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Purchase orders, bills & inventory

Customer ideas for purchase orders, bills, inventory(products and services) and making supplier payments.

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Purchase orders, bills & inventory

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356 results found

  1. The current bill import functionality relies primarily on contact names for matching, which creates two significant problems:

    1. Unreliable Contact Matching

    • Contact names can change over time
    • Even minor differences (single character) result in creating new duplicate contacts
    • No fallback to more reliable identifiers

    2. Character Encoding Problems

    • Special characters (e.g., apostrophes in names like "O'Connor") cause import failures
    • This particularly affects common surnames and business names

    Proposed Solution

    Implement a hierarchical matching system for contacts during bill imports:

    1. First attempt: Match by account code
    2. Second attempt: Match by database ID
    3. Final fallback: Match by contact name

    Benefits

    • More reliable…
    1 vote

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     ·  0 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  2. Include Alt+Key options for cursor positioning rather than having to use the mouse or Tab Key. eg Search, Save, Save and continue, Approve, Approve and add, etc

    15 votes

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     ·  12 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  3. When we receive an email from Approval Max stating that someone has rejected a bill, it has a link to the bill in Xero. When you open the link, there's no way to edit/amend the invoice from this screen.

    Please add an edit button.

    Currently, from this screen, to edit the invoice, we need to go to:
    Bills To Pay > Drafts > search for the invoice > then edit it

    Too many additional steps to edit the invoice, it should be easy from that first link.

    1 vote

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    0 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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    Hi Kelly, thanks for the screenshots. Seeing as this email is sent by ApprovalMax we'd recommend connecting with their support to see if this is something they can change or would consider extending their integration for. Many of our app partners designed and built their integrations with Xero themselves and are best placed to confirm how this works and make changes to it.

  4. The preview window that pops up when entering new bills is a bit small and you need to almost always zoom in on the pdf to read it.

    It would be great to be able to resize the different page components to make things a bit more readible.

    34 votes

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     ·  11 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  5. Honestly, This is very frustrating that we need to manually allocate the bill credits against the outstanding Invoices, it's taking a lot of time to do so, I highly request Xero to please come up with a solution for this

    6 votes

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     ·  2 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  6. Direct Payments - Change of status - Scheduled to Paid

    Currently within 'Manage direct payments' the Status doesn't change on future dated payments once they've been paid. ie. Once a scheduled payment is made change the status to PAID.

    1 vote

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    1 comment  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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    Thanks for the confirmation, Michael. While it's not something we have direct plans around atm I've slightly updated the title of your idea and we'll keep an eye on the interest for this. If there's any change we'll share this with you, here.

  7. When creating subcontractor bills and deducting retention, the CIS includes the retention when calculating the deduction
    For example, XERO should read:
    £250.00
    minus 3% retention (£7.50)
    £242.50
    minus CIS (£48.50)
    = £194.00

    HOWEVER, XERO calculates:
    £250.00
    minus 3% retention (£7.50)
    minus CIS (£50.00) (off the gross amount not the amount after retention deducted)
    = £200.00

    This means that CIS deduction is incorrect.

    There is no way around this currently even though similar issues have been raised since 2019 on Xero discussion threads and no solution has been made.
    The only way around it offered by Xero means that payment &…

    44 votes

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     ·  4 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  8. Whilst creating or editing "normal" bills, archived Products and Services don't appear in the Item pick lists to choose from. However, when creating or editing Repeating Bills ALL the Products and Services appear in the Item pick lists, irrespective of whether they're active or archived.

    With many Products and Services archived (we have to renew them all annually), this makes the resetting of our Repeating Bills very labourious and makes the chances of making errors many times greater, as we can accidently choose archived Products and Services.

    This looks to be a bug in the system that needs rectifying quickly.

    4 votes

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  9. Implement a feature to make it easier to ensure purchase bills are paid only after the corresponding sales invoice has been settled by the client. Ideally, this could be achieved by adding a visibility feature, such as a dedicated column (along with the already existing Type, Reference, Issue date, Due date, Paid date, Paid, Due, Total, and Status) in the ‘Activity - Bills’ tab of a contact. This would eliminate the need to manually search for each sales invoice or purchase bill reference. This column could be optional, as the others are.

