The challenge
SMARTCORNER keeps its books in Zoho Books with AED as the base currency, and it regularly deals in US dollars and euros. Zoho Books stores exchange rates in its Currencies settings, where someone types each rate in by hand with an effective date. Done every day, that is slow and easy to get wrong, and a missed day means transactions convert at an outdated rate.
Stock had the same problem. The procurement team checked by hand which items had fallen to their reorder level, then looked up sales, open purchase orders and stock already in transit before deciding what to buy. The project docs list the risks plainly: missed reorder points, duplicate reorder emails and operational delays.
One more constraint shaped the work. SMARTCORNER’s Zoho Books organisation does not support custom functions or scheduled workflows, so the usual way of running a daily job inside Books was off the table.
What we built
Amatec built three scheduled Deluge automations across Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory, and none of them needs anyone to press a button.
Daily exchange rates. Every morning at 7:30 AM in the client’s time zone, a scheduled function reads the USD and EUR rates published by the Central Bank of UAE and writes them into Zoho Books. Because the client’s plan has no schedules, the function runs from a second Zoho organisation that does, and updates SMARTCORNER’s books through the Zoho Books API. A few details made it work:
- The bank’s page is partly in Arabic, so the script finds the US dollar and euro rows by their Arabic names.
- The bank quotes 1 USD = 3.6725 AED, while Zoho Books wants the rate the other way round. The script inverts each rate and rounds it to two decimal places.
- The “last updated” date uses Arabic month names. A small lookup turns each month into a number and builds a YYYY-MM-DD date, which becomes the effective date in Zoho Books.
- Zoho Books only updates a rate record that already exists, so we created the USD and EUR records once, kept their IDs, and the script now updates them every day.
Reorder alerts that do not repeat. In Zoho Inventory, a second automation runs every alternate Monday at 7:00 AM. It checks every active item, page by page at 200 items a page, and lists those where available stock is at or below the reorder level. For each one the email shows yearly sales, stock left, the reorder level and the quantity to order, worked out as reorder level minus available stock and never below zero.
Duplicates were the tricky part. Once an item is emailed, a checkbox field on the item is ticked, so it does not show up again two weeks later. A separate job runs daily at 2 AM and clears the tick once stock climbs back above the reorder level, which re-arms the alert for the next drop. Item updates are spaced 15 seconds apart to stay inside Zoho’s API rate limits, and empty or text values in stock fields are treated as zero instead of breaking the run.
A reorder report with the full buying picture. The third automation, also every two weeks on a Monday, adds what a buyer needs before placing an order. It joins three sources: sales by item from 1 January to the run date, quantities already ordered from suppliers, and quantities in transit. Zoho Inventory’s summary API could not return the yearly data, so we built a custom report in Zoho Inventory Reports and read it through its API inside the schedule. Each row of the email table carries:
- Item name, plus the English name field the client added
- SKU / EAN
- Total sales this year, stock left and reorder level
- Quantity to order, quantity ordered and quantity in transit
If nothing qualifies, no email goes out.
The results
SMARTCORNER’s exchange rates in Zoho Books now update themselves every morning, using the Central Bank of UAE’s own date as the effective date. The project documentation records “automatic daily exchange rate updates”, “elimination of manual updates” and “improved financial accuracy”.
On the stock side, the docs record “Eliminated manual checks” and “Prevented duplicate procurement emails”. The fortnightly report gives the procurement team “visibility into ordered and in-transit inventory” and “faster and more informed purchasing decisions”, because the question of whether an item is already on order is answered in the same row as the reorder quantity. Take the doc’s own example. A reorder level of 50 with 30 in stock gives a quantity to order of 20, and the buyer sees right beside it how much is already ordered or in transit.
Every test case across the three builds passed, from the Arabic date parsing to pagination over several inventory pages. The workaround is the part worth copying. A Zoho plan without schedules does not have to mean manual work, because the job can run from another organisation and reach in through the API.