Zoho Books
Create, send and manage contacts, items, invoices and estimates in Zoho Books, across every Zoho data centre.
About
Zoho Books ships in the w6w first-party pack. It declares 22 actions, 2 health checks, and the host runs its code in a sandbox that never sees the credential.
- App id
io.w6w.zohobooks- Version
- 0.1.1
- Author
- w6w
- Licence
- MIT
- Categories
- Finance & Accounting
Overview
Zoho Books puts a business’s accounting and invoicing records into a workflow — list, read, create, update and delete contacts and items, manage invoices through their full lifecycle including marking one sent, voiding it or emailing it to a customer, and create and read estimates. Every action falls back to the organization the connection was authorized against, so a single-organization account needs nothing extra configured; listing organizations is how a workflow discovers the id for anything else.
Zoho hosts every organization in one of eight regional data centres, each with its own API host and, almost always, its own connection endpoint, so this app routes each region through its own dedicated connection rather than one that could silently send an EU organization’s requests through the US region instead. Canada is the one region where that connection endpoint breaks the naming pattern the other seven follow, and this app points at the real endpoint rather than the one the pattern would suggest.
Bulk export, recurring invoices, sales and purchase orders, banking and every jurisdiction-specific tax feature such as GST or CFDI are deliberately left out as not core to workflow automation of a Books account; create and update calls take a generic set of fields for the same reason, since Zoho Books’ own forms run to dozens of optional, region-specific attributes.
Build with Zoho Books
Three routes to the same 22 actions. The Workflow tab is generated from Zoho Books's own manifest and carries its real ids, so it is copy-pasteable; the Code and CLI examples are the same call for any action on any app, so every app-specific value in them is a blank you fill in.
Create Contact
contact-create Create a customer or vendor. `contact_name` is required, e.g. { "contact_name": "Acme Inc", "contact_type": "customer", "email": "billing@acme.com" }.
Create Estimate
estimate-create `customer_id` is required, e.g. { "customer_id": "460000000123456", "line_items": [{ "item_id": "460000000234567", "quantity": 1 }] }.
Create Invoice
invoice-create `customer_id` and `line_items` (each needing an `item_id`) are required, e.g. { "customer_id": "460000000123456", "line_items": [{ "item_id": "460000000234567", "quantity": 2 }] }. Get customer/item ids from List Contacts / List Items.
Update Invoice
invoice-update Update an invoice's fields. To remove a line item, submit `line_items` without it.
Void Invoice
invoice-void Mark an invoice as void. Any payments/credits applied to it are unassociated and become customer credits.
Create Item
item-create `name` and `rate` are required, e.g. { "name": "Hard Drive", "rate": 120, "description": "500GB" }.
A workflow step names the app and the action, and the editor fills in the
connection when you pick one. This is the Step shape from the
workflow spec, carrying Zoho Books's real ids.
{
"manifestVersion": "2",
"name": "zohobooks-example",
"steps": [
{
"id": "contact-create",
"uses": {
"app": "io.w6w.zohobooks",
"action": "contact-create",
"connection": "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID"
},
"with": {
"fields": "<fields>"
}
}
]
}Here are some of the things you can do
-
Create Contact
performcontact-create -
Get Contact
readcontact-get -
List Contacts
readcontact-list -
Update Contact
performcontact-update -
Create Estimate
performestimate-create
+17 more actions available
Every app-specific value here is a blank you have to fill in. An
app action is reached through the connection that authenticates it, so the
address is a connection id, not the app id — and connections belong to your account,
so a public page cannot know yours. Create one for Zoho Books, then fill in
the three blanks: conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID, the action key, and the
parameters that action declares. The call itself is real — the shape is transcribed
from the studio's own snippet builder, which prints the same kind of blanks — but
nothing in it is specific to Zoho Books. The Workflow tab is where this app's
real ids are.
npm install @w6w/sdkyarn add @w6w/sdkpnpm add @w6w/sdkdeno add npm:@w6w/sdkimport { W6wClient, isActionRun } from "@w6w/sdk";
// Reads W6W_BASE_URL and W6W_TOKEN from the environment when omitted.
const client = new W6wClient();
const envelope = await client.run({
urn: "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID",
action: "contact-create",
payload: {
fields: "<value>",
// organizationId: "<value>",
},
});
if (isActionRun(envelope)) console.log(envelope.value);npm install -g @w6w/cliw6w run conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID --action contact-create --payload '{"fields":"<value>"}'Give an AI agent Zoho Books — without giving it Zoho Books's credentials. One MCP endpoint exposes every app, function and workflow the caller is entitled to, as tools it can discover and run. Access is granted per team while we onboard.
One tool call{
"name": "w6w_invoke",
"arguments": {
"ref": "app:io.w6w.zohobooks#contact-create",
"input": {
"fields": "<fields>"
}
}
}
Every tool names its target with a single ref. The
app: form above doesn't name a connection at all — the
host resolves which of the caller's Zoho Books connections to sign
with, and refuses rather than guesses when the answer is ambiguous.
What the agent gets
Credentials it can't read
The token is attached host-side, at the moment of the call. It is never a tool argument, never in the model's context, and never in a transcript — so a prompt injection has nothing to exfiltrate.
A tool surface scoped to the caller
Tools are derived per end user from what that person has actually connected and is entitled to — not one shared bot identity carrying the union of everyone's access.
A durable workflow in one call
Multi-step work runs on the workflow engine and returns a run handle the agent can poll — retries, branching and state survive the conversation that started them.
Health-aware discovery
Zoho Books's declared health checks are on the surface too, so an agent can tell "the vendor is down" from "your credential expired" before it burns a retry on either.
The MCP surface is part of the hosted platform. Zoho Books itself is MIT, and the runtime that executes it is source-available (FSL).
Health checks
Zoho Books declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.
Zoho Books platform status
Reads the "Zoho Books" component off Zoho's StatusIQ RSS feed (us.zohostatus.com/rss). Unauthenticated and unsigned.