Entos Design

Entos Design is a design firm that had attempted a Zoho migration roughly three years earlier through another consultant. The project stalled. Some data and around 65 licenses existed in Zoho, but the workflows were never built, so the firm was paying for both its legacy BillQuick/Core system and a Zoho One suite it could not use. Staff had been shown Zoho CRM screens that felt disconnected from how they actually run projects, and the failed rollout left them skeptical of the platform and of consultants generally. Meanwhile the day-to-day problems persisted, with no easy way to track project phases, progress, or financials, and leadership relying on spreadsheets and standing meetings to know where anything stood.

We used to implement Zoho as a partner, and this engagement drew on that. The work was a paid system design to fix the trust problem and the architecture problem before proposing any build.

We ran working sessions inside the firm's live Zoho account, going module by module through what the earlier attempt had left behind, including which automations existed, which were broken, and what could be salvaged. We performed a non-destructive reset of the CRM so the cleanup did not disturb the data already there, and used Zoho's Canvas tool to show what a redesigned, simpler interface would look like for their staff, built inside their own system rather than as a slide deck.

The design produced a phased implementation roadmap for getting off BillQuick/Core entirely, with CRM configured for their client and account hierarchy, Zoho Projects for project and phase structure, Books for invoicing and expenses, People for time entry, automated invoice creation from time and expenses, an add-service request form with accounting approval, PM dashboards showing contract consumed and profitability, and a Zoho Analytics rebuild of the firm-wide project overview leadership had been maintaining by hand, with a migration plan for tens of thousands of lines of historical project and billing data.

The firm went from a stalled, half-paid-for platform and no plan to a concrete, sequenced path with honest estimates for each phase. The existing Zoho data and licenses were treated as an asset to build on rather than a write-off, which reduced the projected effort of the full build. Just as important, staff saw their own workflows reflected in the design instead of generic CRM screens, which is what the first attempt never achieved.

Given the same starting point now, we would put the same design discipline toward a custom, client-owned system, one build that holds clients, projects, time, billing, and reporting without per-license costs on 65 seats or a suite of modules to configure around. A firm that has already been burned once by a platform rollout is exactly the client that benefits from owning the system outright.