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Xero appears to have stopped pre-populating the Who and What fields when reconciling/posting payments. This is such a backward step in an accounting package that I find it hard to believe anyone asked for it or thought it was a good enhancement idea (and that it took priority over lots of other ideas/changes that would have had merit). Pre-populating saved a huge amount of time and mistakes/inconsistencies e.g. not having to look up the account number where previous similar payments had been posted to; not being able to see a default description that had been used on previous transactions; not using the correct VAT rate etc. etc. etc.

I have read that it might have been done "to prevent erroneous data from accidently copying over when dealing with similar invoices or recurring customers". This is absolute nonsense. One should always be checking each transaction but now one has to populate everything from scratch (and possibly look up the account code and the consistency of previous posting narratives) rather than being able to see what had been used before and then edit in the cases where the previous default was not appropriate.

This smacks of a change that has been driven by software developers who know nothing about accounting or bookkeeping and it has just made the product much less attractive to users. What a bizarre business decision when basic functionality and the user experience should be your #1 consideration.

Speaking as an accountant who has regularly used Xero for many years (and has designed such systems in the past), this change is completely incomprehensible and would be a negative factor for me in recommending Xero to anyone now.

Not an idea as such (other than one to reverse the change) but just giving feedback.