Hi everyone
To follow on from Kelly’s last update, the Product team have made a lot of headway in the 'building on beautiful' work which has prepared the platform to more easily build features solving customer problems, like the ones identified in this thread.
I’m pleased to share that we’re in the early stages of developing a solution that combines increasing the number of statement lines being returned to the page and a search and filter across all of your statement lines.
The product team has a working concept and are looking to validate this with some customers before working out the final details. If you’re interested in participating, please register your interest here. Given the popularity of this idea we expect spaces to fill up fast. Update: we have since closed the form as we have enough interest. We also want to make sure we test our concept with a wide range of customers so you might not be selected for testing depending on the level of interest we receive.
As we know this is an eagerly anticipated idea, we’ll be sure to return here and share the progress.
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Donna Harrowell commented
We waste so much time doing a search in the Statement tab to see if the transaction has arrived and then having to go back and scroll through to find it in the reconcile tab.
This would save considerable time in our processing. -
Nick Smith commented
For those of us matching statement lines to bills for clients, particularly with lots of transactions and/or over a period of time, this would be a significant time saver.
I can say that FreeAgent has had this feature for quite some time, although their bill matching process is not as slick as Xero.
While we are on the subject, being able to match to credit notes would be useful too, whilst on the reconciliation screen.
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Robin Brinkler commented
In the past I wrote a Chrome extension which performed basic UI tasks in Xero, such as unticking the "Show GBP Transactions Only" option during reconciliation, where Xero allows you to search for a transaction to match against. Now that AI is able to assist users with writing code, I see an opportunity for Xero to provide the tools to allow users to write their own Xero extensions.
How I see this working:
Xero Smart Scripts
Users are able to enter their own scripts, after accepting responsibility for any changes this might make to their financial records in Xero. Provide an option for a backup / history / time machine backup of your Xero records and if necessary charge extra for the time machine option. This would prevent such user scripts from causing irreperable damage to financial records with no recourse which might happen without this option.
Xero provides the ability for users to share scripts, once they are vetted by the Xero team, so that other users can make use of them too. If a feature gets a lot of traction and adoption, Xero can consider adding this as a permanent or optional feature in Xero. It would allow the community to contribute to improving Xero in real time. This way the users that need new features can help make the situation better for themselves and others, rather than considering alternatives or suffering through any problems that could be easily remedied in short order by the community.
Xero allows users to process some data on the client side (user browser side) for the duration of the browser session in order to take pressure off the Xero servers, as it was previously suggested by Xero staff that searching / filtering transactions is computationally expensive for Xero. If a transaction search is beyond the scope of the default download (say 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, or some other transaction limit) then a download can be requested, which will be run when the servers are able to handle the request, much like PayPal's transaction history downloads where they will email the user once the data is ready to download.
Using machine learning, a chatbot could help users write code, with the chatbot's knowledge of the Xero UI and existing features, it could either help the user write code and test it on sample data (or a copy of real data from the user's accounts in Xero). With the time machine feature, there is less risk of permanent error here. The chatbot could ask the user what they want to achieve, and if this has already been done by another user from the community, it could suggest an existing Xero Smart Script to try out.
The code required to interact with a UI is often quite simple, filtering options might be more difficult, but if Xero had an API which was only accessible from within Xero in a logged in session, I think quite a lot of problems users bring up could be solved by the community.
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Ashley Salemon commented
Need the ability to be able to filter transactions by credit card number, we have multiple company credit cards & clicking through each page to find each persons transactions is time consuming, if there was a filter, this would be much easier.
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Jessica Williams commented
When reconciling a bank account being able to 'Jump to' a date rather than a page. Searching through 20+ pages to find a specific date is cumbersome.
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Ben Solomonides commented
Can we have the ability to filter the date for different transactions when reconciling bank statements and invoices on Xero. This would make it much easier to find specific statement lines and would be a lot easier than going through all the pages to find the statement line which we need.
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BBB Administration commented
In the reconcile screen (bank feed), is there a way to develop a filter so rather than flicking through in date order page to page, being able to filter through unallocated transactions with a search, date range or other filter?
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Rob Eastwood commented
THIS IS SO NEEDED!
You absolutely need to be able to reconcile all of the transactions for a particular supplier.
Paging through hundreds of transactions to try and find them all is incredibly inefficient.Please get this feature out ASAP.
