with more than one service vehicle, this feature is essential. Zoho Inventory allows you to track stock across different locations, which means you can treat each truck as its own mobile warehouse. You can see exactly which parts are on which truck, transfer inventory between your main warehouse and your vehicles, and get a complete picture of your entire stock. This visibility is critical for efficient dispatching and ensuring your techs have the right materials to complete a job on the first visit. It’s a big step up from relying on spreadsheets or memory to know what’s on the truck.

Treating trucks as warehouses is essential for trade businesses, but the way those warehouses operate is very different from fixed storage locations. Inventory on a service truck changes constantly throughout the day as technicians complete jobs, swap parts, and restock between calls. Workflows designed around traditional warehouse transfers can struggle to keep up with that pace.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply are built around mobile inventory by default. Instead of adapting warehouse logic to trucks, Ply treats service vehicles as first-class inventory locations and keeps stock levels accurate as technicians work, helping teams avoid end-of-day reconciliation and surprise stock discrepancies.

This basics of modern warehouse management

Use barcode scanning on the go

Manual data entry is slow and prone to errors. Zoho Inventory’s barcode scanning feature, accessible through its mobile app, helps eliminate that problem. Your team can use their smartphones or a dedicated scanner to quickly check parts in and out of the warehouse or a service truck. This not only saves a ton of time but also dramatically improves inventory accuracy. When a tech pulls a part for a job, a quick scan updates your stock levels instantly. This creates a reliable system for tracking consumption and makes cycle counts much faster and less painful for your warehouse manager.

For contractors, barcode scanning is most effective when it fits seamlessly into the flow of a job. Technicians need to scan parts quickly as they’re used, without navigating multiple screens or managing inventory as a separate task. When scanning workflows are designed for general inventory management, adoption in the field can drop, and updates often get delayed until the end of the day.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply design barcode scanning around technician workflows. By tying scans directly to jobs and work orders, Ply helps ensure inventory updates happen naturally as work is completed, keeping stock levels accurate without adding friction for field teams.

Track items by batch and serial number

This is a must-have for any contractor dealing with high-value equipment or components that have warranties. With Zoho Inventory, you can track individual items by their serial number from the moment you receive them to when they’re installed at a customer’s site. This is incredibly useful for managing warranty claims or handling a product recall. You can also use batch tracking for materials that have expiration dates, like certain adhesives or chemicals. Having this detailed tracking creates a clear audit trail for every serialized part, protecting both your business and your customers.

Batch and serial tracking are especially important for contractors managing high-value equipment, warranty items, or regulated materials. While Zoho Inventory provides the ability to track these details, connecting serial numbers back to the specific job, technician, or installation context often requires additional steps outside the core workflow.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply extend serial and batch tracking into the field. By associating serialized items directly with jobs and work orders, Ply makes it easier to support warranty claims, audits, and service history without relying on manual lookups or after-the-fact reconciliation.

Get automated reports and insights

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Zoho Inventory provides a suite of reports that give you valuable insights into your stock. You can see your inventory valuation, identify your best-selling or most-used items, and spot slow-moving parts that are tying up capital. These reports help you make smarter purchasing decisions based on historical data, not just guesswork. By understanding your inventory turnover and usage patterns, you can optimize your stock levels, reduce carrying costs, and ensure you’re investing in the materials that actually make you money. This data is key to improving your business’s profitability.

Reporting is most valuable for contractors when it reflects how inventory impacts job profitability. While Zoho Inventory provides strong visibility into stock levels, usage trends, and inventory valuation, translating those insights into job-level margin analysis often requires pulling data from multiple systems. This can make it harder to quickly understand which jobs, technicians, or service types are driving material costs.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply are designed to close that gap by tying inventory data directly to jobs and field activity. When inventory usage, labor, and job outcomes are connected in one system, reporting becomes more actionable and easier to use for improving margins and operational efficiency.

How does Zoho Inventory integrate with your tools?

No inventory system operates in isolation, especially in the trades. Your inventory software needs to work alongside accounting, dispatch, and field service tools to avoid manual data entry and reporting gaps. Zoho Inventory offers a wide range of integrations across accounting, e-commerce, shipping, and CRM platforms, making it a flexible option for businesses with diverse software stacks.

