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In January, we switched from QuickBooks Desktop to Xero and overall, we are extremely happy and are so glad we made the change. Xero's system performance is great, their pricing model is much more fair than Intuit's QuickBooks Online and the vast majority of features are as good or better than what we had in QuickBooks Desktop. The main dashboard is great and the daily account reconciliation process is definitely more efficient than it was with QuickBooks Desktop. So, overall, we are clearly happy and Xero should be proud of the product that they offer.

With that being said, there are 3 missing features (compared to QuickBooks Desktop) that I think would make the product significantly better:

1) Customer Hierarchies - We have large customers that have many departments and within Xero the only way to manage this is with Customer Groups, but the sophisticated Customer Hierarchies in QuickBooks Desktop were much better in terms of financial reporting. This allowed sales reports to subtotal by customer group, which I have found no way to accomplish in Xero. We currently need to run a "Sales by Customer Group" and a "Sales by Top Customer Summary" to get what was accomplished with one report in Quickbooks Desktop.

2) Lack of Xero Expense Approval Hierarchy - In fairness to Xero, we did not even have Employee Expense capabilities in QuickBooks Desktop (QuickBooks Online does offer Expense Mgmt.), but the inability to be able to assign an approver by employee or do any type of approver hierarchy has resulted in only one person doing all expense approvals for all employees. 1st line managers really need to be able to approve expenses for their employees.

3) The ability to set a default mileage rate. This is such a basic feature and would be so easy to implement, and the lack of this capability kind of undermines confidence that Xero Expense is a credible product.

Overall Xero expense is definitely a good start and most of the basics are there, but it needs some feature updates like these in order to make it viable for anyone but the smallest organizations.

I sincerely hope these features requests make it into the product in the near term.

Thanks!

Just made the switch and cannot believe that Xero doesn't have this set as a basic feature.

There is so much in Xero that is lacking compared to our former accountancy package!

Another simple and efficient feature that seems to have passed Xero by....

The rate doesn't change across hundreds of claims - it is a frustrating having to enter it each time when it could so easily be made sticky or given a set value

This would be very helpful, it would be good to be able to set a default rate

This would be a very helpful fix, if the default rate could be set at the beginning of each year.

It would make saving a mileage trip much faster

A year already without any answer. I might have done a bad decision changing to Xero. I’m processing the first mileage claim, and I’m really surprised this doesn’t exist, I was taking that for granted.

This should be a very simple enhancement and would add a lot of value...

This would be a really quick but essential fix.

As well as what's being asked for, I think the default HMRC rates should be included to be allocated to each staff member - e.g. cars/vans, motorcycles and cycles in the UK.

Also, spitting the cars/vans rate between the first 10,000 miles in a tax year and thereafter. A YTD calculator would be good.

At the moment, when lodging mileage claims, users have to enter $ per km themselves. It would be good if it can be pre-set to avoid confusion and mistakes.

Has this been done yet? is absolutely necessary

Agree. Each organisation should be able to set a default mileage rate in Xero Expenses. Otherwise, every mileage claim requires the employee to know what the rate is and manually enter. A default rate in Xero would reduce the number of errors created by this manual input.

This would be much easier. Am being switched over to Xero Expenses from Zoho and had to check what the mileage rate is (it was the base HMRC rate) before i submitted, but it should be possible to set default rates like £0.45 and £0.25 so that users can just select the relevant rate.

Thought this would be easy - but staff having to enter the rate/km just makes it harder and turns them off using Xero Expenses.

I am about to switch 50+ staff over to Xero expenses for mileage claims and am amazed a default rate cannot be set. We use the ATO rate (85 cents per km from 1 July) for the year - being able to set this centrally and not have to check that each employee is not inputting a different rate is critical. This is a basic function of every expenses app I've ever used. Please add it as a priorty.

The Xero team need to remember who is paying their salaries and take more notice of what the subscribers are asking for.
The notes below are a very small % of the people who are frustrated about this basic request

This needs to be added ASAP. This is a basic requirement as staff shouldn't have to try to remember the mileage rate.
It needs to be able to be edited whenever the client chooses.
In NZ, IRD set a mileage rate which is the relevant amount each year but clients should be able to set their own rate as they may choose to pay their team more than the IRD rate.

plse add it.