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Melanie Currie commented
The Reconcile screen on the bank where you are matching to expenses and sales, is super inefficient. It needs filters like a custom date range, sort options, longer list in a page, and importantly a Key Word filter. I currently have a client with over 1000 transactions to sift through, I would like to be able to filter on the name or description to have similar transactions together.
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Lindsay Steer commented
Need the ability to search and filter transactions on the bank reconciliation page. Search or filter by date, supplier or amount etc. This would stop the need to search through 50 pages of bank transactions to find the right date range or transactions you are looking for. You could also pay off all bills for a supplier without searching all the way through the bank reconciliation pages to find the payment transactions. QBO allows this and it's really useful.
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Ioannis Kioupouroglou commented
Finally! Thanks for the update, what a nightmare trying to reconcile transactions when you have all the data for a particular supplier and you have to manually navigate through many pages in order to do so!.
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Ioannis Kioupouroglou commented
We need the ability to search for a specific customer/supplier i.e. FEDEX so we can see all their unreconciled transaction in a screen and match them with the relative invoices. Kashflow has that and makes life so much easier. I am surprised that is not a feature in Xero.
Just a search bar that filters supplier/customer based on search term
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Faye Penfold commented
I want to say as well please that sortation or some sort of filtering option on the reconcilation page would be an absolute solid improvement please. It's annoying knowing that you'd just like to sort or select statment lines from one source all together, or that you want to search for particular entries and hone in one just the one or few that you are looking to find and reconcile. At the moment there is a lot of scrolling through pages to find what you are looking for.
We just need the 'Search' button from 'Bank Statements' and 'Account Transactions' copied into the 'Reconcile' tab.
Kind regards, Duncan.
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Kevin Kevin commented
This will be very helpful
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Ronan Browne commented
In reply to Kelly Monroe's message from March 07 2023,
Firstly, at the start of your second main paragraph, you say, "Being open, the platform in..." What do you mean by "Being open"? Is XERO open-source? If so, let's get going and fix all the lazy basics! Where is the link to the source code?
Secondly, you say there is no direct work planned on sorting and filtering of bank statement lines. That's one thing but I don't think it is what the OP requested. What is wanted is a way of sorting the lines in the reconciliation page. As an example, I had to use my credit card recently, instead of my dongle, for tolls; instead of a monthly transaction, I had tens of tolls every week. I now have to wade through each single toll rather than having them all gathered together, run my eye quickly down them and reconcile them all in one or two mouse clicks. This would change a few hours of extra work into 30 seconds. Isn't that why we bought the computer and your software in the first place? Bob Cratchet would do a quicker job with his mittened hands in his pockets!
As someone else said, let's Build the Basics before lashing out impotent buzzwords.
Now, we are open source – YAY! Let's get fixing this thing!
(Why do I think that wishing and reality are the same thing...) -
Guy Butters commented
The reply states that there is no "work planned for sort and filtering of bank statement lines right now" but it is possible to search bank statements already. The request is for a similar feature on the bank RECONCILIATION page. The argument that there are too many lines of information to search/sort cannot hold up if such a feature is already being used on the bank statement view, as there are the same number of transactions on each.
All we are asking for, is the same function as is already applied to bank statements and account transactions views, so that we might be able to, for example, reconcile several payments to the same supplier without having to scroll through the full bank reconciliation listing and hoping to spot them.
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Becky Muthler commented
Right now, Xero first tries to suggest a matching existing transaction by comparing the amount, then contact name, reference and due date. If no transaction exists to match to the statement line, Xero looks to see if any bank rules apply.
However, what is the point of creating a bank rule then? Wouldn't you prefer Xero pull your created bank rules first?
We've been fighting with Xero to implement this change, but they're refusing because their system is 'working as designed' even though their design makes no sense.
Here is a current example as to why their system doesn't work:
I have a transaction currently in my system that needs reconciled. However, because Xero pulls a match of amounts first, it wants to match my current transaction to an invoice. However, this invoice has ALREADY BEEN PAID. Why in the world is Xero even considering paid invoices simply because the amounts match?! You can see in the pictures that Xero is trying to match the invoice, but shouldn't be because a bank rule is already in place for these transactions.
Please up-vote so they will make these changes!
They need to change their order of operations to matching BANK RULES FIRST!
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Charlene Croukamp commented
This will be very helpful
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Prizm Vinyl Corporation commented
Search by date or amount right from the reconcile screen rather than having to go to the bank statements tab.
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sammy cooper commented
just one simple search bar resolves a long time searching