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I’m a Chartered Accountant and registered Tax Practitioner based in South Africa, and I run a small accounting and tax practice. I’m also a Xero Partner and recommend Xero to most of my clients across different industries.

However, I’ve recently run into some limitations with invoice customisation that are making it difficult to use Xero for certain professional service industries, particularly legal and medical clients.

Legal professionals

Many legal advocates and attorneys require more detailed billing formats. In particular:

• A Date column for each invoice line item (e.g. 22 Feb 2026 – Appearance in Court)
• A separate “Matter” or “Case Reference” field on the invoice (e.g. Joe Soap vs SARS)
• The Matter field to be distinct from the existing Reference field

Currently the only workaround is to manually type this information into descriptions, which isn’t ideal for proper legal billing.

Medical professionals

For healthcare practitioners such as biokineticists, invoices often need to include medical aid details for claim processing.

Ideally Xero would allow:

• Custom contact fields such as Medical Aid Name, Medical Aid Number, and Medical Aid Plan
• The ability to map those contact fields directly to invoice templates
• Control over which of those fields appear on invoices

At the moment this requires third-party integrations, which many small practices prefer to avoid.

I’d love to see more flexibility in invoice templates and contact field mapping, as this would make Xero far more suitable for professional service firms.

Is anyone else encountering similar limitations? And does anyone know if improvements like this are on the roadmap?

Thanks!