New Invoicing - Reduce number of steps and clicks
New invoicing has introduced more clicks, taps, steps at almost every level.
Please remove the added friction as it increases processing time.
The "new invoicing" messages are full of comments regarding where these pressure points have been added.
We are paid subscribers, and beta testing/seeking feedback is wonderful, but being forced onto an inferior model is.. suboptimal.
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Hi team, now in 2025 and many here will have received our recent communication leading up to the retirement of classic invoicing on 27 Feb this year.
We’re continuing to work hard on delivering more features within new invoicing that’ll help most in your workflow.
Thanks for staying engaged with us on changes that’ll help you through the idea here.
To give an update on recent deliveries that positively impact some of you that have shared on the idea here. Late last year we released improvements to the issue and due date fields so you can now use all the date entry shortcuts that were available in classic, and we made it simpler to access the date picker. We also updated the Files attachment modal so you can now drag & drop files anywhere on the page, and when you use tracked inventory you can see the number of items you have on hand to sell.
This year we’ve made updates to bring more actions into the body of the invoice, so you can now add tracking options on the fly, or set or edit the exchange rate on foreign currency invoices. And, as of this week we’ve released a whole set of new shortcuts to save clicks and help you quickly perform common actions like being able to Approve an invoice which we know is valuable to our customers! While you get used to the combinations of shortcuts our product team have added small prompts to highlight these in the product, and if you’d like to view the full list of options you can see them all on Xero Central.
We have more updates in store like changes to the Contact ‘To’ field that I mentioned in my last update and improvements to the line item grid within the body of your invoice. You can read more of what’s to come on Xero Central.
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Rae Stanton commented
You still haven't fixed the bug where when I delete an incorrect invoice number, it doesn't then update to the next sequential invoice number, it just puts the one I deleted back in. This is an absolute dealbreaker!! When will it be fixed?? We're getting too close to this becoming a real problem for me, and I presume others!
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Maria Evison commented
All of the above Too many clicks
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Caroline Ryan commented
New invoicing looks ok but today sent over an invoice-approve and email: came up new email on side-not sure really that's needed as you can preview before sending. Please see attached.
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Morgaine Trine commented
The feature where you click on the contact name from the invoice and it automatically creates a new tab is a horror show! It creates so much noise and friction in the process. I love how all the other links in Xero takes you directly to the link in the same tab. If I need another tab, I can right click. But the automatic new tab makes a mess of things.
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Belinda Johnson commented
@Kathy Skinner , it's because we only air our grievances within these hidden threads.
I've suggested a number of times that each of us needs to bombard their social media posts with our complaints.Whenever I have posted on their Facebook posts I'm generally the only person to comment.
THE ONLY PERSON out of thousands of subscribers with complaints.Xero is so focused on attracting new customers to generate even more revenue, that might actually action our requests if they are out there for the world to see.... and judge before signing up and becoming trapped like we are now.
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Lloyd Preston commented
Might be time to go to NZ Hearld and get them to investigate and write in the paper - so that the shareholders know how the developers are destroying the share value of the company - not to mention very likely to lose customers.
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Kathy Skinner commented
@Claire - cause they don't want to admit they have mucked this up and it shouldn't go ahead till it's all sorted so they use the excuse that they are continuing to take in our feed back and make changes but to me it seems they are just being selective on those as well as to what they do first.
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Kathy Skinner commented
Yep and I tried to do one draft invoice for a group of customers like in the classic version and I can't do them. It requires a contact name to be entered not the Group name I want to generate the invoices for which then generates all the draft invoices for them. To me it seems I will have to copy to 30+ Individual customers in a tier taking up even more time when I have over 100 membership invoices in different ranges to generate already.
Unfortunately it seems Xero really doesn't care about all this negative feed back otherwise they would be sorting all these issues out before forcing the new versions on us and hold off increasing the price for the subscriptions.
The same with the GST report which we will be forced to use from end of June - it's totally horrible to look and read and again they don't care otherwise they would hold that as well till it was more user friendly. Bad enough they aren't even including the ability to publish the report but also aren't addressing the layout issue, I found it actually increased the number of pages to print should you need a hard copy by almost double because of the new layout.
Their answer seems to be either close the thread, or as Kelly wrote above asking us to sign up to supply feedback but will they even really consider everything considering there's been so much negative feedback on both new invoicing and GST returns among other things. Plus they ignore things that have been requested for years and instead do what they think is best for their users when that isn't always the case.
Seems all they're interested in is profit now and have such a monopoly now so to speak that their subscribers no longer truly matter as it is difficult when you multiple clients to move them to another.
They've lost their core value from when they started out as being a competitor to other packages out there and who they wanted to represent.
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Claire Parker commented
Hello Xero team - are there any updates on this, please? Xero responses seem to be missing in action since May 17th, meanwhile more and more users are getting more and more frustrated and providing feedback to you about your lousy system upgrade. As the cut-off deadline looms ever closer, surely the progress towards having a useable module increases? I just wonder why you cannot communicate effectively with all these engaged people here who have given their time and effort to test a system that your team obviously have not.
