Enter your idea

What I don’t understand is the rationale behind including a "Save" button on the invoice screen when the autosave feature overrides its function entirely. The autosave implementation has caused widespread frustration across the Xero community, as it removes control from users and introduces unnecessary confusion. It’s hard to see how this change was approved, given its negative impact on user experience.

@Jane Skinner 100%!!! Perfectly said! I have changed internet providers, Hardware etc in the hopes of trying to make it faster. All other Xero processes work fast and amazing and so do all the other programs we use. Invoicing is the only slow painful issue. Constantly auto saving every time a key is clicked.
@Xero & Kelly. Try Processing a Bill in comparison to an invoice you will see the vast difference. I'm happy for you to jump on while I process both to show you. Although I have sent through many videos of the buffering I receive when trying to process invoices.

@Jane Skinner - Here, here! Well said indeed, Jane!
Do we need to start a new "idea" for this as we can no longer vote?

@Jane Skinner - Here, here! Well said Jane!

Hi Kelly

Please would you explain why Xero is happy to make a change that only 20 customers have voted for (https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/44960455-history-notes-auto-save-functionality-througho), but refuse to make it an option when 436 customers have voted for this?

THE OPTION TO TURN AUTOSAVE OFF IS IMPERATIVE. This is not just something that Xero have changed that customers will have to get used to. Autosave is a nightmare for most customers raising invoices & ideally needs to be removed. However, as a few customers had requested it, then making it optional is the best solution for everyone.
Xero needs to have the decency to respect the hundreds of customers for whom this is causing major issues. Maybe Xero needs to recruit coders from the likes of Microsoft, who know how to make Autosave an on/off toggle switch.

Sadly, whenever you respond to us customers, you come across as condescending & ultimately "like it or lump it". I'm sure you don't intend to come across in this way, but it doesn't help when we are all so frustrated with the appalling Xero failures & extra workload caused.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE GET THE AUTOSAVE CHANGED TO OPTIONAL.

@mike Johnston - I couldn't agree more. This feels like the devs have taken over the asylum and can't go back now because they've coded themselves into a blind alley.

Xero turned off voting for this now how rude of them as they know this is hated by the majority. Post on Trust pilot or where ever else you can so anyone looking for an accounting package sees all this. The suggestion to not include the contact before completing the invoice so it doesn't save with every entry is bull and it's not always convenient to do that anyway.
The same goes for when resending a copy of an invoice - you have to unselect "sent" before you do that so instead of getting "Edited" in the history it will show the email address you re-sent the invoice to. That is bull as well.

They have totally destroyed what worked when they brought in new invoicing and should have been able to bring everything from classic over. Their IT development team sound more like DOGE employees who went in and did things without understanding how things actually work.

@Mike Johnson - Here, here.... their recent marketing strategy appears to be the solution, give new customers 3-6 months @ 90% off that way they don't know that it used to be better and by the time their pricing goes up they are too deep into it to change anytime soon. So it doesn't matter if they lose "old" customers that complain all the time.

I'm speculating here (as there has been no transparency) - this is what's happened and what we're not being told. First off, and what's pretty clear, is Xero product team has screwed this up majorly.

Auto-save aside, it seems to have taken their product team 3 years to build new invoicing (were there 3 or 4 failed cut-overs? How many "new features" were added to new invoicing which were available back in 2011?). Considering it took original Dury-led team 5 years to take the whole product to market, 3 to re-write just invoicing...

Part of this stuff-up (I am again speculating) may have been Xero product owners/developers having the idea Auto-save would be good, assumed everyone would like it, and didn't check widely with users. They probably got so excited in their echo-chamber they never considered making it optional, like MSExcel/Word and other products we use daily.

As “everyone would want it”, the biggest mistake of all - Autosave (speculating again) is buried deep into the very foundation of the Invoicing code (which is why it saves every key-stroke with no undo).

It cannot be fixed or even modified, without building the code from the ground up again - which took 3 years to do last time.

I am guessing that, behind the scenes, Xero Product Team are really thinking not that they don't want to fix this, but they can't afford to because it would take a rebuild from bottom up, some careers ending, and cost millions. Do the Board and Exec Team even know?

They’re hoping it all settles down, and we move on - either figuratively or literally. And possibly, if this is all true, they don't have any option.

That’s what I think. I might be incorrect, but don’t see (or hear) any other explanation for why this fix has been rejected.

This is - yet again, and unsurprisingly - so disappointing. I mean, great that you take some used feedback on board and implement changes. But, why is it that you can't also see that there's a group of users who don't want this 'feature'?
Provide an option to switch it off, like Microsoft does! Provide an option to undo, like ... everybody else does.

Autosave is slowing things down - I have to slow my tabbing (or flipping clicking) for it to keep up. Which is bonkers.

I see comments, including in this thread, that Xero is changing stuff to appeal to the small time users, which I find odd. I mean, that's how they started, right? I can't speak for anyone else, but I am a single-person, solopreneur TINY business that does very little invoicing. I can assure you the changes don't appeal to me at all. They drive me batshit crazy. When I first started with Xero I could just do it all intuitively, and without any coaching or experience. It just worked. I use a range of tech in my - just me, doing all the things - business, and am not unable to figure things out and pick things up as I go. I actively loathe Xero and the recent changes they have implemented, and dread what else is coming our way. Very sad.

