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New invoicing | Send - Rich text editor format

Please change the editor in the email copy, when sending an email & creating an email template, to a rich text editor. It would be useful to be able to bold/highlight particular lines especially when invoices are late & reminders are being sent

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Toni Delli-Compagni shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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submitted  ·  AdminKelly Munro (Community Manager, Xero) responded  · 

Hi everyone, while we appreciate and initially provided a solution for the idea here within the new invoicing email modal, we wanted to return as after further testing this feature has needed to be removed.

That said, we know being able to add basic formatting to your emails is important to some of our customers and while the tool bar has been removed you can still add basic html formatting to your emails to bold, add italics or underline text within the invoice emails you send to customers.

  • Bold = <b> and </b>
  • Italics = <i> and </i>
  • Underline = <u> and </u>

We understand not all customers are familiar with these tags so I've added an example image that shows the different tags that can be added and how these will show instantly within the email preview so you can make sure you email looks as you expect.

If we make any further plans around adding a tool bar back into the email window we will be sure to keep you updated of this here.

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  • Tara Broderick commented  ·   ·  Report

    Historically, Xero's email body editor for invoices (and other communications) has been very basic, often plain text. While they've made some improvements, full HTML email templating for the body of the email is still a highly requested feature but not fully implemented for all areas.

    However, for the email message you send with invoices from the "new invoicing" experience in Xero, you can use a limited set of basic HTML tags for formatting:

    <b> and </b> for bold text.
    <i> and </i> for italic text.
    <u> and </u> for &lt;u>underlined&lt;/u> text.

    How to "preview" these in Xero when sending an invoice:

    When you're sending an invoice in Xero (using the newer invoicing experience), you'll typically have a send modal (pop-up window). In the message body field, if you type these HTML tags, Xero should render them in the preview pane as you type.

    For example, if you type:

    Hi [ContactName],

    Your invoice for [InvoiceAmountDue] is <b>now due</b>.

    Please pay by <i>[DueDate]</i>.

    Regards,
    Your Company

    You should see "now due" in bold and "[DueDate]" in italics in the preview pane within Xero before you send the email.

    Limitations and What Xero Users Wish For:

    No full HTML templating for email body: Many users wish they could design beautiful, fully branded HTML emails that go out with their invoices, similar to marketing emails. Xero doesn't currently offer this. The email body is mostly plain text with very limited HTML.
    No direct styling with style attributes: You can't usually use <span style="color:red;"> or other CSS directly in the email body for complex styling. It's limited to the basic tags mentioned above.
    No custom fields in email body: While you can use placeholders like [ContactName] and [InvoiceAmountDue], you can't insert custom fields you might have created in Xero into the email body.
    The attached PDF is the primary customisation: The main way to brand and customize your Xero invoices is through the DOCX template that becomes the PDF attachment.

  • Penny Davis commented  ·   ·  Report

    Markdown would be a great feature for invoice formatting

  • Sharon Anderson commented  ·   ·  Report

    Very basic - please make a change email templates that we can bold, underline, italic important lines within the body of our email.

  • Brian Osborne commented  ·   ·  Report

    Bring back text formatting when sending Email templates

  • Jo Anderson commented  ·   ·  Report

    I would like to be able to make text bold and underlined when sending invoices and statements.

  • Billie FitzGerald-Glen commented  ·   ·  Report

    Please add back the option to edit text formatting within the message of email communications.

    We have several email templates, however, due to there being so many different job types, sometimes we are required to note specific changes in the message body of these emails via Xero.

    We could previously italicize or bold this added note which helped differentiate between the template and job-specific note, however, this option seems to have been removed.

  • Nina Lindahl commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi Kelly

    This method will help with my requirements for now thank you but not very "user friendly" sorry.

    Cheers, Nina

  • Nina Lindahl commented  ·   ·  Report

    Bold option bar back on top of invoicing entries to enable highlighting any wording on the invoice

  • Sally Stubbs commented  ·   ·  Report

    The new invoicing used to have an option to add BOLD text in the email body and that has disappeared again - please add this back in LOVED it!

  • Gabrielle Capati commented  ·   ·  Report

    Emailing invoice, the feature of being able to have text options (bold, underline, itilicize) was removed, hoping it could be put back. Also, being able to highlight the text option would be a great addition. As well as adding placeholders for credit notes applied to the invoice.

  • Fiona Cobb commented  ·   ·  Report

    When I first signed up to Xero about 5 years ago I had to do a lot of work with templates to get the invoices to look aesthetically pleasing. It wasn't possible to adjust the covering email layout but it was OK. At some point, you have changed the covering emails so that the amount due is in large bold font at the top of the email which is not really appropriate for my business (professional services consultancy) and impacts on my relationship with customers. Can this be returned to the old format? Or made editable? Or give us the choice of which format to use? In combination with the new invoicing changes I'm now looking for another online accounting provider as Xero's service is getting worse rather than better....