Disclosure: I work at Skyfall Labs, an official Zoho Partner, so I have a commercial interest. The facts below are from Zoho's own help pages, linked at the end; advice is labelled as advice. Originally published on skyfallhq.net.
A common complaint is that Zoho CRM record screens are crowded with fields most people never need. Zoho's layout rules let a form show sections or fields, or require fields, only when another field has a certain value. This post sets out what Zoho's pages say, including the limits that surprise people.
Page layouts versus layout rules
Zoho's page-layouts FAQ says layouts are given to profiles through Layout Permission and Layout Assignment, and that a profile can access several layouts but has only one default. The same FAQ names not being on the Enterprise Edition, or lacking the Customize Zoho CRM permission, among the reasons you may be unable to create a layout (it does not say whether higher editions qualify). Layout rules work inside a layout: Zoho's Kaizen post says a rule is built on a layout, a primary field and a condition.
Zoho's pages I read do not state which editions include layout rules, so check feature availability for your edition.
What a layout rule can do, per Zoho
- Actions are Show Fields, Show Sections, Set Mandatory Fields and Show Subforms.
- Conditions on the primary field are: is, isn't, contains, doesn't contain, starts with, ends with, is empty and is not empty.
- One condition can trigger several actions. A condition can have at most five criteria, combined with AND or OR; the primary field can be used in only one criterion, and that one can only be joined with AND.
- To create one, go to Setup, Customization, Modules, select the module, and use the Layout Rules section. Only users with the Customize Zoho CRM profile permission can access it.
- Rules apply on the create, edit and view pages.
Limits and where rules do not apply, per Zoho
- Record Owner and multi-select picklist fields cannot be the primary field.
- Layout rules cannot use Auto Number, Lookup, Multi Select Lookup, User Lookup, Formula, File Upload or Multi Line fields.
- Layout rules are not available for records created through import, web forms or the lead convert page.
- Through the API, only mandatory-field rules apply (with the apply_feature_execution key). Show Field, Section and Subform rules are not supported there; Zoho notes that records can hold values in hidden fields and that the Get Records API returns all fields in the layout.
- A field that is the primary field of one rule cannot be the primary field of another rule.
Pitfalls (practical advice)
This section is advice from experience, not vendor documentation.
- Hidden does not mean empty: per Zoho, hidden fields can still hold values, so do not treat hiding as a way to clean data.
- Because imports, web forms and lead conversion skip layout rules, records from those routes may not follow the same required-field logic as manually created ones. Check those routes after designing a rule.
- Start from the job people do on the screen, list the fields they actually need at each stage, and build the smallest set of rules that gets there.
- Test changes in a sandbox before rolling them out to every user.
