Thousands of customers in the world over use Zoho Books for their accounting needs. Why? Because it is simple, beautiful yet powerful and lastly, built with the customer in mind.  We often wonder if we can make it even better. For example, we wondered what if we can build an Auction feature in Books that can be used along with Purchase Orders so that the customers get the best deals from their vendors?  So we gave it a shot with Catalyst! 

https://bookscatalystconnection-696722811.development.catalystserverless.com/app/

The use case is like this -

Whenever a Purchase Order gets created in Books, we trigger a workflow that calls a webhook sending all the Purchase Order data to Catalyst.  You can choose to send emails to vendors whom you think can fulfill the order.

So, the vendors can get back with their best rates by either calling or mailing or Whatsapping(who knew!). 

Now, based on which vendor gives you the best rate for any specific line item, you can declare that vendor as the winner. This will close the original Purchase order and will also remove that specific vendor from the Auction.

The rest of the items will be still in the auction. Now for the rest of the line items when some vendor is declared the winner, a new PO will be created in the system. 

This gives you the ability to literally split a PO into multiple items and get the best of breed value and relationships. 

With Catalyst, you have the ability to extend and add further value to anything Zoho or even other non-Zoho services.

What all can be further done?

a) One can make this into a widget

b) One can extend this even further to make a more full-blown auction system

c) Every important module of Books can be further extended as per your needs with ease for example you can extend the Invoices module etc

Github Link for Code - https://github.com/catalystbyzoho/learncatalyst-bookscatalystconnection-node

#books-catalyst integration