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Feature Request: Bulk Import for Customer Payments (Receipts)

Summary: We require a native feature to bulk import customer payments (receipts) via CSV, which includes customer, invoice, and payment details, and allows for automatic allocation against existing sales invoices in Xero.

The Problem

Many small to medium businesses use industry-specific operational software (like eClinicalWorks, POS systems, or booking platforms) that handle all primary invoicing and receipt generation.

While Xero currently supports the bulk import of Sales Invoices via CSV, there is no corresponding feature for Customer Payments (Receipts). This creates a mandatory step of manual double-entry:

Sales Invoice Import: Export a CSV of new invoices from the operational system and import it into Xero (as "Draft" or "Awaiting Payment").

Payment Re-Entry: Manually find the imported invoice and manually enter the payment details for each individual receipt, including customer, date, amount, and allocation details.

For businesses with high transaction volumes (like clinics, labs, or retail), this manual payment entry is extremely time-consuming and introduces unnecessary human error.

Proposed Solution

Please add a feature, similar to the existing invoice import, to allow users to upload a dedicated Payments CSV template that supports the following essential fields:

Proposed Solution

Please add a feature, similar to the existing invoice import, to allow users to upload a dedicated Payments CSV template that supports the following essential fields:

Field Name (Example)

Requirement

Purpose

ContactName

Mandatory

Matches the existing Xero Contact.

InvoiceNumber

Mandatory

Matches the existing Xero Invoice (for allocation).

PaymentAmount

Mandatory

The amount received for the specific invoice line.

PaymentDate

Mandatory

The date the payment was received.

Bank/GLAccount

Mandatory

The account the payment was deposited into (e.g., Bank Account, Sales Clearing Account).

Reference

Optional

Any unique payment reference from the source system (e.g., transaction ID).

This bulk payment import would allow users to:

Upload a single CSV containing all daily or weekly payments.

Have Xero automatically match the PaymentAmount to the corresponding InvoiceNumber and allocate the payment, marking the Xero invoice as Paid.

The payments would then be ready for simple reconciliation against the bank feed, saving hours of manual data entry.

Adding this feature would significantly improve workflow efficiency and make Xero a much stronger solution for businesses relying on external platforms for sales and receipt generation.

This would be such a simple import requiring 4 fields:
Invoice #
Payment Amount
Payment Date
Bank Account

In a perfect world, the invoice import function could allow an "approved" field and include the payment info directly on the invoice import. Many of us use other, specialized systems (attorneys, for example) and just use Xero for accounting.

Once classic invoicing is retired then not being able to upload will leave me having to use the new version which is extra Clicks and flows less well.

BACKWARDS STEP XERO

This will really help in cutting our workload! Pls have a template that has fields similar to the ones we are doing now for individual update of payment.
Thank you and hoping this update can be roll out soon!

Great idea! Waiting for the updates!

used remove and redo on HUNDREDS of payments reconciled to large batch transactions instead of unreconciling. Xero support had no way of helping me, these payments that were deleted cant even be restored or have a file that can be exported that summarises the deleted payments. This is days of work to singularly input manually when in realty it would be a very simple import file that could attach the payments to invoices. Ridiculous really. And xero support just sends me here to write a little note into the void - hopefully xero actually takes these into consideration. Would be better if they could help me now.

yes I agree, it is import thing.

I agree. The import file needs to include:-
Sales invoice number
Date of payment
Amount paid
Bank Account received in

This is a great idea and i hope it gets implemented ASAP.

Basically there should be a way to use a csv file upload to make or create a batch deposit. selecting 50 invoices multiple times is not the best use of time.

Very good idea!