New Bills experience - Make bill total optional
I have found it very annoying when entering bills in Xero, and if I do not add a total in the bill total (optional), my bill gets saved to draft instead of approved. The fact that it says "optional" should make it optional, not required! It leaves an issue when bills are not moved through to approved and then do not get paid by due dates.
Please fix this issue, make it optional not required!
Renee Hall
shared this idea
Thanks for the feedback here, Renee and Elliot.
While this error also existed in the older bills experience there is a slight difference in behaviour, and I can see the contradiction when the field shows as optional in the new experience.
I've shared this all back with our product team and they are having a closer look - As soon as I have an update I'll share with you here 🙂
Thanks for also coming into our Support team about this too Elliot!
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Elliot Colbert
commented
Thank you Kelly! I am familiar with this behavior from the old bills experience, where if you change a bill's line item(s) without updating the "total" field to match, the bill will not save, and will throw an error instead. While somewhat tedious, I find this to be a useful check - I'm a grudging fan of the behavior.
The issue here though is that if a new $0 bill is created (whether from a $0 recurring bill template as in my case, or 100% from scratch in Renee's), it feels like overkill to be forced to enter the intended total in the "total" field as a secondary check (especially when the field is literally marked optional) - I trust myself to enter the bill correctly, without being forced to enter a variance check.
(For whatever it's worth, my Xero organizations do not show the "new" bills view when creating bills from scratch yet, so I've never experienced the behavior Renee describes - but my draft bills that are generated from a recurring template do show up in the "new" view.)
Thanks again!
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Elliot Colbert
commented
I have a recurring bill with a $0 bill total, since the amount varies by month. Ordinarily, I've always been able to add value to the bill's line item(s), and submit the bill even though the total amount is different from the saved $0 recurring bill total (which I realize I would be unable to do if the saved recurring total were anything other than $0).
However in the "new version" of Bills, I now get a "Totals don't match" error when I try to submit. This was especially surprising considering that the "Bill total" field even has the word "optional" written next to it.
Anyway, this behavior is really not helpful - I can understand wanting to flag variance when you have two totals that don't match, but if the original total was $0, I much prefer the prior behavior allowing users to just enter the total once.
And just to confirm, I switched back to the "old version" and had no issue submitting the bill.
I have lots of feelings about the "new version" of billing, some good and some not, but this is by far the worst change I've encountered so far. Please let me know if this is expected behavior and if so, I'd love for it to be flagged to the Bills team that it's not appreciated.
Also, just FYI - I originally raised this as a support case, but was directed in that channel to submit it as a Product Idea instead, so I'm now doing so. Thanks!