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I have just had my first experience of issuing several Invoices following the new Xero invoice formatting. For context, this is the first time ever, in 7-years of business, that clients have actually picked up the phone and expressed disappointment in the formatting of my invoices. Xero, it really is not great, when clients feel the need to phone me up to express concern...

The invoice layout is really quite poorly constructed, and feels like it assumes that Xero customers are typically working in E-Commerce, and, dare I say it, on the other side of the Atlantic. I write this message from Cambridge, United Kingdom.

An example is 'Bill To' and 'Ship To'. These are not typical in the lexicon of UK professional services businesses, yet these default to display, and don't seem to be able to be amended or removed. I am an Architect, and I don't 'Ship To' my clients. Even if I did, I would say 'Delivery Address'. Similarly, we don't need the 'Bill To' heading, but if it must be there, it should be able to be amended to state 'Client' or something appropriate.

'CRN' should be able to be shown as its proper wording 'Company Registration No.' (theres no need to be lazy about this acronym) and it should be repositionable, ideally to the bottom of the page. The current position feels very corporate.

The 'Tax' line on the description of work undertaken used to be able to be adjusted to say what tax is referred to (i.e. my previous invoices stated 'VAT' rather than just 'Tax'). I think that this is pretty standard in the UK, but it seems unable to be amended.

Also, most of my clients do not want to view the invoice online - so the QR code feels like a weak gimmick. This particularly flies in the face of the experience I provide, which is focussed, as far as possible, on real human interaction, rather than digital data exchange. So I feel the QR Code should be provided as an Option to Show/Not Show.

As other posters have mentioned, the large 'Amount Due' is clunky. Whilst I'm less concerned with this, I do generally feel that there should be much more flexibility in content display and positioning (without the complexity of having to create bespoke DocX templates).

There are other issues, but I feel I have said enough.

And to summarise, just to maintain my visual style for clients, I am now having to recreate the Invoices in Adobe InDesign. Yes, seriously. I am Desktop Publishing presentable copies of the Xero Invoices. This is really quite ridiculous and goes to show what an extremely backwards step this new formatting has proven to be.