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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.

If auto saving has to be in your software, could you at least make it a user or company setting so individuals have the option to turn it off if they don't want to use it. This would keep everyone happy.

Also the same for your repeating bills, this should be something we choose to turn on or off, for either our company or user settings.

You guys have lost the plot

The auto save for both adjusting draft invoicing and now the invoice number is a huge time hindrance. It has caused me no end of time lost as I have to create complex yearly drafts. If you go wrong you have to start again at a huge waste of time. The auto invoice has caused incorrect invoice number sequencing to be sent. Not happy. Please please please please allow an option to switch this off.

The new autoasave feature has significantly increased the time taken to edit invoices and made the whole invoicing process more frustrating than it needs to be. Please consider allowing this to be turned off

We need the ability to disable autosave. It uses invoice numbers when you're half way through typing and it makes editing an invoice take excessively long as it tries to auto save between edits - and when we're making 10 edits it now wastes our time whereas before we could rapidly make our changes and save thereafter. Sort it and consult finance practitioners before making changes to your tool.

Please implement this! This auto save is ridiculously laggy and slows everything down. When you have 100 plus invoices to raise it reallty is a problem. Why won't these people listen??