Getting started

Sloose is a web app at app.sloose.com. Nothing needs installing to use it; the Sloose tab inside Zoho CRM is optional and comes last.

1. Sign up. On the sign-in page, enter your email and press Email me a sign-in link — or, under it, Sign in with Zoho or Use a passkey. The first sign-in creates your account: there is no separate sign-up form, and nothing to fill in after the link. The same email carries a six-digit code, which you can type on the page you asked from instead — handy when the email is on your phone. The link and the code each work once, for fifteen minutes, and a newer email replaces the code. The link opens a page with a button, because mail scanners follow links on your behalf. A link that has run out or been used says so, and the page’s button then sends a new one.
2. Join or create your organisation. Signed in and in no organisation yet, you land on a page that leads with what is waiting for your address: an invitation from an administrator, with Join — or the invitation’s email, opened signed in as that address, and Accept the invitation — then any request to join you made from a CRM tab. After those, or when nothing is waiting, you make an organisation of your own: the person who creates one is its owner, and a trial starts with it. You can be in several.
3. Connect the CRM. Until the organisation has one, Home leads with Connect your Zoho CRM. It opens Add a connection, where you pick Zoho CRM, and then a page saying what happens next before Continue to Zoho: Zoho asks you to allow Sloose and to choose one of your Zoho organisations — production, or a sandbox or developer account where you have one. The connection is named after the organisation you chose; an administrator can rename it on its Overview, under Connections in the app bar, which is also where more are added (+ Add a connection), as is + New connection on an import’s Target. If Zoho’s answer does not say which organisation you chose, you are asked before anything is connected. The CRM’s modules and fields are read on the way through, so the organisation arrives discovered — and if that read fails, the connection still stands and its Overview offers to read again. Only an administrator can connect, and an import writes through the connection it names, as the person who made that connection. An organisation can hold several connections — a sandbox beside production, or each client’s CRM — as many as its plan allows, and a connection whose grant Zoho stops honouring has a Reconnect of its own. An organisation and a CRM are different things: the same CRM can be connected by other organisations too, each with its own connection — if colleagues already use Sloose with this CRM and you want to work with them, ask their administrator for an invitation rather than connecting it to an organisation of your own.
4. Choose the modules Sloose imports into. A new connection comes back from Zoho on that choice: every module of the CRM that an import could write, from A to Z — Zoho’s own read-only modules are left out — with the field a record of each matches on. Tick the ones imports may write to and save, which takes you back to where you began — Home, which says the CRM is connected, or the import you were setting up, which says so too and offers Write this import there. Choose later goes back without choosing: until an administrator chooses, an import’s Target offers every module of the connection that Zoho lets Sloose write, and says they have not been chosen yet. Choose modules on the connection’s Overview opens the same choice at any time. Each module has a page of its own, with what it is called, what a record matches on and the fields inside it, where you can exclude one from AI, hide it from mapping, or mark it as filled by a formula — or annotate fields from your configuration repository instead, so auto-mapping knows what they mean.
5. Run your first import: Home is your organisation’s Imports, and Start an import there begins one. A dry run first, every time.

Everyone else in your organisation joins by invitation: a role is the invitation’s until an administrator changes it on People.

Security. Your account, from your avatar, is yours in every organisation. Its Sign-in & security holds an authenticator app and passkeys, both optional for customers, and every browser you are signed in on: any other one can be signed out from there — or all the others at once, with Sign out everywhere else. Apps with access lists the apps you have allowed to act as you, in every organisation, and revokes them. Profile holds your name, your organisations, and deleting the account — everywhere, at once — once you are no organisation’s only owner. The files you import are stored by Sloose — with your corrections — in Cloudflare’s Oceania region until your plan’s history window has passed since the import was last changed or run, and for up to 30 days longer after a change of plan, so an import can be picked up again by you or a colleague. They are deleted after that, or when the import is deleted; closing the organisation deletes them with the rest of its data, within 30 days. Your CRM records are not stored: each record’s write and, when you match on a field, the value looked up for it (in a dry run too) pass through Sloose’s API in transit to and from Zoho through the organisation’s connection, and the matching records come back the same way. What each run did with them is kept with the run’s history — each record’s outcome, its ID in your CRM, the CRM’s reason when it refused one, and the values it was matched and linked by; for a dry run, whether each row would have created or updated a record, and none of the values it would have written; and for a retry, a copy of what the runs before it made — and deleted with it. If you use AI features, only what your organisation’s AI data setting allows is sent to the model: samples of your columns, and to translate values into a lookup field, the names of the CRM records it can link to. The values of fields you exclude from AI are not sent in any form, not even as their shape, and those fields are never translated by the AI. Your data and the model has the detail.

Inside Zoho CRM. The same import can open as a tab in your CRM; see the Sloose tab. It asks which organisation its CRM belongs to and works in that one.