Enter your idea

As an accountant, there are SO. MANY. things that Xero just gets wrong, and refuses to fix.

It seems like a perfectly serviceable program for a small business owner to run their books with, but working in an accounting practice that switched over from MYOB System Services / AE Tax a few years ago for our main ledger & tax software, there are just SO MANY things every day that irritate me to tears:

- No depreciation on the cash P&L / Bal Sheet.
- No private use depreciation
- No option to show quantities in reports
- So much double handling of figures in the Tax Return (CGT can't be shared between people, Losses required to be input in multiple places, multiple business required to just be input as one total, etc etc etc)
- Having to manually 'roll forward' a file from year-to-year
- Having to manually calculate livestock closing amounts / figures and fill in the report in the financials
- Cash Coding only having bare-bones column sorting, and no proper search (having all transactions sort by 'EFTPOS [[date]] [[store]]' isn't actually very helpful)

And just a whole bunch of small things that aren't failures of accounting, but just failures of creating a polished piece of software:

- Automatically creating new lines on the 'manual journal' screen, but not on the 'bank reconciliation' screen???
- Editing transactions and taking to you to a different screen when you click 'save'...
- Not automatically placing the cursor in the text field when logging on and you need to put in your 2FA code

There is just so much stuff here that I would call a 'bug', but Xero insists are 'features' and then you have to 'gain support' when some stuff (the 2FA code thing) should take one developer a day or two, but then other FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN THINGS are labelled as 'not in pipeline', and it makes me want to scream.

If I had any say in it we would've gone straight back to MYOB System Services, but alas I am merely an employee that gets to be irritated by a thousand cuts every single day.

I have the same problem here. I have to do tax reconciliation on cash basis with no book depreciation and tax depreciation shown on Cash P&L

Show Depreciaiton in Cash P&L report;

A Cash Accounting P&L is NOT a Cash Flow statement. Xero is targeted towards Small Businesses who legitimately use Cash Accounting, but the P&L doesn't include Depreciation, and importing into Xero Tax also excludes it. This is fundamentally wrong.

Xero cannot do Basic Accounting. I would think you would want to fix this. But no.

https://productideas.xero.com/forums/967133-reports-tax/suggestions/46171579-fixed-assets-option-to-show-depreciation-expense

Pretty poor to close this issue to comments because you don't want to do it right now. Couldn't you leave it up to garner more support? It can only be a lack of awareness that more Accountants don't complain about this.

Once again, wasting more time and potential errors having to mess about with manual journals just to make up for the deficiencies in Xero's core accounting product.

And yet they have the audacity to force ai slop upon us when they can't even get basic depreciation correct...

It's absurd that resources have been allocated into AI that have increased my workload in error correction when such QOL functions as not needing to do manual journal entries for Depreciation Expenses in Cash basis reports go by the wayside

What we are requesting is an Australian accounting standard.

This is the workaround that I received from a Xero Partner Assist Specialist today:

'To include depreciation amounts on your cash reports, you'll need to add two manual journals:

One to reverse the Xero-created journal – ensure 'Show journal on cash basis reports' is unticked, then click Post

One to add a journal the same as the Xero-created one – ensure 'Show journal on cash basis reports' is ticked, then click Post'

This is not ideal, but at least there is a way to include depreciation expense in a cash basis P&L (without double counting).

It is ridiculous that an otherwise good software has such poor deprecation and fixed asset features and is wasting it's time doing fancy analytics stuff which is not nearly as useful as just working properly as accounting software.

Xero need to stop working on AI "analysis" that no-one asked for and put resources into getting the Tax software working correctly. Sure it isn't '****', but it is a basic fundamental tax-accouting function and you don't put resources into it. This is ridiculous.
Xero need some actual Accountants on staff.

When is Xero going to take this issue seriously? How many votes will it take before someone takes notice and fixes this?

You can tell that Xero have NO IDEA how to actually work as accountants...

A 'cash flow' report (a specific report), indeed, wouldn't include depreciation - because no money has been spent - but WOULD include asset purchases in their entirety!

On the other hand, preparing regular reports on 'cash basis' (vs on 'accruals basis') DOES include depreciation - it simply doesn't include Accounts Payable or Receivable.

Will anyone from Xero bother to comment?

Will they continue to make us report bugs and failures of their program in the 'Product Ideas' forum?

My guess, respectively, is 'no' and 'yes'...

What the actual?
First time having a year with a depreciating asset and I was trying to work out why my "profit" for the year was so high.
Only to discover that the depreciation expense was just....missing...
There is good functionality to create assets....but seemingly rubbish functionality to track them. What a crock!

EDIT: and now I can't even find an article that describes how to work around this fault.

Canceling my subscription and going elsewhere if this isn't worked out soon

Xero P&L on cash basis must also include depreciation. This is not a cash-flow report. Depreciation should be included in both cash & accruals reporting. If it is an option for small business to use cash reporting, and this is small business software, how can it possibly be excluded? Ridiculous to have to manually enter. In my opinion this produces an incorrect financial report and potentially an incorrect tax return, for which Xero should be held accountable.

Xero caters to Small Businesses, many of which are entitled to use Cash reporting, so why is this not an option? Sure Depreciation doesn't belong in a Cash Flow report, but a Cash P&L is not a Cash flow report. It is almost like there aren't Accountants working on this software

This needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency, we are paying top dollar for your software and this is a basic accounting issue.

As most people have pointed out, this is unacceptable.

For the price Xero charges this basic functionality should exist and be well developed.

It is not acceptable to have to enter a journal to show depreciation on cash basis reports. When accrual basis reports are run, then it is doubled up!

Xero's depreciation and fixed assets register is very poor compared to the rest of it. Writing off pooled items also continues to be a big issue.

Unless this is fixed ... I am moving away to quick books for sure

The fixed assets depreciation would be useless for those businesses using cash basis without this feature being fixed up