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Recipe

A monthly finance pack from Zoho Books

For anyone who reports the numbers every month: build the pack from Zoho Books once, and it arrives for the month just gone on the 1st.

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At the start of every month you, a partner or an investor wants the same pages: how the month went, where the money is, and who still owes you. In this recipe the agent builds that pack from Zoho Books once, and XataWorks makes it again on the 1st of every month for the month just gone.

What you need

1. Ask for the pack

With Zoho Books open beside the chat:

Make a finance report for last month from Zoho Books: income, expenses and net profit as key figures, the profit and loss by category as a chart, the balance sheet at the month’s end, the bank balances, and a table of overdue invoices. Add a short commentary.

The report opens in a window of its own, laid out with a cover, contents and page numbers. Change it by asking.

2. Export it

The report window’s File menu exports it as a PDF, a spreadsheet with every row, a Word document, slides for a board meeting, a small website or a short video.

3. Make it monthly

Choose File ▸ Save as Template…. XataWorks works out which dates in each request to Books belong to the period, and says so: the profit and loss’s start and end, the balance sheet’s date, the invoices’ date range. Check it found them all. Then open File ▸ Report Templates…, select it, choose Schedule…, and set Runs to Monthly, On day 1, covering The previous period.

Each run asks Books for that month’s figures, follows every page of a long list, and makes the report and its formats again. Sources… shows the period each set of figures was fetched for.

Where this recipe stops

  • XataWorks has to be running, and Books signed in. A run that falls due while the application is closed is skipped until its next time. If Books is not open and signed in, the run says so and makes nothing.
  • Read only. The pack reads Zoho Books and never changes it.
  • Big lists have a ceiling. A run follows up to 100 pages of a list, all or nothing. A fetch that cannot finish makes no new version, and the last one stays.

Read more

  • Reports: what a report holds, exports, templates and schedules.

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