Restrict visibility of employee payroll transactions in Contacts Description: When payroll is processed in Xero, employees are auto
When payroll is processed in Xero, employees are automatically created as contacts. This means that any user with access to the Contacts area can view employee contact records and see their payroll transaction history, including individual pay amounts.
This is a significant data privacy concern. Even when a user has no payroll access, they can still navigate to an employee's contact record and view sensitive salary and payment information through the contact's activity tab.
What I'd like to see:
The ability to hide or restrict access to employee contact records (or their transaction history) from users who do not have payroll permissions.
Alternatively, a separate "Employee" contact type that is only visible to users with payroll access, keeping employee records and their associated transactions hidden from other users.
Why this matters:
Salary and wage information is highly sensitive personal data.
Under UK GDPR, businesses have a responsibility to limit access to personal data on a need-to-know basis.
Currently, the only way to prevent this is to remove a user's access to Contacts entirely, which is impractical for staff who need to manage customer and supplier records as part of their daily work.
This limitation forces businesses to choose between operational efficiency and employee data privacy.
Impact: This affects any business using Xero Payroll where multiple staff members need access to Xero but should not see colleagues' pay details.
Julia Godbold
shared this idea
Hi Julia, thanks for raising this. In Xero, a Payroll employee record is separate from a contact record. Processing a pay run doesn’t automatically create a separate contact record in Contacts.
From what you mentioned, the contact record info may relate to how wage payments are paid or reconciled in Xero. Payroll itself doesn’t create contact records, so the contact would have been created separately—for example, by someone adding it manually, or through a separate accounting workflow connected with payments.
If you’re seeing individual wage amounts in a contact’s activity tab, please contact Xero Support so they can look into the specific record and explain what those entries are and why they’re visible. You can include the contact name and where you’re seeing the entries.
