Monoclinic zirconia is a ceramic material with vast applications in catalysis and doping it with zinc in adequate proportion enhances the dissociative adsorption of water molecules on its surfaces. Over the last years, many computational studies related to crystalline monoclinic zirconia have been performed, focusing on the calculation of properties of the bulk of the crystal, its most stable surfaces and the superficial interaction with water molecules and other chemical species relevant to catalytic processes. Within this context, plane-wave density functional theory (DFT) algorithms have shown a good compromise between computational cost and quality of results, allowing for the modelling of a great number of distinct systems. In spite of this, modelling of mixed oxides of monoclinic zirconia are scarce. In particular, the doping of monoclinic zirconia with zinc - originating the m-(Zn,Zr)O2 mixed oxide - has never been studied via DFT. In this work, we propose a methodology for the modelling of bulk m-(Zn,Zr)O2 (with an atomic fraction Zn/Zr of approximately 3.23 percent) based on a preliminary refinement of calculation parameters through the geometric optimization of the bulk of a monoclinic zirconia crystal. Preliminary results obtained with some modifications to the proposed methodology show that doping with zinc introduces little local deformation in the crystal, and that oxygen vacancy formation (inherent to the doping process) is energetically favored on oxygen sites with coordination number equal to four.