Moving from Zoho to Workdome: what comes across, and what doesn't

Most companies that look at Workdome are running some mix of Zoho CRM, Zoho Books and Zoho People. Here is exactly what each importer brings across, what it leaves behind, and the order that makes the move least painful.

By the Workdome team · 13 October 2026 · 7 min read

The short version

All three connect with your Zoho login (OAuth). There are no export files to download, clean up and re-upload.

Zoho CRM

The importer pulls through Zoho's API and maps each object to its Workdome equivalent: accounts become organisations, contacts are linked to their organisation, leads keep their New, Contacted, Qualified or Not Qualified status, and deals land in a pipeline built from your Zoho deal stages. Tasks become activities, and notes attach to the record they belonged to.

It matches records on their Zoho ID and de-duplicates email addresses, so an import interrupted halfway can be run again without doubling your contacts. Two imports cannot run at the same time.

What to sort out before you import

• Owners. Deals, tasks and notes are assigned to the person who runs the import, not to their Zoho owner. Plan a short session afterwards to hand records to the right salespeople, or run the import as the person who should own them.
• Custom fields. The importer keeps the standard fields — phone, description, lead source, industry and the like. If your team lives in custom fields, recreate them in Workdome first and move that data across deliberately.
• Activity history. Calls, meetings, quotes, orders, invoices, campaigns and attachments stay in Zoho. Decide whether you need them in the new system at all, or only as an archive you can still look up.

Zoho Books

The Books importer brings across your accounting between two dates you choose, from the chart of accounts down to individual bank transactions. Two safeguards matter in practice:

• It will not overwrite work you have already done in Workdome. Re-syncing skips records Workdome has since acted on, and documents in a GST month you have already marked as filed.
• Cutover is signed off, not assumed. A reconciliation report compares the two systems, and a cutover sign-off step records the moment Workdome becomes the books of record.

If you are not on Zoho Books, you can still start cleanly: set a finance cutover date and post your opening trial balance from a CSV, with a preview before anything is posted.

Zoho People and payroll

Zoho People brings across your departments, employees, leave and attendance records, holidays, shifts, bank details, and salary and statutory details. If you are switching payroll in the middle of a financial year, the year-to-date figures can be imported from Zoho Payroll exports or your own spreadsheet, so TDS for the rest of the year is calculated on the full year's earnings rather than restarting from zero.

The order that works

1. People first. Everything else hangs off the employee directory — record owners, approvers, payroll.
2. Books at a clean boundary. Pick the start of a month, ideally one whose GST return is filed, as the cutover date.
3. CRM last. With people in place, reassigning record owners after the import is quick.
4. Run both systems for one cycle. One payroll and one GST month in parallel is usually enough to trust the numbers.

If you are not on Zoho

Employees, leads, statutory details, leave, holidays, attendance, assets and bank statements can all be imported from CSV or Excel. There is no direct Tally importer today: customers, vendors, invoices and bills come across through Zoho Books, or are entered as opening balances.