Zoho Books in Finrely
Last updated: 23 September 2026
Finrely reads your Zoho Books data and turns it into management reporting — P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, AR/AP ageing and AI-written commentary. The connection is read-only: every permission Finrely requests from Zoho ends in .READ, and the sync only ever calls read endpoints. See What Finrely reads for the full picture, across every connected source.
Overview: Finrely for Zoho Books
Connecting
- Open Integrations. In Finrely, go to Integrations in the left navigation and find the Zoho Books card.
- Pick your region. Zoho partitions accounts across data centres. Choose Global / Auto-detect (recommended), Europe (.eu) or Saudi Arabia (.sa) before connecting. Auto-detect is right for most accounts; Finrely then routes every later API call to the domain Zoho itself returns for your organisation.
- Authorise on Zoho. Click Connect. Zoho's own consent screen opens — no API keys or credentials are entered into Finrely. Approve, and you are returned to the Integrations page.
- Check the organisation. If your Zoho login can reach more than one organisation, nothing is loaded yet: Finrely shows which one it proposes and asks you to confirm — accept it or pick a different one from the list, then click Use. A fresh sync starts automatically as soon as you confirm; the card shows its progress. Later, once connected, use Change organization on the card to switch to a different one — this discards the previously loaded organisation's data immediately and never mixes two organisations' books, but it does not reload the new one on its own; run Refresh data afterwards (or wait for the next scheduled sync).
- Wait for the first sync. It starts immediately, on Finrely's own servers — you can close the tab. A typical organisation finishes in a few minutes; a large one continues in the background and resumes on its own.
What Finrely reads
Chart of accounts, monthly P&L and balance sheet, invoices/bills/journals/credit notes (for analytics only), your reporting tags, and AR/AP ageing by counterparty. The full list, and what is never written back, is on What Finrely reads.
Finrely stores period aggregates, not a copy of your ledger. Access tokens are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM); the decryption key lives only in Finrely's server environment, so no usable token is ever exposed to your browser.
Keeping data current
Finrely re-syncs every connected organisation once a day, automatically. You can also refresh on demand from the Zoho Books card:
| Control | What it does | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Refresh data | Incremental sync across the trailing 25 months | You posted something in Zoho and want it reflected now |
| Reload full history (last 36 months) | Re-pulls up to 36 months from Zoho Books and re-maps accounts, in multiple batches | After reclassifying accounts or changing tags in bulk |
Zoho's API has a daily ceiling. The Zoho Books Free plan allows 1,000 API calls per organisation per day; paid Zoho plans allow more (up to 10,000 on Zoho's Premium tier). A full reload of a busy organisation can use several hundred calls. If you hit the daily limit, Finrely pauses the sync and resumes automatically once it resets, at Zoho's own daily reset — it does not fail silently or retry uselessly against a limit that is already gone.
AI Insights
AI Insights reads your synced figures and writes what changed, why, and what to do about it. It is off until you turn it on: Finrely requires explicit consent before any financial data is sent to a model. See AI Insights for exactly what is sent, when, and how the monthly limit works.
When something looks wrong
"No data returned." The sync finished, but Zoho sent back no report values and no documents. Almost always one of two things: the connected organisation is not the one you meant — check the name on the card — or the Zoho user who authorised the connection does not have access to reports and transactions in that organisation.
Reports are empty right after connecting. The first sync may still be running — the card shows its progress. If the organisation has no posted transactions in the last 25 months, there is genuinely nothing to report on yet; add an invoice or a journal entry in Zoho Books and refresh.
"Zoho API rate limit." Zoho enforces both a per-minute and a per-day cap on API calls. A per-minute limit clears in a few minutes and Finrely retries automatically. A per-day limit clears at Zoho's own daily reset — no action needed, the next scheduled sync picks it up.
"The connected organisation changed." A banner on your reports means the integration's authorisation now points at a different Zoho organisation than the figures on screen were loaded from — this happens when the Zoho login used to reconnect resolves to a different default organisation than before. Syncing pauses until you choose, on the Integrations card, what to do with the previous organisation's data. Until you do, Finrely labels the affected pages rather than presenting the previous organisation's numbers as current.
Plans and limits
Zoho Books is available on every Finrely plan, including Free — no paid plan is required to connect it, run reports, or use AI Insights. Company, user and history limits depend on your plan; see Plans and limits.
Disconnecting
Use Disconnect on the Zoho Books card. Finrely revokes the authorisation with Zoho, stops syncing, and discards the stored credentials; your Zoho Books data itself is untouched, because nothing was ever written to it. The reporting data Finrely already derived from your organisation is not deleted by disconnecting — to have it deleted as well, write to [email protected].