Enter your idea

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.

Utter Madness. The only other software I know that has autosave is the Google docs suite, but at least you have the ability to return to saved point, there is no such thing in Xero. All mistakes are autosaved and there is no means of returning to the correct version. - Awful Software Design!

Extremely disappointing from Xero and your unwillingness to listen to your customer base. You will lose customers over this...

Not good enough. And your workaround suggestion is pathetic - we use Zapier to create invoices (which automatically adds the contact). So we'd have to remove the contact to stop the invoice from auto saving. We shouldn't have to do that.

@kelly munro - we raise things with the support teams and they tell us there is nothing they can do or that they've not heard there is a problem before. So you take the feedback of those who want auto save and not those who don't It has added several hours to my billing routines each month and I'm only a small practice - how do I get about £1,000 of chargeable time back because of Xero's unwillingness to enable users to toggle it on or off (preferably until switched back on/off rather than the bonkers things you see sometimes where you have to do it on every document). Your idea also isn't good if you have repeat bills that are set up as reminders/placemarkers not just regular monthly amounts and they may end up being deleted - then that brings me onto the auto numbering. The numbering should only be done when the bill is approved not when it's created - I spend a lot of time changing auto sequence bill numbers to keep the actually billing sequence right. It seems most of the changes of late are to keep the devs not the user happy!

It needs to be optional - we didn't ask for this and it's an absolute pain. We end up with deleted invoices or at best asking the team if anyone needs to process and invoice to use up an invoice...what is with software people telling us what we need!

Autosave is incredibly frustrating. No user-choice... no option to make optional or turn off altogether; no undo, or way to revert to an earlier version; no straightforward workarounds.

Genuine question: Are there any other organisations who don't give their users a choice of whether they save a document or not?

Goodness I hate Xero now.
It has gone from a company and platform that I loved and recommended, to one that I cannot wait to leave and actively dissuade people from using. Kelly and the community team are likely hamstrung by corporate direction, however that doesn't negate the ham-fisted messaging and horrible tone.
Between this 'Idea' and the general community discourse on the New Invoicing implementation, it is clear that interacting with Xero is completely pointless as your vote is worth nothing.
This is the politest response I can muster.

Well that's pretty disappointing. You got the idea from your user base? I think that's BS as the amount of complaints about Auto Save says otherwise. And I find the tone of this answer condescending to say that least. Xero have decided they know best for all of us and too bad if we don't like or cant use what they've implemented. This does not mean we’d never make a change, we know that that's what this is abut your changes. Xero continually forces unwanted change and then speaks down to us and asks us to pay more for the privilege. We are looking at other options and will not recommend Xero to anyone.

Frankly Kelly this is not the way one responds to paying customers. To say you "hope" that giving more clarity will ease ambiguity is just ridiculous, absolutely insulting and totally meaningless. Stop hoping because it wont ease any opinion of this sub standard software. Who is responsible for this decision. Are you just the messenger? Who will take responsibility for this decision and are they fully aware of the implications. I THINK NOT!!!

@Kelly Munro - That's the problem though...it doesn't JUST autosave when you select a contact. It autosaves every bloody time you enter data in a cell! That delay, of even a second or two, quickly throws you off your rhythum, if you are used to doing rapid data entry, and almost guarantees mistakes (some of which can be VERY costly if they don't get picked up in time - % vs $ discount ring any bells?).

This feature needs to be an option to be turned on or off, if you aren't prepared to remove it entirely. Anything short of that is not acceptable and makes the product less useful to people like us and harder to recommend to prospective clients.