For contractors, however, the most important integrations are the ones that connect inventory directly to jobs and work orders. While Zoho Inventory integrates cleanly with accounting tools, linking inventory usage to field service activity often requires additional connectors or manual processes. This distinction becomes more noticeable as job volume increases and accurate job costing becomes critical.

No inventory system operates in isolation, especially in the trades.

Accounting software (Quickbooks, Xero, Zoho Books)

Keeping your inventory and financial records in sync is non-negotiable. When you sell a part or use it on a job, that transaction needs to be reflected in your books. Zoho Inventory connects with popular inventory accounting software like QuickBooks, Xero, and its own Zoho Books. This integration automatically syncs your sales, purchases, and stock values with your general ledger. It helps ensure your cost of goods sold is accurate and gives you a real-time view of your financial health without having to manually reconcile numbers between two different systems. This direct link is key for accurate job costing and simplifies your bookkeeping process.

E-commerce platforms (shopify, amazon, ebay)

If your business sells parts or equipment directly to customers online, managing inventory across multiple channels can get complicated fast. Zoho Inventory helps solve this by letting you connect to various e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and eBay. When an order comes in through your online store, Zoho automatically updates the stock levels in your main inventory. This prevents you from accidentally selling an item you don’t have and keeps your entire inventory count accurate, whether a part is sold online or used by a technician in the field. It streamlines your order management and ensures a smooth experience for your customers.

Shipping carriers (UPS, FedEx, DHL)

Whether you’re sending parts to a job site, returning items to a supplier, or fulfilling an online order, managing shipping can be a job in itself. Zoho Inventory integrates with major shipping carriers like UPS, FedEx, and DHL to simplify the process. You can get real-time shipping rates, print shipping labels, and track packages directly from the Zoho platform. This saves you from having to log in to different carrier websites and consolidates all your shipping information in one place. It’s a practical feature that makes your logistics more efficient and easier to manage.

The Zoho ecosystem (CRM and other apps)

If you’re already using other Zoho products, you’ll find that Zoho Inventory fits right into the ecosystem. The most powerful connection is with Zoho CRM. Integrating Zoho Inventory with Zoho CRM gives your sales and service teams a complete view of the customer, including their order history and the specific parts used on their jobs. This allows for better customer service and more informed sales conversations. When your customer data and inventory data are linked, you can see which customers are buying which parts, helping you anticipate their needs and manage your stock more effectively.

Payment gateways

Getting paid quickly is essential for maintaining healthy cash flow. To help with this, Zoho Inventory integrates with various payment gateways, allowing you to accept online payments for invoices. When a customer pays an invoice, the payment is automatically recorded and reconciled within the system. This closes the loop on the sales process, from creating an order to receiving payment, without requiring manual updates. It streamlines your accounts receivable process and ensures your financial records are always up-to-date, making it easier to track payments and manage your revenue.

Zoho Inventory pricing: which plan fits your business?

Choosing the right software often comes down to price and value. Zoho Inventory offers several pricing tiers, from a free plan for small-scale operations to enterprise-level packages. Let’s break down the options to see which one might align with your contracting business’s needs and budget. The key is to look past the price tag and focus on the limits—like the number of orders, users, and warehouse locations—to understand how each plan would function in the real world of a busy trade business.

For contractors, evaluating pricing goes beyond monthly subscription costs. Inventory software also impacts labor time, accuracy, and job profitability. While Zoho Inventory’s pricing tiers are competitive on paper, trade businesses should consider the operational overhead required to adapt a general-purpose system to field service workflows. Time spent reconciling inventory to jobs, updating truck stock, or bridging gaps between systems can quietly add cost as operations scale.

Contractor-first platforms like Ply factor these realities in from the start. By reducing manual steps and tying inventory directly to jobs and technicians, Ply helps contractors understand the true cost of inventory management and avoid hidden operational expenses that don’t show up in a pricing table.

