Enter your idea

the blue xero search bar is VERY restrictive.
In exhibit A I can search by email and it brings up the two profiles.
However, if I type in ANTHONY HA, it only comes up with one profile, and not the other.

The same can be said for the BUSINESS > INVOICES
It very restrictive in its word order,

OMG I thought I was going crazy, because it takes so much more time to find a contact now.
Honestly, it seems haphazard.
Whomever is the head of app development needs to speak directly with end users - not their shareholders with respect to what features work and how they are used by customers.

This is much more important than the silly changes you guys have been making. If possible it would be awesome if you could concentrate on things like this that make a difference. Cheers

On Business->Products and Services, when searching for a product code, if there's a space before or after it does not find the product.

This is quite annoying when copy pasting from other files that sometimes bring a white space.

It's an easy fix that will help a lot.

I am not sure how the search is working as expected....please see my search results and NO I don't want to have to go and Search in contacts, we never had to do that previously, when the search was in fact working as expected! Two different companies two different searches..... I thought upgrades were supposed to help with efficiency....having to search in different places, is in no way efficient and it is more time consuming.

The one searching for Stratco is searching within the same company file, yet I type in Stratco and one contact comes up, I then need to type in Stratco ( for the other Stratco to come up....how in anyones right mind do they think this search is working as intended? It is clearly NOT working, I would expect if I typed in even Strat......those TWO contacts should come up....similarly like if I type in S.....I would have thousands of results, with everything that starts with S and has S....then I type ST.....I would reduce the search further but I would still have both Stratco contacts, and any other names starting with st, or possibly with st in the name or description, then I type STR and again the search should reduce, as you are being more specific, however the two contacts would still remain within the search, and so the process of elimination goes, which in this process there is a process of randomly pick what you feel like.....there is certainly no common factor in the search....if your contact has the EXACT same name.....with extra characters after, the shorter version is displayed....I can prove this with another search, check when I search Mei, only one contact comes up, I have to type in Meizhou in order for both to come up! Why?? Mei is in BOTH contacts, so BOTH contacts should appear.

Hi Sarah, I raised a case with Xero about this issue. They claim the functionality is "working as intended".
They responded with the following:
"Looking through the screenshots and details you provided, I tested the Global Search function in your organisation, as well as in my testing file and I can see that the search results are providing unexpected results.

Looking into this further, I can see that this has been raised with our Product team, and they have confirmed that this feature has recently changed. The new interface and AI that is being used in this feature is trying to pick up the most likely transaction you are looking for, however we have found that the search results don't always look as expected.

We apologies for the inconvenience, however they are reporting that this feature is working as intended.

Understanding that feedback around this functionality is key to gain deeper insight into how customers expect the search bar to work, we can see that this has already been raised with us in our Xero Product Ideas. Xero Product Ideas is a Xero website where our customers can share and support ideas for change.

We recommend leaving your additional feedback about the search function on the Xero Product Idea link I’ve included below."

I sent them the below response this morning:

"I don't understand how the results can be "as intended". You yourself said the results are unexpected. Is the intention to show the oldest results? Why would I want to see transactions from 2016, or an invoice from 2019? I cannot imagine anyone wants this. Users want to see the latest invoice, transaction or bill, not something from 7 years ago. I cannot even see the Customer from the result - surely this is one of the most common reasons for a search? Your AI clearly is not working properly. The "Product Idea" that you are pushing me towards in from 2022, and has only 12 votes. This will never happen. How about you fix the search rather than suggesting this should be a *new* idea. Here's an idea - provide a search function that works properly."

I'm not expecting anything will come of this, but I am so annoyed at their attitude towards their customers - they really don't seem to care that they have broken something that was working fine.

Another example of the search screen not behaving in a logical way:
1. When I type in 'bar' I would expect the contacts that begin with 'bar' to show first, then contacts with 'bar' in their name.
2. Why does Barista Buddy appear before Bargain car rentals?
3. Why does a bill from MM electrical from 2015 with 'bar' in it's tracking code appear before bills from Barista Buddy from 2024? Who decided that tracking codes have higher priority in the search over the most recent bills?

I just don't get the logic and now find the search function very frustrating as it returns irrelevant and illogical results

The search function is still not behaving in a logical way - ie contact name first. As you can see in my screenshot, if I search for 'pm', the contact group that matches this search is returned first, then the contact email address, then with the letters contained in the contact name, then back to email address, and finally letters at the beginning of the contact name.
Similarly, the search is not showing the transactions in a logical way - ie most recent first. As you can see in my screenshot a transaction from 2021 is first on the list before the transaction from 2024.

When we search contacts for 'water', the first result is a contact with water in it, but the 4th contact BEGINS with 'water'. Why wouldn't the contact beginning with 'water' be the first result? Or at least in alphabetical order. Also Pittwater Engineering hasn't had any transactions since 2018 and are not the highest value, so not the highest relevance.

When I search for ATO the contact 'ATO' doesn't appear at all as a search result. It only appears in the search if I limit the search to 'contacts' only. The first result is a tracking code with ato contained in the text. This means that the search function has made some wild assumptions about relevancy, isn't reliable and can't be trusted.

When I search for Telstra the first transactions listed are for 2013 even though the client has entered a bill or bank transaction from Telstra every month from 2013 to 2024. How can Xero possibly assume that bills from 2013 are more relevant than bills from 2024?

BUG? - Search should ignore trailing spaces; searching for the invoice "54190 " yields no results but "54190" works and shows the invoice; the search function should trim/ignore trailing space characters.

For example, the search box does not find results if there is a space at the end of the search term. More often than not, if you are copying and pasting a piece of text with the search term, the device will add a space at the end and most non-technical users will not realise that the cause of no results from the query is due to a space they cannot see. e.g for invoices and products and services