Batch Payments: Reference from the Bill instead of Contacts
When generating a batch payment for multiple bills, the reference column of the batch payment is driven from the reference field within the supplier contact.
When a batch payment is made the reference is automatically set from contacts rather than the reference on the invoice. This means that in the reference column of the batch payment the invoice reference is required to manually added, doing this also updates the contact which means this process has to be completed every month otherwise you end up exporting payments with the previous months invoice reference as the payment reference.
The simplest fix is just make the reference for the payment driven from the reference on the invoice, as this is the information the supplier wants to see when the payment hits their bank statement.
AdminXero Team
(Admin, Xero)
shared this idea
Hi everyone, rounding back we appreciate there hasn't been much explanation before now on why this idea is not planned.
Coming across from our previous forums this has been reviewed by many of our team in product. To start, and explain logic behind the scenes - Xero allows references to be pulled from either:
- what's been entered as a reference for the contact, or
- the bill reference
Batch payments is designed to cater for businesses that require the same reference for every invoice via the reference entered in the Contact record.
👉For example utility companies needing an account number entered as a bill reference; so that the utility company knows who paid them.
If you need to have all the payee references be pulled from the bill instead of the contact record then you can remove the reference from the contact field when processing your batch. Moving forward all of the bills selected for the batch payment will have their reference pulled into payee details.
While we’ll continue to enhance the flows and visuals through the batch experience, we don’t have any intentions of changing the way in which the reference’s here behave at this time. Thanks
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Baden Turley
commented
I would like this please
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Theresa Walker
commented
This would be very helpful! Seems such a waste to have the invoice reference populated in the left hand side of the batch payment screen but not to be able to even copy that data across to the reference field on the right hand side, which is what comes up in the bank account!
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Kathy McConnon
commented
This would be huge, as at the moment you can copy the reference line and paste so the supplier receives the correct invoice number when creating the batch, however you can only do this line by line - which when you have over 200 plus invoices to pay at once is very time consuming!
I thought xero was supposed to help save us time!
Very disappointing to see it is not planned :-( -
Hana Le
commented
I do batch payment weekly for about 50+ bills and I always have to manually enter the reference section because Xero only capture the reference from the previous payment to a particular suppliers.
Can Xero populate the reference with the invoice number automatically?
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Kerry Pattinson
commented
Why hasn't this been FIXED yet Xero??????????
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Rhonda Messercola
commented
Just wondering why this one says 'Not Planned'.
I am about to start using batch payments and assumed would be a big time saver. It sounds like a nightmare. As well as the above comments it would also mean the remittance advice does not show the invoice numbers, unless you change each one manually? -
Rebekah Green
commented
This is critical and would save a LOT of manual copy and paste time from the Ref to the Reference column. At the moment, a batch payment of 200 lines takes me 30mins+ to manually copy and paste the invoice number into the reference field. Incredibly frustrating and time consuming for something that should be automated to pull through from the invoice reference field.