Enter your idea

Why did it take Xero more than a year to realise and fix the audit trail of sending invoices? This is something that even the most incompetent business person knows is critical to cashflow, and yet it seems that Xero needs endless bug reports and feature requests to make them realise that its an important feature of an accounting package.

Sept 2024 "Our team are beginning to review this idea" ... So its taken more than a year to log the "to" address when an invoice is emailed - something a hobby coder could do after watching a youtube tutorial.

What would be great would be to put a little less effort into window-dressing and gaslighting the users, and more effort on some of the bugs that are old enough to go to school.

How about you fix the stupid bug where all invoices get marked as "unmarked as sent" when the invoice was absolutely *not* unmarked as sent.

Hi Xero,

Appears to be a "simple fix"
All recipients of the invoice should be detailed in the history.
Also
When automatic reminders are sent they should automatically only go to the original invoice recipients

Are these options available

Thanks

Hi Xero Support,

I am struggling to understand why Xero does not record all email addresses (To, CC, BCC) in the invoice history.

I have also encountered a recurring issue (though not every time): when sending or resending invoices, the email address does not appear in the history, and the "Sent" box is not automatically ticked. Instead, the history only shows "Invoice updated". This makes me question whether the invoice was actually sent, leading me to repeat the action before realising it was a system fault.

Could your team please test and resolve this? It is causing our business to appear unprofessional to clients, and we need reliable records of invoice communication.

Thank you for your support,
Joana

Good to see the re-sent history has been reinstated, to a point as people are still having some issues.

The auto-update is still causing issues with unnecessary logging as per my original post:

Sep 23, 2024 · Edit… · Delete…
Absolutely essential for credit control and progression to have detailed logs - at the moment, my history and notes logs are just filled with lines and lines of pointless updates from auto-save - meaning for any actual notes, they are bumped way down, and the text has to be copy, paste and edited to remove all the guff. The auto-save every minute (at least) plus adding the actual detail into the invoice needs to be removed from the log, its ridiculous, just one timestamp at the end of that 'session' would be needed.

Date User Action Detail
19 Sept 2024 12:46 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:46 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:45 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:43 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:42 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:42 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:42 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:42 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:34 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:34 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:33 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.
19 Sept 2024 12:33 pm VWA Credit Control Edited
INV-21918 updated.

It appears the invoice history still isn't updating if an invoice is dated pre-year end lock date.

The work around previously advised was to untick sent and resend but we are also unable to untick sent for invoices pre-year end lock date. We don't want to be constantly unlocking and locking files just to send a copy of an invoice and record the history.

About ****** time

Thanks

This is a long overdue fix!

For quite sometime, the notes have not shown that a copy invoice email has been sent which has been quite a problem in not having an accurate audit trail.

I agree with comments below, I am now getting 3 lines, 2 showing invoice updated - which it wasn't - and one for invoice sent and to who.

Thanks for the update Kelly this is a great functionality to have back!

Although agree with Joana that the status of 'INV-xxxxx updated' is very misleading - especially if there's no functionality to show what's been updated on the invoice with a different colour/highlight etc.

The invoice sending history is key to our start up as it's just myself and the founder and we're both working remotely so being able to quickly check the history before re-sending an invoice is so important.

Hi Kelly, Finally! Thank you for the update. I did a quick and simple test, and while all I did was to resend the invoice, the history is showing 2 entries:
This invoice has been sent to
and
INV-xxxxx updated.

This is misleading as the invoice has not been updated.

In the original invoicing page, only the "invoice was sent to email xxxxx@xxxxx" would show in the history.

Attached for reference

Hi Kelly Munro,

Seeking some progress on this idea post your Sep 2024 message. From what I see the idea is still "Under review".

The suggested manual work arounds costs time and money for any business.

Why does it take so long to reinstate a feature that was available in the past?

From where I sit its hard to see that Xero demonstrates any true understanding of the importance of full audit trail of the email history when resending customers invoices. In this instance the software has become less functional and manual. A business cant make money from spending time with manual work arounds for a feature that has been taken away.

Please listen to your current community..

I'm really surprised this info isn't already recorded on Xero but it's so important to be able to keep track of how many times and when you've emailed an invoice to a customer. We definitely need this included

When you resend an invoice; it indicates only that the invoice has been updated. This is incorrect, if nothing has been updated. It should, as the old invoicing did, indicate that the invoice has been sent and to whom. Please fix this, as it has created added steps that I have to take to note that I have resent the invoice.

We need to be able to trace who invoices are sent to. This used to be clear, but from the 'new' version update, this record of recipients has disappeared! Very annoying.

How can this be 'an idea you are developing' when it worked perfectly in classic invoicing? It should have been testing and functional before the new invoicing was released.
I want to be able to check the history to confirm with a client each time an invoice was sent, and to who.
If I use the workaround, it removes the original 'sent to' line so I don't have history of who the invoice has previously been sent to!

Thanks Vicki,

It's even more clicks/inconvenience if the invoice was originally raised in a locked/closed period. You cannot then just untick send.

They should be fixing the issue, not telling us to use workarounds for something that used to work!

This is not a workable alternative.

Hi

Since Xero doesn't care to share, I will jump in. I raised a support ticket on this issue. The reply: Unsend your invoice before resending, and it will record the new send. It works but adds to the cumbersome amount of clicks.

Showing a customer that an invoice was sent multiple time is critical when starting to put pressure on account receivable. Some invoices are also first sent internally for adjustments and then sent on to the Customer. We need to be able to confirm form the history that the invoice was sent to the customer. This was working correctly, and the function was removed. Please reinstate.

This issue has been around now for at least 12 months from memory. Xero - get your act together. How hard is it to make this minor adjustment and keep us all happy.

Crazy !!!!

Hey Kelly

So we are at least 10 months down the track from your "let's just placate our users' reply stating that you are moving it to "under review".

I bet that is about the only thing you/Xero have done on this CRITICAL, now missing, function in that time frame

How about Xero programmers get of their collective butts and actually start reinstating the features that we previously had and relied on to run our businesses.

And if they can't do it, then EMPLOY SOMEONE WHO CAN

Pathetic