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Purchase orders, bills & inventory: Paying bills

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Bill Payments - Allow payments to be scheduled

When making a bill payment using open banking direct transfer from bank account, it would be nice to be able to schedule the payment - currently there is no ability to do that.

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Hitesh Panchmatia shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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In development  ·  AdminKelly Munro (Community Manager, Xero) responded  · 

Hi everyone, we appreciate the on-going investment from our community here.

We'd like to share an update as we're continuing to expand future-dated bill payments across regions.

To recap;

Next up is Australia, where we’re developing scheduled payments for online bill payments powered by Airwallex.

We’re hoping to make this available to customers over the coming months, and we’ll share another update once this becomes available.

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  • Alexander Cope-Norris commented  ·   ·  Report

    We use Xero’s Pay bills (UK, direct bank transfer) to schedule GBP supplier payments for future dates. Our internal control needs an approver to receive the bills and supporting documents and authorise each payment before it goes out. We’ve built that workflow on the Xero API and webhooks, and it works well for payments made immediately.

    Scheduled payments break it completely. Once a batch is scheduled:

    Nothing appears in the Accounting API. Not in Payments, BatchPayments, Bank Transactions or the Invoices endpoint, until the payment date arrives.
    The bills themselves aren’t updated. Their status, UpdatedDateUTC and PlannedPaymentDate are all unchanged, so no webhook fires.
    The bills are locked once they’re in a batch, so we can’t add a marker ourselves.
    No email notification is sent when a batch is scheduled.

    The batch is clearly visible in Xero’s own Payment activity screen, with its status, payment date, bill count and total. Xero holds the data; it just isn’t exposed to the apps and integrations that rely on the API. The result is that any approval, notification or cash-flow process built around Xero only learns about a scheduled payment on the day the money leaves, which is too late to be useful.

    What we’re asking for:

    An API endpoint (or BatchPayments status values) for scheduled Pay-bills batches, showing the bills, amounts, payment date and status (Scheduled, Failed, Sent).
    A webhook event when a batch is scheduled, changed, failed or sent.
    At minimum, update the bills when they’re added to a scheduled batch, for example by setting PlannedPaymentDate, so integrations can detect them.
    An email notification when a batch is scheduled or fails. We currently have a failed batch showing in Payment activity that we’d only find by checking the screen manually.

    Scheduling payments is one of the main reasons to use Pay bills, but right now it’s the one part of the payment process that can’t be controlled or audited outside the Xero screen. Is this on the roadmap, and is there any interim way to access scheduled batch data?

  • John Kelly commented  ·   ·  Report

    Agreed. Without this functionality we need to stick with our BACS payment process.

  • Lucy Bartlett commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yes agreed! I was really happy to see this open banking feature but then sadly disappointed that you cannot future date payments. Our bank charges £2.50 for a faster payment and 50p for a next day so its costing me £2.50 to send 24p to Xero. Its not cost effective so I won't be using it until this function is available. I almost feel that unless you have free banking (in most cases this doesn't happen unless its new business bank account) this product you've offered for the time being is pointless. I don't think you should have launched this product in Xero until you had the full functionality that Crezco offers.

  • Michael van Zwanenberg commented  ·   ·  Report

    100% agree. This functionality has been lost since we transferred from Wise to the Xero method of paying bills.

  • Adam Tarrant commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is a critical feature.....banks charge extortionate fees for same day payments so using the direct transfer feature is currently unviable. Crezco offers scheduled payments as part of its open banking so not sure why it's not possible in Xero.

    Scheduled payments is a vital part of business banking surely?!

  • Michael van Zwanenberg commented  ·   ·  Report

    Add a payment date for Crezco open banking payments so they can be scheduled upto 10 days in advance. This used to possible with Wise batch transfers

  • Mark Spencer commented  ·   ·  Report

    Businesses frequently need to schedule future payments. One example of many is scheduling payroll to ensure that staff are paid on the alloted date irrespective of public holidays (Christmas, New Year, Bank Holidays et etc).

    This needs sorting please.

  • Philip Hankers commented  ·   ·  Report

    Unfortunately we will not use this functonality until future bill payments is an option.

    Due to the excessive costs charged by the banks for same day payments I do not believe that we will be the only Xero customer not willing to incur substantial additional bank charges by using Bill payments via Open Banking / Crezco.

    Crezco tell me that the functionality is available on their software but not via Xero. They say this is on the Xero 'roadmap' but are unable to say how long the road is......