Hi All,

I think it will be useful for you to look at these two ideas and leave your comments:

https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/47750858-bills-add-an-autosave-function

https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/48698486-new-invoicing-autosave-in-edit-mode

If these two ideas go to production, the use of Xero will be unbearable.

Re this comment: For the time being, as autosave kicks in once you add a contact to your invoice, if you’d really like to prevent your invoice from saving as you're entering data you could avoid adding the Contact until you're ready for Save to kick in.

This is patronising nonsense.

Of course we would really, really, pretty pleasey like to prevent our invoices from autosaving (unless we are just making this up to give ourselves high blood pressure?!!!)

As we have already stated many, many times, we bring info from the customer contact, so it's not reasonable to not add them at the end of the start of a new invoice. Also this makes the workflow more ridiculous than it is already.

Most of us work systematically from top to bottom, left to right. So your suggestion means more navigating up and down and around the houses.

Shame on you for suggesting this. Just shows another lack of understanding how finance professionals work. PITIFUL, Xero!!!

Thanks for confirming that Xero don't give a s..t about their loyal users. I suspect that the people who initially asked for autosave are doing an occasional invoice on a mobile device, unlike most of us here who work with large volumes of invoicing.
I noticed that the feedback comments are now not being emailed to people in this group, I wonder why!
New invoicing with autosave is horrible dysfunctional software and sad to think it replaced classic invoicing which worked really well.
I am also actively steering clients away from Xero - hopefully enough people will go elsewhere and eventually Xero will go broke or lift their game.

Few months ago, I did find an original idea about some suggestion of how not to lose un-saved invoice. It did not have autosave in its title. I can’t find it right now and do not want to spend my time searching for it.

Kelly, I said about it before (somewhere below in this thread). Your idea of autosave is overkill! We do not need it. We need just a reminder when we click the cross closing the tab of a browser or closing the browser altogether. Every reputable software has those reminders.

We do not care about developers’ ego or how brilliant their coding was to create the autosave function that saves every click on the keyboard.

To your surprise we, users, can decide themselves whether we need to save recently made changes to the record (invoice, bill, journal) or not.

We just need a reminder!

Accounts @ EFX - completely agree - would love to hear what system you are moving over to, as I may have to bring my clients over as well. Sadly, I detest MYOB even more than this hideous auto save & the new added columns that turn up in the invoicing screen, even though I keep turning them off. I have managed to avoid Quickbooks for my 30+ year career, but I have 1 client moving over to QB come 01/07/25, so that may be where I take my other clients.

Who even complained about losing an unsaved invoice ?
And how do you think that introducing an autosave that cannot be turned off, doesn't hold full details of all the changes and has no way to revert back to a previous save point solves anything?

It's just slower for everyone, and if you misclick and delete the wrong line, the autosave overwrites all previous saves.

It's good for nothing really...

More condescending BS from Kelly Munro. Not helpful. Not listening. Accounts @ EFX - Your comments are spot on.

I'd suggest that Xero go back to those customers whose feedback they relied on who "could" lose data to see if a) their issues have been satisfactorily resolved by the autosave, or b) their problems with the autosave are worse than those from the occasional lost or uncompleted invoice.

An afterthought: I don't recall seeing any community/product requests with large upvotes to bring in an autosave feature?

We have been a Xero subscriber for over 17 years, and not just recommended Xero, but actively helped dozens of businesses get setup with it, including custom integrations which effectively ingrain Xero into their business. We are beyond APPALED by Xero's 'new invoicing', and the deeper issues that it represents in having seemingly no clue about how the product is used, no clue about the impact of it's failings on customers' businesses, and no respect whatsoever for the trust that has been placed in Xero by so many customers.

'New invoicing' has been a slow motion trainwreck in everything from design, technical implementation, management and communications. Yet Xero show disdain for legitimate customer feedback.

Unfortunately for customers, the reality is that there is a high degree of 'product lock in' i.e., it can be difficult and time consuming to move to a different provider. Xero know this and are exploiting the trust that has been placed in it. They know that the product has to pretty bad, or the price increases pretty large, before customers will change. As a result, we see headlines such as "Xero flexes pricing power as profits soar 76%". Enough said.

So its clear the path that Xero are taking, and it's only going to be worse for customers. Doubling-down on a shockingly poor Autosave 'feature' is just another symptom of how wayward Xero are. This approach would never have got Xero to the scale it is today.

For these reasons we now actively dissuade businesses from choosing Xero, and are ourselves underway with a 12 month process to change systems. That comes at significant cost and hassle, which we would prefer to do without, but as another commenter so aptly put, 'Xero has lost the plot'.

Why isn't the legal aspect of this being considered? In the UK, invoice numbers should be consecutive. It is very easy to waste invoice numbers with the Autosave feature. I appreciate some people think they lose work by not having autosave but it should be an option, not a forced "feature" that is not useful. Why make everyone pay for those that can't use a save button?? We raise invoices as draft as appointments are made. As numerous appointments are made in a day and invoices must be issued immediately, this saves a lot of time to pre-populate draft invoices. This requires contact details to be added. If those appointments are canceled or changed, the invoice isn't needed. A draft should be a draft not a fixed invoice number - otherwise why call it a draft?

Who does Xero consult with when making decisions? The cost of the software is increasing every few months but the functionality is getting worse.