Customer Statements - Transaction History Option
Please can Xero consider adding a Customer Statement option that shows payments as totals (not splits per invoice allocation) as found on the bank statement.
Many businesses have customer accounts that are paid towards or caught up regularly in round bulk amounts that do not neatly match individual invoices.
In these cases customers getting statements showing their payments as splits cannot easily or intuitively see the amounts that they paid on specific dates.
In dealing with queries ourselves we find that many customers find the Activity Statement format frustrating or confusing, especially when we have to capture part of a payment as an 'overpayment' in order to allocate the credit to invoices that will be imported later.
A History format example should show as follows:
2022-10-01 Invoice X 1000
2022-10-02 Payment (3000)
2022-10-05 Invoice Y 1075
2022-10-06 Invoice Y 2050
Balance Due for account: 1125
Being able to select between Activity, outstanding and 'History' Statement types would be ideal, allow admin personnel to deal with queries regarding payments and reduce confusion for an average customer viewing their account activity.
Jessica Salmon
shared this idea
Hi Jessica, it'd take some customisation of the Statement advanced docx. template but it is possible to remove fields from showing that may cause confusion or are unnecessary for your customers.
You could look at removing the 'PaidAmount' field if this is not required and just keep the 'Balance' and 'Amount' fields.
There's a discussion over in Xero Central where there are others in community who often help with making changes ti advanced templates and maybe of help here.
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Scotty Jenkin
commented
I also have this issue for a client who charges an admin fee on the account each month and so when they reconcile and choose the admin fees the payment received is split out into many lines unless we reconcile the payment as an overpayment and then allocate the overpayment against the invoices we want to (normally the small admin fee invoices and any late fees chanrged) with the remaining amount off the main invoices. Screenshot attached showing two examples. The top three payments were reconciled as overpayments but applied to many invoices and the payment recived on 6 Mar 24 was for $100.00 and not done as an overpayment but reconciled via Find and Match which has split the payment across three invoices where we want only one payment on the statement to be shown.
Based on my client who receives between 60-120 payments on a daily basis to do the overpayment way on each of these is very time consuming and we need a better way to show just the one payment amount on the invoice.
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Jessica Salmon
commented
Thanks Kelly, I am aware of the ability to remove fields and we have rearranged and removed fields to try and simplify the statement format, however the key issue raised in my query is the splitting of the customer's payments on their statement according to Xero's allocation.
We have long term, monthly paying, customers who do not pay the exact value of their monthly invoice (which varies every month).
They often pay large round amounts to keep in credit or to catch up if they are behind on payment.
Our customer doesn't care if we allocate their R10000 payment to 3 specific invoices, nor does it make sense to many to have to get a calculator out just to check if R3589 + R1976 + a R4435 overpayment = to their R10000 payment that they can see on their bank statement.
It's tedious for the customer to reconcile every statement received every month just for them to check that all their payments are showing correctly on their account.
Hopefully this clarifies the purpose of this suggestion.As far as I'm aware this relates to the information Xero populates the fields with in the docx (e.g. 3 statement lines as in the above example vs 1 line showing the R10000), thus editing the fields doesn't seem as though it would solve our problem.
