How to migrate from Zoho CRM to TatvaCRM

1. Why migrate from Zoho?

We are not going to rehash the full pitch here. If you want the side-by-side comparison, read TatvaCRM vs Zoho CRM. The short version: most teams move because Zoho has become a sprawling 40-product suite where the CRM keeps getting buried under upsells, the UX feels dated, and the per-user pricing creeps up every renewal. TatvaCRM is a single focused product built for Indian SMBs and BFSI / DSA teams — modern stack, BFSI-native data model, GSTIN and PAN as first-class fields, and per-user pricing that is honest about what you get.

On price, TatvaCRM Starter is INR 449/user/month for 10,000 records and unlimited users. Professional is INR 999/user/month for 50,000 records, RBAC, custom roles, and teams. There is a real 30-day free trial with no credit card, and a free tier for 3 users / 2,000 records if you want to kick the tyres before paying anything.

But this page is not a sales pitch — it is the runbook for actually doing the migration. Let us get on with it.

2. Pre-migration checklist

Spend 30 minutes on this before you touch either CRM. Skipping the checklist is the single biggest reason migrations drag on for days.

Audit your Zoho data

• Open each Zoho module (Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Leads, Tasks) and note the total record count. You will use these numbers to verify the import.
• Open Setup → Customisation → Modules and Fields and list every custom field per module. Most teams find 30-50% are unused or were created for one-off campaigns.
• Identify duplicates and dead records now. There is no point migrating 8,000 contacts when only 4,200 are actually active.

Match custom field counts to a TatvaCRM tier

TatvaCRM Starter supports 50 custom fields per entity. Professional supports 200 per entity. If you have 80 custom fields on Contacts alone, you are on Professional. Most Zoho Standard customers fit comfortably on TatvaCRM Starter; most Zoho Professional and Enterprise customers fit on TatvaCRM Professional.

Identify Zoho features with no TatvaCRM equivalent

Be honest with yourself about this list. For each item, decide whether you can live without it, replace it with a separate tool, or wait until TatvaCRM ships it.

• Workflow rules and Blueprints. TatvaCRM does not have an automation engine yet. Document what your rules actually do — most are simple required-field enforcement that pipeline stages can replace.
• Zia AI. No equivalent. Lead scores and predictions stay in Zoho.
• Zoho Marketplace integrations. Most have direct alternatives. List the integrations you actually use this month (not the ones you connected and forgot).
• Bulk email / Campaigns. TatvaCRM is sales software, not marketing software. Use Mailchimp, Resend, or Brevo for bulk email.
• Web forms. Use a separate form tool (Tally, Typeform, Google Forms) and pipe submissions in via CSV import for now.

Decide on a tier

• Free — 3 users, 2,000 records. Great for kicking the tyres and parallel-running for a week.
• Starter (INR 449/user/month, USD $12) — 10,000 records, unlimited users, 30-day trial. Most Zoho Standard customers land here.
• Professional (INR 999/user/month, USD $24) — 50,000 records, RBAC, custom roles, teams, 30-day trial. Most Zoho Professional/Enterprise customers land here.
• Enterprise (talk to us) — 500,000 records, unlimited users. For datasets that outgrow Professional.

All paid tiers are per-user with no minimum seats and 2 months free on annual billing. CSV migration help is included free on every paid plan — that means a real human will sit on a call with you to map fields and run the imports. We are honest about the limit: it is manual help via CSV, not an automated Zoho API connector.

3. Step-by-step migration runbook

Step 1: Export from Zoho (Zoho CSV export tutorial)

Zoho exports data module by module. There are two paths — pick the one that matches your edition.

Per-module export (any edition): Open the module (Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Leads, Tasks). Click the three-dot (More) menu in the top right of the list view. Choose Export Contacts (or whichever module). Pick the list view you want to export from and download as CSV. Repeat for each module.

Bulk export (recommended for full migrations): Go to Setup → Data Administration → Export. Tick every module you want (Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Leads, Tasks, Notes, Calls, Meetings, Attachments). Zoho will queue the export and email you a ZIP file with one CSV per module. The job runs asynchronously and usually completes within an hour for typical SMB datasets.

