Zoho Books and Procore integration

What moves between them

Purchase orders and vendor records flow from Zoho Books into Procore. When a purchase order is created or updated in Zoho Books, ml-connector reads the order details including vendor and amount, maps the vendor to the matching Procore vendor, and creates or updates a commitment in Procore tied to the selected project and cost code. Vendor records are kept in sync across both systems so procurement staff see consistent vendor information in Procore while accounting staff maintain the authoritative vendor list in Zoho Books. Cost code and project master data are aligned in both directions to ensure every commitment lands on a valid Procore budget line.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector manages two separate OAuth flows: user-delegated tokens for Zoho Books (with proactive refresh at 55 minutes) and client-credentials tokens for Procore. The organization ID for Zoho Books is resolved once during credential setup and cached; the region-specific base URL is stored per customer so all Zoho Books calls route to the correct regional endpoint. For each Procore customer, the company ID and one or more project IDs are stored, allowing purchase orders to be mapped to the correct project and cost code. When a Zoho Books purchase order webhook arrives, ml-connector validates the organization ID, fetches the full order from Zoho Books, looks up the vendor in Procore by name match, and creates a commitment if the project and cost code are valid. Procore's 5-second webhook response window means ml-connector responds immediately to Procore webhooks and queues the work asynchronously. Rate limiting on the Zoho Books side (100 requests per minute) is managed with exponential backoff and jitter on 429 responses. Every record carries a full audit trail including the source order number and Procore commitment ID so reconciliation and replay are always possible.

A real-world example

A regional construction company runs Procore for project management across 15 active projects and uses Zoho Books for accounting and vendor management. The procurement team creates purchase orders in Zoho Books and the accounting team maintains the vendor master file there, but the project managers in Procore need to see those commitments allocated to the right project budgets and cost codes. Before the integration, the procurement coordinator manually entered purchase orders into Procore, creating a lag and risking misalignment between what accounting recorded and what project managers saw. With Zoho Books and Procore connected, purchase orders sync automatically from Zoho Books into Procore, tied to the correct project and cost code, so project managers see real-time commitment data and month-end reconciliation is straightforward.

What you can do

• •Sync purchase orders from Zoho Books into Procore as commitments, mapped to the correct project and cost code.
• •Keep vendor records synchronized between Zoho Books and Procore so procurement data is consistent across both systems.
• •Map Zoho Books vendors to Procore vendors by name and validate that cost codes exist before creating commitments.
• •Manage OAuth2 authentication for both Zoho Books user-delegated tokens and Procore client credentials, with automatic token refresh.
• •Route API calls to the correct Zoho Books regional endpoint and Procore company and project IDs based on customer configuration.

Questions

How does the integration handle Zoho Books regional URLs and organization IDs?

ml-connector stores the region and organization ID per customer during credential setup. The region determines which Zoho Books base URL to use (US, EU, India, Australia, Japan, Canada, China, or Saudi Arabia), and the organization ID is appended as a query parameter to every Zoho Books API call. This ensures all requests route to the correct customer instance without manual intervention.

What authentication flow does ml-connector use for each system?

Zoho Books uses OAuth2 with user-delegated refresh tokens; ml-connector refreshes the access token proactively every 55 minutes since tokens expire after 1 hour. Procore uses OAuth2 with client credentials via a Developer Managed Service Account, and tokens expire after 1.5 hours. Both credential sets are stored encrypted and rotated when they approach expiry.

How are purchase orders mapped between the two systems?

When a purchase order is created in Zoho Books, ml-connector fetches the order, matches the vendor by name to a Procore vendor, and creates a commitment in Procore linked to the selected project and cost code. If the vendor or cost code does not exist in Procore, the mapping fails and is logged for manual review, preventing invalid commitments from being created.