    1 vote

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    0 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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    Interesting idea here, thanks for sharing. Will be good to get a sense of the interest and other businesses that process sales and payments in this manner. Being open it's not something we have plans for atm, but we'll start to track the idea here and let you know if there is any plans made.

  10. I forward invoices to Bills via the email feature.
    I then batch process these at regular intervals.
    There could be 50 to 100 bills here.
    I have set default purchase contacts for all these contacts yet none of these drafts use that until I go into the bill for manual approval.
    This wastes a lot of time as I have to go through each bill 1 by 1.

    Allow me to bulk edit the accounts on Draft Bills and / or use the default account setting for that contact.

    This simple change would save me hours and I would get…

    15 votes

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    4 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  11. Add a line item/total for 'Awaiting approval' to the 'Bills you need to pay' section of the Dashboard.

    25 votes

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    12 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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    Thanks for all your input and sharing the needs in seeing awaiting approval invoices and bills from the Dashboard.

    We'll soon be rolling out our new Homepage experience. The team have put a lot of work into designing the new widgets with our customers front of mind.

    Within the new Tasks widget you'll be able to get a quick snap of invoices (and bills) awaiting approval, and from the 'Invoices owed to you', and 'Bills to pay' widgets you can get a quick understanding of the # of invoices or bills awaiting approval and amounts associated to them.

    Try it out in the demo company now and I'll be back to share when it's fully released 😊

  12. Need to be able to send credit notes including bill credit notes to customer/ supplier with one click. Equally as important as sending them an invoice/ purchase order.

    11 votes

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    6 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  13. Whilst doing multiline bills and invoices we need a key stroke shortcut that copies the line above to reduce time taken to enter data. I was used to this in sage. I REALLY miss it. Please!!!!

    63 votes

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    20 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  14. Deposits on Sales and Purchases - will this ever be possible in Xero? The workarounds are fine if you have a few deposits to keep track of. But what if you have many? Like my Art Gallery client where most art is sold on a 'layby' system. The layby isn't recorded as a sale until it is fully paid. The customer makes multiple payments. There is no way to directly link the payments to a pending sale. They all coded on-mass into a prepayment liability account. The only way to keep track of payments is a spreadsheet which is time…

    4 votes

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  15. Capture energy usage data such as electricity kwH and gas MJ, or actual CO2 emissions when inputting utility bills. This would be beneficial for SMEs who may need to calculate carbon emissions - increasingly being asked for this by larger clients with net zero targets and/or are calculating their Scope 3 emissions.

    4 votes

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  16. The new bills view has totally rearranged the columns and the column widths. I have already added my own vote to adjusting column widths but i really need to be able to sort my bills view columns in an order that is easier on the eye, and neck, instead of bouncing from from one side of the screen to the other unnecessarily.

    26 votes

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  17. 4 votes

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  18. I have a bill to enter from a supplier with around 40 line items.
    The supplier does not list unit prices on their invoice, so i do not have accurate unit prices to enter for each line item to match the line item total.
    This means i have to calculate and enter each line item unit price individually in order to match each line item total.
    If i could enter the line item total and qty, with xero automatically calculate/enter the unit price, this will make entry of these bills significantly quicker.

    10 votes

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    4 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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  19. Xero made a change when adding bills at some point last year.

    Before, when you clicked to add a new bill, it would automatically open in a new tab, really handy when adding multiple bills to a specific supplier.

    Now, you have to right click on add a new bill to open a new tab otherwise you have to keep going back to contacts to re-find the supplier in order to add another bill.

    Not sure why this needed to change as it was far more user friendly and was quicker to add bills before.

    1 vote

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  20. We would love to be able to send a remittance advice direct from Xero which includes the Reference that the supplier has asked us to provide. We are having a lot of trouble with suppliers failing to match payments which is time consuming for everyone.

    It would be a really easy fix!
    And even better, would be when exporting a file to BACS, the Reference requested by each supplier should be included on the relevant line, not the global company reference that is currently exported. (not quite sure why it already works exactly like we want when you only export…

    35 votes

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     ·  9 comments  ·  Bills  ·  Admin →
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