The free plan: what you get (and what you don’t)

Zoho’s free plan is a solid starting point for a solo contractor or a very small business just getting its inventory process organized. It allows for one user to manage up to 50 orders (sales or purchase orders) per month across two locations, which could be your shop and a single van. This is enough to get a feel for the software and digitize your basic stock tracking. However, if you have more than one technician, handle more than a couple of jobs a day, or need to track materials across a fleet, you’ll hit the limits of the free plan very quickly. It’s best viewed as an extended trial rather than a long-term solution for a growing business.

A look at the paid tiers

When you’re ready to move beyond the basics, Zoho offers several paid plans. Each tier increases the limits on orders, users, and locations. For example, the Standard plan raises the cap to 500 orders and two users, while the Enterprise plan allows for 15,000 orders and seven users across 10 locations. As you go up the tiers, you also get access to more advanced features like serial number tracking and batch tracking. You can find a complete breakdown on the official Zoho Inventory pricing page. When evaluating these, consider how many purchase orders your office manager creates and how many technicians need access to inventory data from the field.

Can Zoho Inventory solve common trade challenges?

On paper, Zoho Inventory has a lot of features that seem to address the headaches contractors deal with every day. But how does it hold up in the real world of service calls, job sites, and truck stock? Let’s break down some of the biggest inventory challenges in the trades and see if Zoho is the right tool to solve them.

Avoiding stockouts and backorders

There’s nothing worse than a technician arriving at a job site only to realize they’re missing a critical part. These last-minute trips to the supply house kill productivity and profit. Zoho Inventory tackles this by allowing you to set automated reorder points for each item. When your stock of a specific filter or valve dips below that threshold, the system automatically alerts you or even drafts a purchase order. This proactive approach helps you maintain optimal stock levels, ensuring your team has the materials they need to complete jobs on the first visit. By moving away from manual tracking, you can significantly reduce the risk of stockouts that frustrate both your team and your customers.

Automated reorder points help prevent obvious stockouts, but contractors often face more dynamic demand. Job schedules change, technicians pull parts unexpectedly, and trucks may consume inventory faster than planned. When inventory updates aren’t tightly connected to job activity in the field, reorder alerts can lag behind reality, leading to surprise shortages despite having controls in place.

Cutting down on shrinkage and human error

Inventory shrinkage—the loss of parts due to theft, damage, or simple mistakes—can silently eat away at your bottom line. When you’re tracking materials with spreadsheets or pen and paper, it’s easy for errors to creep in. A part gets used but not recorded, or the wrong quantity is jotted down. Zoho Inventory helps minimize this by creating a clear, digital trail. Using features like barcode scanning for check-ins and check-outs enforces accuracy and accountability. Every item’s movement is tracked, making it easier to spot discrepancies and understand where losses are happening. This shift from manual entry to a more automated system is key to reducing human error and protecting your inventory investment.

While barcode scanning and audit trails improve accuracy, shrinkage in trade businesses often happens during job execution. Parts get swapped between trucks, used mid-call, or temporarily borrowed for another job. When inventory updates depend on manual follow-up, even good systems can drift out of sync. Field-first inventory platforms reduce this risk by capturing usage as work happens, not after the fact.

Simplifying orders when things get busy

When you’re in the middle of your busy season, the last thing you have time for is wrestling with purchase orders. Juggling multiple suppliers and trying to remember what you ordered last week can lead to duplicate orders or, even worse, forgetting to order essential materials. Zoho Inventory centralizes your purchasing process. You can manage all your supplier information in one place, create purchase orders directly from the system, and track them through to delivery. This helps streamline your procurement workflow, especially when things get hectic. It ensures you’re prepared for seasonal demand without getting bogged down in administrative tasks, freeing you up to focus on scheduling and completing more jobs.

Centralized purchasing helps during busy seasons, but contractors also need visibility into why parts are being ordered. When purchase orders aren’t directly tied to specific jobs or work orders, teams may struggle to prioritize materials, manage backorders, or understand how purchasing decisions affect job profitability. Systems built around job-driven demand make it easier to keep purchasing aligned with real field needs.

