Enter your idea

I work with a lot of small business clients, and one of the biggest time-savers in QBO is the ability to export and import bank rules. It’s honestly a game-changer for anyone managing multiple files.

Here’s why this matters:

I can quickly bring my standard rules into new client orgs

I can easily remove my firm’s rules when offboarding

I can keep things consistent across my whole client base

I save hours of manual setup when migrating clients from QBO to Xero

Right now, Xero doesn’t offer a way to do this — which means recreating rules one by one, every single time. It slows down onboarding and makes offboarding clunky.

As more of us move clients from QBO to Xero, this would make the transition smoother and faster, and honestly… it just makes sense. Bank rules are one of the biggest efficiency boosters in a bookkeeping workflow, and being able to manage them in bulk would help partners like me work smarter and stay aligned across dozens of organizations.

Would love to see this added — it would make a huge impact on day-to-day workflows for practices. 🙌

Dear Community Manager, you last response on this topic is 15 months ago.
This doesn't demonstrate active engagement by Xero in reviewing Feature requests. 520 Votes have been made to date, what does it take for Xero to respond or take action in providing a valuable time saving function?

In my opinion this should have come way before any kind of AI developments. A very simple function that could provide endless hours of time saved for your users. This is coming from Platinum Partners. Please devote some attention to this request.

Necessary for efficiency in onboarding new clients from the same province.

At what point would this be considered. There are currently 512 Votes for this request.

At how many votes would Xero consider this, as it has been ongoing for quite a few years with constant comments saying how this would help?

Hi,

We are a small software development company that uses Xero, and have been researching the creation of a tool to solve this problem. There are a couple of issues we discovered that we would love to get ideas/input on:

1. The official Xero API does not provide access to this data, but it is possible via the unofficial API that drives the Xero web application. The downside of using this mechanism is that access would require using your Xero credentials directly (i.e., username and password) instead of being granted controlled short-term access via Xero's OAuth 2.0 mechanism.

2. Because each rule can have a number of conditions or line items associated with it, CSV isn't an ideal format to store this data. JSON would work, but is not very human-readable or easily edited without specific tools. An alternative would be to use spreadsheets, which allows more flexibility in formatting so that the data is easier to understand. I have attached a screenshot of a possible layout for this data.

We would love some feedback on this topic, feel free to reply here or contact us directly via email on support@cloudcollab.nz

Thank you
Aaron Glover
cloudcollab.nz

Yes - absolutely crucial for productivity.

My understanding is that LedgerSync can create a rule for a Client Company e.g. contains "Staples" is categorized as 6720 Office Supplies.

Ok. No difference.

But THEN...while the accountant/bookkeeper is creating that rule for that one Client Company, the rule can be created for ANOTHER Client Company to which the accountant/bookkeeper has access. It's as easy as select next Client Company, a Chart of Accounts pops up. Select which account will be used to categorize the transaction in that Client Company's books. Continuing with the "Staples" example, select 7440 Office Expense for that Client Company. Then, go to the next Client Company, selecting the correct account to use for categorizing the transaction for EACH. It may take a bit of time to go through every Client Company, but it will be LESS time than creating the "Staples" bank rule from scratch in EACH company.

I'm not sure how it will work when adding a new Client Company. Maybe just an edit of all existing global bank rules? Check with LedgerSync.

Really? How many votes does it need for it to be taken seriously?

For me the ability to download and upload is a way to address the real problem, which is to be able to update in bulk.
That said, it would be good to be able to see a report that could be sorted and compared as well. And then load it back up with corrections if necessary. Some people ue a lot of bank rules and it's easy to get lost.

We have case where a partnership has ceased and started as sole trader. It would be handy to be able to export/import the bank rules to the new sole trader file from the old as the the business, suppliers and customers remain unchanged between the 2 files.

It would also be handy as we are in a rural area to have a master chart of rules for obvious drawings, bank fees, interest etc.

Judging by the many comments in wanting Bank Rules export as a basic feature it might be worth Xero Dev considering this feature as a priority. This is such a tedious task for any accounting firm or business.

It would be very useful and time saving if we could import bank rules into xero. We find we are entering the same ones many times

@Paul, new invoicing really doesnt make any sense if recurring invoices stayed the same (with a change that now there are extra steps when adding new emails to the profile, just to make our lives harder) This is by far the most hated DOWN grade ever, i cant wait for management to decide to move away from this BS

Cool beans.

Add to the pile something else that bookkeepers and accountants (i.e. Xero power users) would ACTUALLY find useful and time saving, but no Xero is too busy ruining basic functionality (*cough*new invoicing*cough*)...

Importing and Exporting Bank Rules is a needed feature. It saves time with new client set ups and transitions from QBO files.

Importing and Exporting Bank Rules is a necessary feature to help complete with QBO. I've been slowly clients to QBO, but the bank rule process is tedious to rebuild in Xero one by one. I also would like to have a way to bulk delete bank rules for client that disengage.

Please set this up so we can just use same bank rules accross files, seems like this should be in place. Cant be too hard to do it. With more AI and automation this is an easy win.

I can see why this doesn't have plans to be developed - it'd be too unique and helpful for an accounting software in general.

When do you expect to complete this project?