Aerista is the largest pre-owned Cirrus aircraft brokerage in the United States. Their agents operate nationwide, each carrying a book of aircraft listings, representing sellers, managing buyers, earning commission on closed sales. All of it runs on Zoho CRM. What leadership could not get from CRM was a straight answer to the questions an executive actually asks: how does this year compare to last year; where is the late-stage pipeline; and is the team keeping up with client follow-ups? Zoho Analytics become an answer.
Industry: Aircraft Brokerage & Sales
Aerista’s operational data was already in a well-tuned Zoho CRM: deals, contacts, follow-up tasks, and a custom Aircraft module. The reporting was not. Executive review ran on native CRM dashboards, ad hoc reports, and direct inspection of CRM list views.
It’s a well-known fact that Zoho CRM’s native dashboards can fell short in specific, repeatable ways (that’s why the BI applications like Zoho Analytics exist). Year-over-year comparisons were misleading: half a year of current data was being stacked against a full prior year. Monthly trends could not be paired against the same month last year in a single view. Referral activity to the manufacturer was being counted by close date, which said nothing about when referrals were actually going out. And follow-up accountability — who is keeping up, who is falling behind — was invisible, because completed tasks and open tasks were tangled together in the counts.
The result was a familiar one: leadership was spending time determining whether a number was right instead of deciding what to do about it.
The gap was not in the data: the data was impeccable. It was in the definitions. Every KPI Aerista wanted required a calculation the native CRM dashboards could not express.
For instance, a fair year-to-date comparison needs a rolling window that clips the prior year at today’s month and day, so June of this year is compared against January-through-June of last year, not against twelve months. Next, referral metrics need to run on record creation date, not closing date, because a referral sent today may not close for months. “Due” tasks need to exclude tasks that were already completed — otherwise the most active team members look the most overloaded, which is exactly backwards. And uncategorized revenue states need to consolidate into a single bucket instead of scattering across three noisy variants.
These are query-level and formula-level problems; Zoho CRM’s native reporting is not the match for them. The right tool was Zoho Analytics, which syncs CRM data on a rolling schedule and supports formula columns, SQL query tables, and layered filter logic on top of it.
We developed a complete KPI report set in Aerista’s Zoho Analytics workspace — roughly twenty reports across three functional areas — and handed the composition of the final Executive Dashboard to the client team. That last part was deliberate: Aerista wanted to own the product, rearrange it, and make cosmetic changes without opening a ticket with us. We built the reports; they built the dashboard from them; we explained how it works.
Before the first report was built, we mapped Aerista’s CRM metadata model using Zoho MCP — an MCP server connected to the CRM, with Claude gathering the module, field, and layout structure programmatically. That map drove every formula and join decision that followed, saved hours of work, and eliminated the usual guess-check-rebuild cycle of working against a customized CRM schema.
The results were delivered as a fixed-price project, in iterative review rounds: Aerista’s leadership commented on individual reports directly in Zoho Analytics and a shared Workdrive document, and each revision batch was scoped delivered as a unit.
A side note: no, Claude alone cannot deliver the results, even being connected via Zoho MCP. There's no way one can build a complex, multi-surface report only by prompting Claude.
| Business Question | Before: Native CRM Reporting | After: Zoho Analytics KPI Dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| How are we doing vs last year? | Partial current year compared against full prior year — misleading by construction. | Fair YTD Windows: prior-year data clipped at today’s month and day. Apples to apples, every day of the year. |
| Which months gained or lost ground? | No paired monthly comparison in one view. | Monthly Trend Reports: current and prior year side by side, plus a companion report distilling each month into a single percentage-change bar. |
| Are referrals flowing? | Counted by close date — months of lag between the referral going out and the metric moving. | Created-Date Basis: referrals counted when the deal record is created, matching how the referral process actually runs. |
| What is closing soon? | Pipeline mixed all stages and horizons together. | Late-Stage Pipeline Split: commission and deal counts for the next 60 days versus the rest of the year, segmented by stage and revenue bucket. |
| Is the team keeping up with clients? | Open and completed tasks tangled together; active reps looked overloaded. | Per-Owner Outreach Reports: Due vs Completed by task owner over 7-day and 30-day windows, with completed tasks correctly excluded from the Due count. |
| Can we trust a surprising number? | Manual digging in CRM list views. | Drill-Down to Records: one click on any bar opens the row-level deals or tasks behind it. |
The data was in Zoho CRM all along. What Aerista bought was not charts — it was correct definitions, encoded in formula columns and query tables, documented, and handed over with the keys. That is the difference between a dashboard that gets ignored after two weeks and one that runs the Monday meeting.
If your Zoho CRM holds the answers but your dashboards don’t show them, let us know.
