In the eight years since Zoho first held its annual Zoholics conference for Canadian customers and partners, its attendance has gone from about 100 to more than 850.
So it’s fitting that this year’s Zoholics was the scene for several Canada-specific updates and new features, adding several new offerings for Canadian customers as it continues to flesh out its value proposition as what it calls “the operating system for business.”
At this year’s conference, the company announced Canadian version of its Payroll and POS offerings, as well as the launch of Zoho Solo, it’s solopreneur-focused stack of tools.
Probably the biggest development is that the Zoho Payroll offering is now available and ready for Canadian customers. Promising “all the bells and whistles across all ten province and three territories,” Chandrashekar LSP, managing director of Zoho Canada, called it “a product that will touch every individual, in every business, in every industry, in every province.”
LSP called Payroll something Canadian customers “have been asking for for a long time.”
For those selling goods and services, updating Zoho POS to support Canadian businesses promises more than the ability to handle payments at the storefront, but promises integration with Zoho’s Finance platform, website building, expenses, billing, and accounting.
The launch of Solo plays into Zoho’s traditional strength in the small end of businesses, offering a phone-first solution that’s tailored to solopreneurs, and includes the foundations of Zoho’s CRM, accounting, notebooking, mail, and calendars, in an easier-to-use package. LSP said it’s creating a new category.
“Today, there are tools. There are a lot of silo solutions, but not solo solutions,” he said.
And while it’s built with the sole proprietor in mind, it uses the same foundation as the company’s Zoho One flagship of business applications and systems, with interfaces pared down to the simplified needs of the micro-business. LSP said the concept was to offer tools for those who may find Zoho One “overwhelming,” but who may want to grow into the suite someday.
In the past, such users would likely have opted for the free versions of Zoho’s products, including Books, Mail, and CRM, but had to stitch together the integration or manually manage different systems. With a Solo subscription, LSP said, new businesses would get an integrated suite for their needs with the ability to move up to the full experience as their business grows.
“It’s the ease of use and the peace of mind together,” he said.
All of the new offerings are available in the company’s Canadian data centre, which launched in 2023. The timing of that launch was fortuitous. Since launch, he reported, the Canadian data centre has been the go-to home for customers in regulated industries. But LSP said that since the beginning of 2025, they’ve seen “a huge surge” of customers wanting to bring their business into the Canadian data centre “just because,” as data sovereignty has become a hot-button issue in Canada and around the world.
“Today, just about every business in Canada wants to have their data in Canada,” LSP said.
That’s part of an overall trend of Canadian customers having higher expectations, LSP said, as the company’s Canadian subsidiary, created in 2021, has expanded and its contact with Canadian customers has expanded. Over the last year, LSP said the number of people working for Zoho in customer-facing roles has doubled.
And as the business has grown, so has the profile of customers.
“Small businesses have always been dear to us, but we’re also bringing in the big labels in Canada,” he said, giving the example of telecom giant Telus. He also said the public sector “has taken to Zoho” especially since the launch of the Canadian data centre.
