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Dear Xero & Clive Mence,
I use Xero for my charity clients, and use the tracking categories to get the Sofa Accounts.
The 1st tracking category if for reserves, and the 2nd tracking category I use for the Sofa.
I then use other software (or use an Independent Examiner) to complete the charity accounts. However, as regulations are changing, ie Charities may soon be required to submit iXbrl accounts (if they are also a company), it would be great if Xero could help with this.
Elizabeth Sanders Limited

Dear Kelly Munro (Dec 16), Georgia Clarke (Jul 28) and Kelly Middleton (Jul 4),

We all hope you have had a pleasant break for Christmas and wish you a prosperous New Year; and thank you for your nearly identical replies over 2025.

Whle you are considering helping charities, could you provide standard templates for Income and Expenditure, and Balance Sheet specifically for charitites as they differ in format from those you provide for limiited companies.

Yours faithfully
Clive Mence
Hon. Treasurer, National Honey Show

Yes please I would really want you to pursue setting up a bank feed integration with CAF Bank. I'm currently looking to move my charities accounts onto Xero and this would make the whole process more efficient.

Yes please, it would save so much time and thus have lower costs for our charity clients.

Thank you for the update and for acknowledging the growing demand for a CAF Bank feed. Many UK charities rely on CAF and Xero together, and we appreciate that Open Banking integrations depend on third-party providers. That said, we would strongly encourage Xero to continue prioritising and sponsoring CAF support within its aggregator partnerships. The absence of a live feed creates avoidable manual work and governance risk for charities, particularly those run by volunteers. A CAF feed would unlock significant value across the charity sector and materially improve accuracy, transparency, and audit readiness.

Linking Xero with CAF would help charities manage finances seamlessly, save time, reduce admin costs and increase transparency for donors. This integration positions Xero as a leader in supporting nonprofits with efficient, innovative solutions that drive real social impact.

Yes please! I use Xero regularly and have been anticipating the link between Xero and CAF bank to gain the benefit of saving time.

I have to agree with all those who have commented before me that a bank feed for CAF bank would make a big difference in saving precious time. The bank feeds have been something I have valued in a past role so it would be great to see that for CAF - I know how reactive Xero can be when there is a customer need for something so would be great to see this pushed further up the agenda for action.

Hi
As a Treasurer for a Charity, using CAF bank, our services include Food banks, Debt management services and skills improvement services to help people to help themselves. We are all about bringing hope to people who are feeling lost and do not know which way to turn. Anything that can save admin time, so that I can spend more time working with people in need, is of huge importance to me. I look forward to a time when the bank feed facility is available to CAF bank users. Thankyou.

Thanks for the update Kelly, I appreciate the reply :-).

Further to this, it would be great if you could please clarify:

- Which bank-feed / Open Banking integrator(s) Xero would use to support CAF Bank?

- Whether Xero or its integrators have formally reviewed or engaged with CAF’s Open Banking APIs yet? If not, when might one or more definitively plan to?

- Whether CAF Bank is on Xero’s bank-feed roadmap? If so, whether there is any indicative timeline or milestone for delivery you could share with us all?

Understanding whether this is a technical blocker, an integrator-readiness issue, or a prioritisation decision would help me plan appropriately.

We know as small charities we're not a lucrative customer set, but Xero offering Non Profit discounts says that our worth is appreciated by Xero! If you could proactively engage with a third party integrator to push this - perhaps as a CSR initiative? We'd be a very grateful, if not super profitable, customer group!

Thanks! Amber

This is now the 4th top idea by votes. It would be great to get an update from the Xero team on where this is up to. There is a large number of people posting and probably the same again not- an update before year end would be really appreciated for all 404 frustrated posters.

This is really essential for charities like our’s

Adding my support for a link with Xero

HI Folks

I tend to second LB’s previous comments below. We were previously with QuickBooks and suffered all sorts of errors which has not occurred with Xero.

If is frustrating that there is not an automatic feed for CAF and as many of you have mentioned - time consuming to do manual imports.

After considerable discussion with our accountants we have taken the decision to move away from CAF to another bank that already has automatic Xero feeds. Frustrating and initially time consuming but now all running smoothly.

Good luck to those that decide to remain with CAF.

There is a lot of negativity towards Xero here. How long has it taken CAF Bank to upgrade there system to meet the security needs of an online bank? And that didn't go well.

Patience folks. Xero will get there.

And if anyone is considering other options other than Xero, I would caution against ruling out Xero. Xero Accounting is too good and easy to use to warrant going anywhere else.

Yes, its a pain to export and load transactions, but if you have a system it only takes a minute. I would rather load manually that use QuickBooks!!

Does anyone else on this thread who has contributed to the repeated pleas for Xero to implement a CAF Bank feed feel like they are ******* their head against a brick wall? Because I certainly do. And I will be very happy when I no longer have to keep doing it.

What I find most frustrating isn’t even the lack of progress , it’s the lack of basic courtesy. There has been a recent flood of messages, all saying essentially the same thing: this integration is needed, it’s overdue, and it’s causing real problems. Yet there has been no meaningful acknowledgement, no update, not even a holding response.

What exactly is the problem Xero has with responding politely and transparently to its users? Even a brief “we hear you, this is where it sits, and this is why it’s not happening yet” would be better than this wall of silence. At the moment, it feels less like a product discussion and more like shouting into the void.

I am really sorry to have to share my frustration here, I thought there was an update on this today but it seems the latest update from the Xero team was still the one given in July to say that the idea had been accepted. Where are we now? That update suggests that there are various stages stated as Submitted
In review
Existing functionality
Feedback
Gaining support
Accepted
In discovery
In development
Completed
Not in pipeline

so we should expect some kind of update to say that this has now reached the "in discovery" stage, but here we are all these months on and no news at all.
When we do get to the "in discovery" stage there will still be another further stage to go - what does this mean? how can we plan? should we give up? Are there any other finance software providers out there that work in a similar way and have a more effective alliance with the needs of charities? has anyone else taken the step to switch yet? I am really keen to hear from anyone that has and if you have had a good experience? Our charity won't move from CAF and while we have many issues with them if there is not a solution to the bookkeeping that xero can provide I want to find another sensible answer. thanks to anyone that responds.

Alongside an integrated feed, is it also possible to have some choice over the format of your spread sheets that can be downloaded. Before the system change, when downloaded these appeared with beginning of the month at the top annd end of the month at the bottom I.e. 01/04/24…..30/04/25. In addition they had debit and credit columns which were helpful for preparing the accounts.

Now when you open the downloaded cvs sheet, the newest date is at the top, I.e. 30/04/25 and the oldest date at the bottom (01/04/25) and there is no debit column - just one column with both credits and debits.

I could probably live without the debit column being changed but having the transactions back to front is so annoying as every single transaction has to be reordered individually (order of all can be done in a couple of strokes but then it isn’t in the order on the statements, which makes reconciliation more complex.

Georgia
Thank you so much for responding but this update gives us nothing to go on in terms of how long we need to continue with things the way they are. If you could give us a time frame it would at least give some light at the end of this long tunnel.
If Xero has any care for the charity sector in the UK and understood the number of particularly small charities that use CAF you will know just how much of an issue this is, while it is great to hear from you, telling us that QFX improves the uploads is just not a thing.. no it doesn't!! our charity are doing two uploads each month and we also had issues with the manual uploads and errors created that were time consuming to resolve. Does Xero only care about big banks? When we first moved to Xero it was because of the notion that Xero cares about charities but I am really starting to doubt this. We need a timeframe, we need hope and we need to get this sorted.

This would streamline our processes. A definite plus.