Zoho Flow update: Announcing folders, date format conversions, and more

It was just a few months ago that Zoho Flow completed 5 years since launch. In that time, we've gone from being an intuitive drag-and-drop builder supporting 100 applications to being a mission-critical integration platform for business, supporting over 800 apps, with essential features like custom functions, auto reruns, and error branches.

In this update, we're announcing 5 more features for the platform:

1. Export task history
2. Restart flows
3. Folders
4. Custom functions list
5. Date format conversions

1) Export task history

The History section in Zoho Flow is where you can check the execution of every step of all the flows in your organization for the previous 90 days. If you find that one of your flows has failed at a particular step, you can select the flow and "run" it again. What this does is it runs just the failed steps again.

If you want to get a CSV file containing the execution history of your flows, for further analysis, it's now possible. When you click on Export History, you get an email containing a link to download the CSV for the selected time range.

2) Restart flows

Export history isn't the only feature we've added to this section. One of the main functionalities of the History section of Zoho Flow has been to examine failed flows and run those failed steps again. Now, we've added the ability to restart the entire flow.

Consider this situation: You're collecting data from Zoho Forms, creating a contact in Zoho CRM, sending a notification on Zoho Cliq, and creating a ticket in Zoho Desk.

If, for some reason, the flow fails at sending a notification in Zoho Cliq and subsequent auto-reruns also fail, the next step (creating a ticket in Zoho Desk) will not get executed. If you select the flow and "resume" it, the flow runs again from the step where it failed. Zoho Flow will once again attempt to send a notification on Cliq, and if that attempt is successful, the flow will proceed to create a ticket in Desk.

However, if you want the entire flow to run again for the failed instance using the data obtained from your original trigger data, you can choose to restart the flow. In this example, this would mean all three actions in the flow (CRM, Cliq, and Desk) will be executed again.

3) Folders

Now you can organize your flows into appropriate folders—or even subfolders! Having flows organized into folders makes it easier to manage, audit, and collaborate with all the Zoho Flow users in your organization.

4) Custom functions list

View all your custom functions in one place. You can now quickly change, test, and update your custom functions right from the Custom Function section in Settings.

5) Date format conversions

Different apps often have different date formats. Before, to match the date formats so that they aligned with the apps you wanted to perform an action on, you needed a custom function. Now there’s a simpler way.

Consider a situation where you want to add customers from an ecommerce store, like Shopify or WooCommerce, to Zoho CRM. Let’s assume that the ecommerce store has an MM-DD-YYYY date format and Zoho CRM has a DD-MM-YYYY format. Once you get the data from the ecommerce store, you can configure Zoho Flow to convert the date to align with the expected date format of the app you're sending the data to. In this example, you would be choosing the DD-MM-YYYY format for Zoho CRM.

In addition to converting the received date to the desired format, you can also choose the timezone of the input app—which would be Shopify/WooCommerce in our example—and convert the date in accordance to the time zone that you want in the output app, which would be Zoho CRM.

And that's everything! With this update, we hope to make your experience on the platform more organized and convenient. If you need help with anything, please feel free to write to us at support@zohoflow.com. We'll be glad to help!