Step 2: Sign up for the TatvaCRM 30-day trial

Go to app.tatvacrm.com/register. Create your tenant. No credit card required. The trial gives you full Professional tier access for 30 days so you can test imports, RBAC, and email integration without artificial limits.

Step 3: Set up your pipeline and stages

Do this before importing deals. In TatvaCRM go to Settings → Pipelines and recreate your Zoho deal stages. The stage names in your CSV must match the stage names in TatvaCRM exactly (case sensitive) for the import to auto-link.

Step 4: Create custom fields

Custom fields must exist in TatvaCRM before you import data into them. Go to Settings → Custom Fields and recreate every Zoho custom field you decided to keep. Picklist options have to be re-typed — there is no auto-import of picklist values.

Step 5: Import companies first

Settings → Import → Companies. Upload your cleaned Zoho Accounts CSV. Map columns, set duplicate handling to “Skip duplicates” (matched on company name), preview the first 10 rows, and run the import. Companies must exist before contacts and deals because both reference them.

Step 6: Import contacts

Settings → Import → Contacts. Upload your cleaned Zoho Contacts CSV. The Company column will auto-match against the companies you just imported. If a contact references a company that does not exist, it imports without a company link — the import does not fail.

Step 7: Import deals

Settings → Import → Deals. Map the stage column to your pipeline stages, the company column to companies, and the primary contact column to contacts. Verify the deal value column is numeric (no currency symbols).

Step 8: Import leads

TatvaCRM keeps Leads as a separate entity from Contacts (the same pattern Zoho uses). Import your Zoho Leads CSV into Settings → Import → Leads. Converted leads in Zoho should already be in your Contacts/Deals exports — do not re-import them.

Step 9: Import tasks and activities

Tasks and activities reference contacts, companies, and deals — so they go last. Settings → Import → Tasks. Settings → Import → Activities. The CSV needs the parent record name (or ID) so the activity links to the right place.

Step 10: Verify data integrity

• Compare record counts: TatvaCRM count vs Zoho count vs CSV row count for each entity.
• Sample-check 10 random records per entity. Open each one and verify the company link, custom field values, and phone format.
• Open 5 deals and verify they are linked to the correct contact, company, and pipeline stage.
• Download the import error report from TatvaCRM if any record counts do not match — it tells you exactly which rows were skipped and why.

Step 11: Set up users and roles

Settings → Users. Invite your team. Assign system roles (Owner, Admin, Manager, Member, Viewer) for the first cut. On Professional, you can build custom roles with any permission combination, plus create Teams to scope visibility.

Step 12: Configure email integration

Settings → Email. Connect each user's mailbox so outbound emails are sent from their address and inbound replies are logged against the matching contact automatically.

4. Zoho to TatvaCRM field mapping

This is the reference table for the most common Contact, Company, and Deal fields. Use it when renaming your CSV headers before import.

firstName,lastName,email,phone,company,jobTitle,source,address,notes
Priya,Sharma,priya@abcindustries.in,+919876543210,ABC Industries,Director,Web Form,"MG Road, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001",Key decision maker

5. Common gotchas

• Account vs Company. Zoho calls them “Accounts”, TatvaCRM calls them “Companies”. Same concept, different label. Rename the column in your CSV before import.
• Potential vs Deal. Older Zoho documentation and exports sometimes use “Potentials” instead of “Deals”. Same entity.
• Phone formatting. Zoho stores phones however users typed them — with country code, without, with spaces, with dashes. TatvaCRM normalizes on display but the import is happier if you standardise to +91XXXXXXXXXX before uploading. Excel formula: ="+91"&RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"-","")," ",""),"+91",""),10)
• Picklist values do not auto-import. If you have a custom picklist field with 12 options in Zoho, you have to re-create those 12 options manually in TatvaCRM before importing data into that field.
• Multi-select fields. Zoho exports multi-select picklists as semicolon-separated values inside one cell. TatvaCRM CSV import does not handle multi-select via CSV — pick the primary value or move the data to a notes field.
• Workflows DO NOT migrate. Zoho workflow rules, Blueprints, approval processes, and macros do not have an equivalent in TatvaCRM yet. Document what they do before you cancel Zoho.
• Zia AI scores DO NOT migrate. Lead scores, deal predictions, anomaly flags — all Zoho-proprietary and stay in Zoho.
• Email templates need to be re-created. Copy the body manually. There is no template export/import path.
• Attachments. Files attached to Zoho records need to be downloaded from the Zoho data backup ZIP and re-uploaded to TatvaCRM. The CSV import does not pull files.
• Excel and dates. If you open a CSV in Excel on an Indian-locale machine, Excel sometimes converts YYYY-MM-DD dates into DD-MM-YYYY on save, which silently swaps day and month for ambiguous dates. Use a text editor or Google Sheets if you need to inspect raw CSVs.

