In every business it is very important to keep track of the updates so that you don't miss out any vital information. Say for example, in sales it's crucial to track the "deal stage" or "lead status" to get an idea of the entire progress or traversal of a deal or lead. In Zoho CRM, you can track the history of such picklist values each time it gets updated. In addition to this, you can also see the changes in the related fields and its values with respect to a record's transition to different stages.

Lets take a few examples to understand this further. 

Scenario 1. Matt is a sales manager and wants to find out the major stagnation in the lead conversion process in his company. He uses picklist history tracking in "lead status" to find out the duration of a lead at a particular stage. The history tracking showed that the lead was moved from the "not contacted" stage to "contacted" after 15 days. It was easier to track this update since every transition of "lead status" was recorded. 

Scenario 2. Matt wants to keep track of the amount at different stages of the quote. To make this possible, he enables history tracking in "Quote stages" and chooses "Amount" as the related field of the particular record. As such, he was able to view the varying amount at different stages. 

Availability

 Enable picklist history tracking

In Zoho CRM, you can enable the picklist history tracking for any one picklist field per module. The history tracking for the mentioned field will be enabled across all the layouts. 

To enable history tracking

1. Log in to your Zoho CRM account.
2. Go to Setup > Customization > Modules and Fields.
   Module refers to the Leads, Accounts, Contacts, etc. tabs.
3. Click the desired module and select a Layout.
4. In the Layout editor, go to the required picklist field, click the Settings icon and select Edit Properties.
   
5. In the Pick List Properties page, select the Enable history tracking for picklist values checkbox.
   
6. In the Picklist History Tracking page, select other Fields you want to view.
   
7. Click Done.

 View history tracking

You can view the tracking history of a record as well as the other selected fields right under the record's related list.

You can also select the fields to be shown in the picklist history related list and unselect the unwanted fields.

Points to Remember

• You can select up to 10 new fields to display in the Picklist History related list along with the 4 default fields namely picklist values, duration, modified time and modified by.
• Zoho CRM provides smart filter options with which you can filter the records based on the duration.
• History tracking for picklist values option is not supported in the Activities module.
• If the tracking option for a picklist field is disabled or if the picklist field with the tracking option enabled is deleted, then all the tracked data will be lost permanently.
• Tracking will not be enabled for the picklist field created in other modules from Leads, Quotes and Sales Order using "Also create for" option.
• In deals module, existing tracking will be followed. You cannot modify or choose any specific field in deals module.