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Anouchka Nagy commented
New invoicing is so much more work!!!
INVOICE ADDRESS - says no address or takes a while to display the address
ADD PAYMENT - I do no quite understand why it's at the top. This means i have to scroll to the very bottom to figure out what other partial payment were made. Also unable to copy and paste an amount into the amount section when adding payments.
EXTRA CLICKS to send an invoice - not convenient
The invoice format is so overwhelming, i personally prefer a more compact view.
Annoyingly slow.
When sending an invoice i need to click "send me a copy" every time whereas the older version i only have to tick the box once and this would apply to all future invoices.
When emailing an invoice unable to modify the recipient email, you will need to remove it and retype it.
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Jacomina Wakeford commented
Bianca, this is an Adobe setting with nothing to do with Xero; open Adobe, and there's a box in settings to untick. I had to google when it first happened to me.
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Bianca Davitt commented
No idea what has changed, but the last couple of days, every time I download an invoice, it saves a copy into my download folder as usual (perfect!) HOWEVER it then also opens the acrobat PDF program and loads an open file on my screen.
This is SO BLIMMING ANNOYING! How can I stop them for auto-opening!?!? I now have to use extra clicks to close the PDF viewer EVERY TIME. Please fix this urgently!
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Jenny Draper commented
Paul Kampe, you're 100% correct!
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Jenny Draper commented
"TAB( arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh) to select a highlighted contact
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Paul Kampe commented
Our business team has some serious concerns related to the "New" invoicing format:
1) More clicks - the number of steps and clicks has increased dramatically, leading to processing an invoice taking longer than the classic view. The Classic format has a shortcut link to "Email" invoice to the customer. The new format has the email option buried in a dropdown box hidden behind a 3-dot ellipsis. This is our MOST used feature in the invoicing. Why did you bury this function?
2) Way too much white space - far more than half the screen is white space, resulting in invoice information that is very hard to follow on-screen.
3) Gridlines missing - the new format eliminates the gridlines which was incredibly helpful in the Classic format because it is easier to find the different fields on an invoice with delineation.
4) Item / description combined? - the new format combines these separate fields which is entirely unhelpful. We need these displayed separately as they are in the current Classic format.
5) Customer address missing - in the new format all of our customer invoices say "no address" in the upper left corner. However, all of these address are correctly displayed on-screen in the Classic format. We need the address displayed on-screen so that we can verify that it's correct before emailing it to our customers.
We have been a loyal Xero customer since 2016 and made countless referrals for your platform. Please do NOT change the current Classic Invoice format. The Classic format has seamlessly supported our Accounting functions without issues and has allowed us to grow our business to support thousands of customers annually. To force an unwanted change of this scale upon us would be a blow to our relationship.
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Kylie Cowell commented
New invoicing is not better. Its a step backwards. It may be doing what Xero needs to in the background, but is not user friendly. A separate payment screen is crazy. Its badly laid out. New invoice takes forever to enter and process when you have a customer standing there waiting. Too many clicks. Seems to have alot of lag. Please leave classic invoice page as an option. Nothing in this new format makes any sense. :(
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Karen Mayer commented
The new invoices are not working for me. It's not intuitive at all. Feels like it was designed by an IT person, not someone that actually uses the software. The copy invoice to Purchase Orders is still not present like in the classic. If it doesn't get included in the new invoice I am looking for other software. Not happy with this at all. From a user perspective the classic was working well. I still don't see the value in the new invoice version. Why aren't you listening to your customers?
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Chantel Moerman commented
I just hate the new invoices, tracking catergories no longer come up by themselves,
its just cluncky and clumpsy. You can tell it was designed by someone who has no idea how to enter over a 1000 invoices in a timely manner. Xero seems to going like QB make it as difficult as possible entre easily. Very sad. Keep it simple people. -
David Reeves-James commented
Classic invoicing is so much better and avoids so many extra clicks / tabs / returns etc. As a user of Xero for nearly 8 years, I have found Xero to ignore ALL requests / suggestions / ideas. I have been asking for nearly 8 years for a 'stop' function. Xero's response - there is a credit limit feature in new invoicing, which is of no use. i.e. Credit limit £1,000.00, customer is invoiced £500.00 in January. Debt becomes due in February. This still leaves £500.00 credit on Xero and they could be invoiced another £500.00! FRANKLY WORDS FAIL ME - XERO!!!! GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER AND LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS AS QUICKLY AS YOU TAKE OUR MONEY!!!!!!!
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Laine Ratsep commented
Hear hear, @Andrew Chadwick! This is a well-expressed summary of the issues surrounding putting the invoice details directly into the email. That is one of many 'enhancements' to the invoicing system that are aggrieving not only your customers but also our customers!