Writing data

Many resources support writes as well as reads: create, edit, delete and resource-specific actions such as mark-sent or categorize. To see what a resource supports, run fob-zb resource. For one action's flags, run fob-zb resource action --help.

Try it on a test organization first

Writes change your real books immediately. Create a free test organization in Zoho Books, connect it as its own profile with --from (how), and practise there with --profile test.

Video coming soon

Doing tasks with fob-zb: invoices, vendor payments and the bank feed (3–5 min)

How writes behave#

edit only changes the flags you pass. Everything else on the record stays as it is.
delete asks for confirmation. It refuses to run without --yes (-y).
--json prints the saved record as JSON, which is handy for capturing the new ID in a script.
IDs are Zoho's numeric IDs. Get them from list (the first column) or show.

Examples#

Customers and invoices#

# A customer
fob-zb contacts create --name "Acme Ltd" --type customer --email [email protected] --payment-terms 30

# An invoice with one line, then send it
fob-zb invoices create --customer 4600xxxxxxx --item 4600yyyyyyy --quantity 2 --rate 5000
fob-zb invoices email 4600zzzzzzz

For several lines, repeat --line:

fob-zb invoices create --customer 4600xxxxxxx \
  --line "item_id=4600aaa,quantity=1,rate=1200" \
  --line "description=Setup fee,quantity=1,rate=300"

Paying bills#

fob-zb bills list --status open
fob-zb vendor-payments create --vendor 4600xxxxxxx --amount 1500 --date 2026-10-01 \
  --paid-through 4600bbbbbbb --bill 4600ccccccc

--bill applies the whole amount to one bill. To split a payment, repeat --apply "bill_id=amount" instead.

Bank feed#

fob-zb bank-transactions list --account-id 4600xxxxxxx --status uncategorized
fob-zb bank-transactions categorize 4600ddddddd --as expense \
  --field account_id=4600eeeeeee --field amount=49.00 --field date=2026-09-30
fob-zb bank-transactions exclude 4600fffffff

categorize --as and match pass extra fields straight to Zoho's API with --field key=value or --json-body. Check the field names in the Zoho Books banking API. These two commands are Beta: they haven't been validated against a live bank feed yet.

Every write command#

The command reference lists every action and its options, grouped by area.