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Xero should automatically recognise a Xero client account number in any bank transfer and allocate those funds to existing invoices in that client's account. This should either just occur automatically when a client payment matches the total on their statement, or alternatively, any payment should simply be allocated to the client's oldest invoices.

Currently, when customers pay us for invoices that we have sent them, we search for their name in the “Match” function during the bank feed reconciliation. We then select the invoice(s) that match each payment and reconcile these.

There are two major problems with this workflow:

1. We have to hope that the bank account name that feeds through from the bank is similar to the customer account name in our Xero instance. A lot of customers will add their customer account number in the reference field, but searching for this in the ‘Match’ function doesn’t work. In other words, this is just asking for errors to be made.

2. It all seems pointlessly manual. Why can’t Xero automatically bring up all the invoices for a client who has put their customer account number in the bank transfer reference field? Why do we need to search for this at all? In fact, why can’t Xero automatically bulk reconcile a client’s invoices when they pay the exact amount on their monthly statement and add their client account number into the reference field? The chance of this being misallocated is basically zero. The workflow almost exists with bank rules, but these don’t work with existing invoices as far as I can tell.