Invoicing - Paste Multiple Cells into Invoice Lines
Why can’t Xero do basic spreadsheet-style paste???
This is honestly ridiculous: in 2026, Xero still can’t handle basic multi-cell paste like every normal grid on the web.
Everyone uses Excel, Google Sheets, Airtable. We copy blocks of rows and columns all day. In Xero, the same paste either dumps into one field or doesn’t work, so we’re forced into CSV import or manual entry. That is a massive waste of time for something that should be a baseline feature.
There is no technical excuse here. Airtable/Sheets don’t do anything magical. In a browser, multi-cell paste is just:
Clipboard text in TSV format (tabs between columns, newlines between rows)
A grid intercepts the paste event, reads clipboardData.getData('text/plain'), parses the TSV, and fills the grid cells
For strict fields (Account, Tax Rate, Tracking), it matches exact values or flags invalid cells with a clear error
Request
Add spreadsheet-style multi-row, multi-column paste (TSV) into line item grids (Invoices and Bills at minimum). Create new lines automatically, validate values, and highlight any cells that don’t match (e.g., Account/Tax). This is a basic productivity feature and Xero is behind on it.
be MODERN. PLEASE!
Nic Lap
shared this idea
Hi Nic, thanks for sharing this idea. We can see how helpful it would be to paste invoice details straight from a spreadsheet. It'd make the process faster and easier, especially for longer invoices.
For now, one option is to use the Import feature. By pasting your spreadsheet data into Xero’s CSV template and uploading it, you can create invoices in bulk. It’s not quite direct copy-paste, but it’s a quicker way to handle larger invoices.
We’ve moved this idea to Gaining Support to understand how many of you would find this useful. If you can, let us know what tool you’re copying from and which columns you’d most want to include, your feedback will help guide what we look at next.
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Nic Lap
commented
Why can’t Xero do basic spreadsheet-style paste???
This is honestly ridiculous: in 2026, Xero still can’t handle basic multi-cell paste like every normal grid on the web.
Everyone uses Excel, Google Sheets, Airtable. We copy blocks of rows and columns all day. In Xero, the same paste either dumps into one field or doesn’t work, so we’re forced into CSV import or manual entry. That is a massive waste of time for something that should be a baseline feature.
There is no technical excuse here. Airtable/Sheets don’t do anything magical. In a browser, multi-cell paste is just:
Clipboard text in TSV format (tabs between columns, newlines between rows)
A grid intercepts the paste event, reads clipboardData.getData('text/plain'), parses the TSV, and fills the grid cells
For strict fields (Account, Tax Rate, Tracking), it matches exact values or flags invalid cells with a clear error
Request
Add spreadsheet-style multi-row, multi-column paste (TSV) into line item grids (Invoices and Bills at minimum). Create new lines automatically, validate values, and highlight any cells that don’t match (e.g., Account/Tax). This is a basic productivity feature and Xero is behind on it.be MODERN. PLEASE!
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Okey Onyeachu
commented
I have worked with an accounting system that allows many rows e.g. description, Qty, Price, Account and Tax rate to be copied from Excel (at a go) and pasted to create an invoice, Journal etc. This saves a lot of time.
Can you please look into activating such function. Thanks