Reconciliation - Allow credit notes to show and be selected on the find & match screen
Ability to show and can select credit notes on the find & match screen.
Purpose: To save time rather than having to go in and allocate the credit note against an invoice then going back to the bank reconciliation screen.
Hi community, thanks again for all the support and very honest feedback you’ve shared on this idea over the years.
We appreciate the manual steps to apply credits are time consuming, especially if you’re managing large volumes of these on a regular basis.
We'd like to share that we've now developed functionality that allows Xero to suggest relevant unpaid credit notes as matches when you’re reconciling. We’ll be releasing this feature slowly to all users over the coming weeks.
You’ll also be able to find and select Credit notes using Find & Match - Just make sure you tick "Show Received Items" (for spent statement lines) or "Show Spent Items" (for received statement lines) so the credit note appears in the list.
When you select a Credit note to Reconcile, Xero will create a cash refund against the credit note (rather than allocating the credit to a specific invoice automatically), instead of requiring you to set this up separately first.
Front footing here, we know this solution won’t yet cover all the scenarios customers have asked; for example, overpayments and prepayments, and including credit notes in bill payment batches are still out of scope for this phase - We’ll continue to monitor feedback to help inform where we take this next, so please do continue to share through Xero Product Ideas and the ideas I’ve linked above.
As this becomes available in your business, you’ll see a message within Xero highlighting the new behaviour and where to find credit notes in bank rec.
Once this is available to 100% of customers, we’ll come back to update everyone here and provide more detail to help with understanding exactly how it works, and making the best use of this feature.
Thank you again for your patience, persistence, and for sharing real examples of how this impacts you, they’ve been critical in shaping what we’re delivering here.
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Kyle Stutter
commented
Thanks for the update. This is a great improvement. However, the quality of matching is incredibly poor and seems to be based solely on the amount.
Credit notes that have no connection to a payment whatsoever (payee, reference, description do not match anything) are being suggested as matches for payments of the same amount. It's very frustrating. Please look into it.
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Andrew Syme
commented
Great News Kelly, Now to add the next request
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Alison Habebi
commented
****CAN WE HAVE AN UPDATE ON THIS??****
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Julie Richardson
commented
Any chance of an update from Xero after almost 2 years 'in development'
@Kelly-Munro ???
Last update from Xero 10/03/2024
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Ann Roberts
commented
Without the option of availability of credit notes in the outstanding accounts to allocate a payment I don't feel that this software is user friendly and as a bookkeeper in an accounts practice its too time consuming for the time allocated to the job
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Natasha Taylor
commented
The way credits are allocated is such a waste of time and too time consuming. There a many better ways to do this. We have a huge number of credits and having to to go back through the process to allocate each one takes me too long. We should have to option to select multiple credits and apply them to multiple invoices.
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Christine Ashton
commented
Great additional input on this topic, Selorm! Couldn't agree more.
And, while we're talking currency conversions, why can't we choose the currency that we want to reimburse through Expenses? Why does every expense claim have to be converted into the base currency so that when we want to reimburse it in the currency that was used for the expense I have to manually add them all up? (Probably should find the correct "idea" to record that comment but it always takes so long to find the right one).
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Selorm Klaye
commented
It is bad enough that I have to 'add a cash refund' for the credit note to appear in bank reconciliation, but I also have to manually calculate and enter an exchange rate for each of the dozens of credit notes I have to add a cash refund for. It would be much easier to enter the amount received (which I know) rather than the exchange rate (which I don't know). Hopefully what is developed allows credit notes to be matched to refunds automatically across different currencies, as is the case for bills, etc.
And generally, whenever a currency conversion is required, please ask for the amount and not the exchange rate (as Xero does when a there is a transfer between bank accounts with different currencies.
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Katrina King
commented
This is a major issue for us as well.
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Dave Smith
commented
My understanding, after a good deal of research and circular conversations with the persistently over-confident GPT, is that when my supplier issues me a refund, paid to my bank account, I must first add a cash refund to the credit note - manually - including the date, value, reference and bank account, despite the transaction already existing right on my bank feed ready to go.
I can understand why it might make sense not to immediately generate reconcilable account transactions based on credit notes (if the supplier issues credit as opposed to a refund, for example), but surely it's simple enough to allow users to request a search for credit notes to reconcile, or even to add the option to select a bank feed transaction as the basis for a cash refund to apply to a credit note.
Neither of these options for basic bookkeeping functionality seem like hard computer science problems that take years to understand and solve.
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Gill Izen
commented
Is there any update on this?? We issue credits that don't necessarily relate to any invoices so just have to post them against a random invoice which makes it very messy when looking back - it seems such a basic booking keeping requirement...
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Greg Chatfield
commented
Hopefully this will also apply to being able to include credit notes in a batch of bill payments so that these credits also do not have to be individually applied to bills before being included in a batch payment.
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Andrew Syme
commented
So working on it for 9 months already ! Surely time for the delivery ward and some maternity leave ???
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Alex Cooling
commented
The ability to allocate supplier credits while matching bank payments.
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Alison Habebi
commented
Working in a large firm of accountants, transitioning clients to Xero and training them, this is by far my biggest issue with Xero. I have been requesting this for 8+ years now and I can see the request is the most voted for....please, please, please prioritise this!
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Josh Coles
commented
Is there any further update on this. the last update provided was in March 2024.
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Valerie Hague
commented
I've spoken to the "team" in Reading via my "Partner Assist Specialist" and sent in documentation of several scenarios surrounding the functionality of credit notes and how it should work. They of course can do nothing, but have promised me a call from a "Senior". We'll wait and see.
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Nikki HOWELL
commented
Supplier Credit Notes should appear in the list of available Supplier Invoices for allocations when reconciling the bank. The current system of having to allocate a credit note to an invoice is nonsense because if the invoice to which the credit note refers has already been paid, you are allocating the credit note against the wrong thing. Please list credit notes with invoices as unpaid documents so you can simply tick them off until you reach the desired amount to balance the transaction. It would be so easy.
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Lisa MacHardie
commented
When reconciling the bank, to have the option to search and find any unpaid credit notes - without having marked them as 'paid' beforehand, or having allocated them to an outstanding bill or invoice.
At present, a credit note does not show unless it has been previously marked as 'paid' or already allocated against a bill or invoice; hence reducing the outstanding balance.
Credit notes should be treated in the same way as a bill or an invoice in this scenario. I spend a lot of time having to back to the 'awaiting payment' screen, searching a credit note, manually marking it as paid, before I can then go back into the bank reconciliation screen and match this against a payment - it feels like I am working backwards. -
Chris Rogers
commented
Oh, I see. We don't use any of them for anything more than bookkeeping, VAT and so on. Accounts/corp tax are done elsewhere. So how Freeagent handles corp tax is irrelevant to us. The rest is just debits/credits, not sure what the problem is?
We're going to have to disagree on everything else as well, but glad to hear Xero is working for you because it never has for us.
The elephant in the room is that Quickbooks, Sage, Freeagent all handle credit note matching better than Xero, pretty much every software does. Also many of these Xero feature requests just aren't a problem elsewhere...