Email to bills - Ability to add note that's included in History & Notes of the bill
We generally forward incoming bills for payment to Xero by emailing the bill to bills.b3xxxxxxxxxxxx@xerofiles.com) resulting in them getting queued in 'Draft' - which of course is a beautiful feature. At that point our finance manager will go through and process them to the point of Awaiting Payment (i.e. check them, allocate as appropriate, etc.).
On occasion there is additional information people in the business may wish to communicate to the finance manager about this (e.g. where it should be allocated to, or other descriptive information/special instructions).
Presently this requires a separate email to be sent to the finance manager, typically containing a copy of the invoice, explaining, etc. Then finance manager must remember this when processing that invoice.
It would be nice to have the ability to incorporate free text in the email which would automatically appear in the History & Notes section, so it is attached to the bill all the way through. It could be just free text written in the body of the email with some sort of easy to type, unlikely to be found elsewhere, suffix (eg. '///')
To illustrate with an example:
I send a bill through from new vendor where allocation is ambiguous for anyone but myself, but I know it should be allocated to 'Marketing' .
The bill is attached to a clean (no copy in the body) email ready to send to bills.b3xxxxxxxxxxxx@xerofiles.com
I go into the body of the email and type: '/// allocate to marketing please'
In the history and notes section for this bill there appears a time-stamped note showing the source and stating: 'allocate to marketing please'
Finance manager incorporates into her work process to check History & Notes prior to processing bills.
This would be amazing.
Tom Fuyala
shared this idea
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Adelle Brown
commented
As a work around I have found that when you forward the invoice to the bills email take a snip of the note you want to include (use print screen on your keyboard and just drag your mouse around the wording you want to take a snip of) and then I delete the contents of the email body and just leave the attached the invoice and paste the snip (by pressing CTRL-V).
This will put both the invoice and the snip of the invoice note together on the draft invoice awaiting coding. -
Susan Gooley
commented
Email to bills is excellent, it's just missing an important feature of being able to provide a note in the original email, that sits in notes when you code it. This for me is an essential upgrade required, as it's standard in another accounting package.
Clients don't want to code the whole bill, they just want to send it in and provide a division/account code note.
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Jay Craddock
commented
I consider this an essential feature. We need to communicate for almost every new bill.
Thanks for recording this feature request.