Enter your idea

Dear Susan,
As treasurer of a medium/small charity I have only recently moved to Xero and also find it infuriating that I canot find who has transferred money into our CAF account.
I have several times commented on this forum that Xero does not seem to have a template for a charity income & expenditure account which differs from a limited company layout. It's taken me sometime to create my own 'custom' P & L. No one has ever replied.
A forum for charities would be very ehlpful
Clive

"if one of them doesn’t do something very soon - their customers will be voting with their feet"

Aren't we already - we've certainly moved most of our payments to an alternative current account we already had.

Out of interest does anyone use a forum for finance managers in medium sized charities?

Onwards and upwards!

Sue

I’ve been in contact with CAF Bank’s Business Technology Programme Manager who said that he has approached Xero and invited them to on-board. The response from Xero was CAF Bank were on their list of future feeds to integrate with and will be looking to visit this “sometime later this year”. He mentioned that CAF Bank are very keen to be a supported bank.

So this does look to be fully in Xero's court right now.

@Rachel Salisbury, I completely agree, it's a mess and a complete downgrade. I have also reported an issue with QFX files where the end date of transactions is wrong causing Xero to show a statement date far in the future.
Regarding card transactions showing only as POS, the Merchant Name can be found on the transactions page by clicking the drop-down (see attached). But obviously this is not a convenient workaround.

I have just tried the recently introduced QFX download on CAF and it is no less trouble than a CSV. Card purchases appear as POS without any further info. When raising it with customer services the advice was to go back to using CSV - so two months after their system upgrade we are all still in a worse position than we were before. This lack of connectivity is turning a Xero/CAF combination into a headache and if one of them doesn’t do something very soon - their customers will be voting with their feet.

Thanks for the suggestion of QFX format. But this is NOT available in CAF - see sccreenshot attached. We are currently restricted to CSV, PDF, Excel

I am just about to take on a charity accounts and cannot believe that XERO do not supprt CAF bank syncing. Please XERO do consider facilitating this.

Eching Darren Taylor - With Xero supporting over 1.1 million users in the UK and CAF Bank serving over 14,000 charity customers, enabling this connection would make a meaningful difference across the charity sector. Thank you again, and I hope this gets prioritised soon.

Mary

Thank you for the update. It’s encouraging to hear that the product team understands the growing demand for a CAF Bank feed.

As a charity finance manager, I can say that the lack of integration between Xero and CAF Bank is causing a real operational burden for many non-profits. Manual CSV uploads are time-consuming and prone to error, especially for small charities with limited administrative capacity.

CAF Bank has indicated they are open to integration but are waiting for Xero to approach them. If both sides are willing, I’d strongly encourage Xero to take the first step to open a conversation; even just a scoping call could move things forward.

While it’s great to see Xero investing in AI-driven functionality, the lack of basic automation, like a working bank feed, makes many advanced tools less compelling. If we’re still manually downloading and importing statements, it undermines the very efficiency that Xero is known for.

With Xero supporting over 1.1 million users in the UK and CAF Bank serving over 14,000 charity customers, enabling this connection would make a meaningful difference across the charity sector. Thank you again, and I hope this gets prioritised soon.

Dear Kelly

Can you provide any further updates from the product team as to the possibility of instituting a bank feed from CAF?

This would be of benefit to many.

Thanks

Michael

Just to let everyone who is using Xero know - CAF has reinstituted a QFX download on the transactions screen which works the same way as an OFX without needing to be amended. You need to use the download button when you're looking at your account and it will give you options of dates to download and output options. DON'T use the historic transactions tab, just the download icon on the banking screen where you can see your recent transactions.

Hope that helps a bit.

Commiserations to anyone who's had time sucked into the CAFBank systems upgrade wormhole.

Sue

Hi Everyone, I so agree with all the comments of CAF Bank!

To those people who are thinking of opening an account with CAF-

DONT we have dealt with them for years they are so difficult to deal with and everything on their system is not user friendly especially the new system.

Lloyds is excellent for charities and has a much better online system.

I spent an hour and half on the phone to CAF Bank and their comment was that Xero has to approach them, for as they don't approach software providers.

They also have the "we don't really care we support QuickBooks" attitude.

Given the disastrous change to a new system ( and the old one was pretty dreadful too) I would recommend changing banks !

We really need a bank feed from CAF ASAP and any planned timeframes.would be greatly appreciated. Please raise this as a priority for the product team.

Yes, please, can we have this as soon as possible?

Hello,

Is there any update on when this will happen?

Please can you address this as soon as possible as this would significantly help all the charities that bank with CAF and use Xero.

Hello Kelly

Thanks for your response. While it’s encouraging to hear that the product team is aware of the need for a CAF feed, the lack of any time frame is a concern, especially given how critical this functionality is for our operations and I am sure others too.

We need a clearer indication of when this issue will be prioritised and addressed. Even a provisional or indicative timeline would help us plan accordingly. Could you please escalate this request and come back with a realistic timeframe for when exploration or delivery of this feature is expected to begin?

We appreciate your efforts in keeping us updated, but at this stage, more concrete information is essential.

Hi All -

As a small charity we have just moved to Xero and wish to leave QuickBooks going forward. However our main accounts are with CAF and due to the volume of transactions manual imports are time consuming.Now that CAF have implemented external bank feeds we hope that Xero can rapidly include a feed.

Hi Clive

Just as another option you can also now use the .csv export from CAF as they have given debits a negative figure and credits a positive figure in the new export, which was not the case in the old system!
I have tried it and it works ok. You will have to re-map the fields but it will prompt you to do so when you upload the file to Xero.

Dear Mat Mellor,
I have finally signed on to the new CAF Login, (apparently I wasn't swiping right firmly enough in HID) and Firefox is giving problems.
Now I am getting the USD warning. When I open the .qfx in Notepad there is no refernce to USD. Where can I find it?

Yes please - make this happen!