Allocating parts for specific jobs

One of the biggest inventory hurdles for contractors is accurately assigning parts to specific jobs. You need to know that the furnace control board you ordered is for the Miller residence, not general truck stock. Zoho Inventory allows you to create sales orders to reserve or “commit” stock for a particular customer or project. While this helps earmark materials, it isn’t a true job costing system. For a seamless workflow, you really need a tool that connects directly with your field service management software. A dedicated integration with platforms like ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro is often required to automatically allocate parts and sync costs back to the right job, ensuring accurate and profitable quoting.

Reserving inventory for customers is a useful step, but contractors typically need tighter job-level controls. Without direct integration to field service workflows, assigning parts to jobs often becomes a manual process. This increases the risk of misallocated materials and inaccurate job costing, especially when technicians are working across multiple jobs in a single day.

Managing inventory from the field

Your inventory isn’t sitting in one place—it’s on the move, spread across multiple trucks and job sites. Your technicians need access to inventory information from the field. Zoho Inventory offers a mobile app that allows your team to view stock levels and product details on their phones or tablets. This can reduce time-wasting calls back to the office to check if a part is available. However, the app is designed for general inventory management, not the specific, fast-paced workflow of a service technician. For field teams, a more tailored solution that simplifies updating truck stock after a job and integrates directly with their service tickets is often more efficient and leads to better adoption.

Mobile access is essential, but adoption depends on simplicity. When technicians are asked to navigate full inventory systems in the field, updates are often delayed or skipped entirely. Tools designed specifically for technician workflows tend to see higher adoption and more accurate data because they reduce inventory management to a natural extension of the job itself.

Zoho Inventory can help contractors bring order to parts and purchasing, especially for teams moving away from spreadsheets or basic accounting tools. It handles the fundamentals of inventory control well and provides a centralized view of stock across locations. For smaller operations or businesses

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Frequently asked questions

Many contractors start with general inventory tools like Zoho Inventory to establish control and visibility. As operations grow more complex, contractor-first platforms like Ply become the natural next step, connecting inventory directly to jobs, trucks, and technicians without manual workarounds.

Is Zoho Inventory a good fit for a small contracting business?

Zoho Inventory can be a solid step up from spreadsheets, especially if you need to centralize your parts list and get a handle on purchasing. Its strengths lie in core inventory control, like setting reorder points to avoid stockouts. However, since it’s built for a broad audience that includes online retailers, you may find yourself navigating features for e-commerce and shipping that don’t apply to your service business. It works best if your needs are straightforward, but you might feel its generalist approach as your operation grows more complex.

How does Zoho Inventory handle truck stock?

You can manage your service vehicles by setting up each truck as a separate “warehouse” in the system. This allows you to track which parts are on which truck and transfer stock from your main shop. This is a huge improvement over manual tracking. The process, however, is designed for traditional warehouse transfers, so it may not feel as quick or intuitive as a system built specifically for the fast-paced workflow of a service technician who needs to update their stock between jobs.

Does Zoho Inventory connect with field service software like ServiceTitan or Jobber?

Zoho Inventory offers a range of integrations, but its connections to trade-specific field service platforms can be limited. You may find that you need to rely on third-party connector tools like Zapier to link the systems, which can sometimes result in data delays or incomplete workflows. For seamless job costing and billing, a deep, direct integration is essential to ensure parts used in the field are automatically and accurately assigned to the correct work order in your main platform.

My team isn’t great with technology. Is the mobile app easy to use in the field?

The mobile app gives your team access to inventory data from their phones, which can cut down on calls back to the office. Features like barcode scanning can also help improve accuracy when checking parts out. Because the app is designed to do everything—from creating purchase orders to managing sales—it can feel a bit cumbersome for a technician who just needs to perform a few key tasks. Field teams often have higher adoption rates with apps that are designed specifically for their role, with a simpler interface focused only on what they need to do on a job site.

What’s the main difference between using Zoho Inventory and the inventory features in QuickBooks?

QuickBooks is an accounting tool first and foremost, so its inventory features are designed to track the financial value of your stock for your balance sheet. A dedicated system like Zoho Inventory is built for the day-to-day physical management of your parts. It gives you much more operational control, with features like multi-location tracking for trucks, detailed item histories, and automated purchasing alerts that go far beyond what a basic accounting system can offer.