6. What to do about features TatvaCRM does not have

We would rather be honest than hand-wave. Here is the list of Zoho features we do not match yet, and what we recommend you do about each.

• Workflow rules / automation. Live without them, or wait until we ship them. Most teams find that 70% of their Zoho workflows were either unused or replaceable with required-field enforcement and pipeline stage gates.
• Blueprints. Replace with TatvaCRM's pipeline stages plus required fields per stage. The result is simpler and easier for sales reps to follow.
• Zia AI. Skip. There is no AI scoring equivalent yet. If lead scoring is a hard requirement, this is the one reason to delay your migration.
• Marketplace integrations. Most have direct alternatives. Common replacements: accounting (Zoho Books → Tally / QuickBooks have their own connectors), helpdesk (Zoho Desk → Freshdesk / Intercom), forms (Zoho Forms → Tally / Typeform with CSV pipe).
• Bulk email / Campaigns. Use a separate tool — Mailchimp, Resend, Brevo, or MailerLite. TatvaCRM is built for one-to-one sales email, not one-to-many marketing email.
• Web forms. Use Tally or Typeform for the form, then either CSV-import responses weekly or use Zapier/Make to push them as Leads via the TatvaCRM API.

For everything else — contacts, companies, deals, leads, tasks, activities, custom fields, pipelines, RBAC, teams, email — see the full features page or the comparison hub.

7. DSA / BFSI special section

If you are a DSA, NBFC, MFD, or insurance team that has been forcing Zoho into a loan-files shape with custom modules and bolt-on workflows — this section is for you.

TatvaCRM has a native DSA toolkit. You will not need custom modules for the BFSI workflow, because the entities are first-class in the product:

• Applicants (Contacts re-labeled for DSA tenants), Lenders (Companies), Loan Files / Applications (Deals), Enquiries (Leads) — all native.
• Loan files with sanctioned amount, product type (HL, LAP, BL, PL, Auto, Education), employment type, and lender link — all native fields, no customisation needed.
• Tranche disbursals against a sanctioned loan, with cap enforcement (sum of disbursals cannot exceed sanctioned amount).
• Commission splits auto-computed on disbursal events using configurable templates per product.
• Document checklists auto-instantiated per loan file based on product + employment + lender match.
• Lender network with partner type, payout matrices, and contact roster.

The migration path: import your Zoho Contacts as Applicants, your custom “Lender” module as Companies (with partnerType set), and your custom “Loan File” module as Deals — then the DSA module activates automatically based on your tenant's industry. Talk to us before doing this one, because the field mapping for custom modules is tenant-specific and we usually run it with you.

8. Post-migration: your first week

Day 1: Assign owners and verify pipeline

• Confirm contacts, companies, and deals are assigned to the correct owners.
• Walk the deal pipeline view and verify counts per stage match what you expect.
• Set follow-up tasks on your top 10 active deals so the team has obvious starting work.

Days 2-3: Train the team

• 15-minute walkthrough per rep: where their contacts live, how to log a call, how to move a deal through the pipeline.
• Have each rep find 5 of their own contacts and add a note. Builds muscle memory.
• Make the rule explicit: all new updates go in TatvaCRM. Zoho is read-only archive from today.

Days 4-7: Set up reports and monitor adoption

• Build the 3-4 dashboards you actually look at weekly: pipeline by stage, deals closing this month, activity per rep, conversion rate by source.
• Check daily that every rep is logging in. If anyone is still updating Zoho, address it directly — split data is worse than no CRM at all.

9. FAQ