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183 votes
Hi community, thanks for sharing your continued interest here. We appreciate the importance of having assurance that mail you send from Xero is being received, and that being able to send from your own company email would increase confidence in this process.
I can confirm this idea has been regularly reviewed by our product teams, and being able to send from your own company email is on their radar. Currently there are other priorities, and platform work that requires their attention, before they can consider this more deeply.
We'll move the idea back to submitted so we can continue to gauge the interest through votes here. When there is opportunity to pick this up, I will share any news with you all here.
An error occurred while saving the comment An error occurred while saving the comment 
Perry Paolantonio
commented
" and even if they DID, they would not know how to talk a client through REMOVING the address from the Spam list."
And that assume they can even do that. We have institutional clients (universities, schools, museums, libraries), where that can only be done by IT. If they've decided you're spam good luck getting them to change that. Especially when actual spammers have used post.xero.com to send phishing emails that purport to come from legitimate companies. I've received some of these myself.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
1/3 of the past 15 posts on this idea are promoting your service. I'd call that spam.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
@ashkay_singh - please stop spamming.
I swear every day the Xero ecosystem becomes more and more ******.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
Nobody should have to pay for an add on to do something we’re already paying zero to do.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
First, it's not that complicated for them to implement. They're just not interested in doing it.
We're switching to Zoho books. It supports DKIM/SPF authentication, and also addresses two other big issues we have with Xero. The only reason it's taken us so long to do it is that we're a small company and moving 2 years worth of records over is a bit of a process. I'm hoping to get to it before the end of the year so we can ditch Xero. Zoho is slightly less expensive for us as well.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
@David Boshoff: their “solution” doesn’t work if all mail coming from post.xero.com has been blocked at the server level. The IT departments at two of our customers have done this. So it never even gets to the recipients inbox.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
So just an update here: I just received 4 emails that came from post.xero.com that look like phishing attempts. One invoice, one statement, two thank yous for paying the invoice. None of these are invoices for a vendor we work with or have heard of, and we never paid anything.
This is why it's important - for customer trust - to have the emails coming from the company that's billing the client, NOT from Xero. These looked reasonably legit and the first thing I look at when I get an email that doesn't smell right is the return address. Now you have phishing emails using the server that Xero uses for legit emails. That's just great.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
>Has anyone got feedback / recommendations they'd like to share?
We're moving to Zoho as soon as the tax season in the US is over.
Funny, I was on vacation in the UK recently and saw a ton of ads on TV for Xero. I can confirm that this appears to be where they're putting their money - into roping in new suckers, not into improving the software. Between this issue, the way they handle ACH payments through Stripe, and the inability to have multiple contacts within a single client, we're done.
Zoho appears to do everything we want, I've been testing it and will get it set up and fully running in parallel with Xero over the next couple weeks, then as soon as our accountant is done with our taxes, we're done with Xero. It's slightly cheaper, gives us a feature that allows us to cancel another subscription (time tracking, which we do through e-hour now), and it looks to be under active development with a responsive support team.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
This is truly ridiculous. Make the current setup the default and allow those who want to do it the right way to do so. If you’re so worried that it will break for some people put it in an advanced section of the preferences and put a warning on it.
Almost 25% of our invoices never make it to the customer. How is that acceptable for an accounting/invoicing app?
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
"If Xero allowed us to effectively SPOOF the FROM address, many recipient email servers, such as Google, would mark it as SPAM, because the headers do not look correct. This might well be worse than the current situation."
this absolutely *would* be worse. About 30% of our invoices are filtered to spam as it is. Add in a spoofed reply-to or From address, and it gets worse.
What Xero needs to do here is not hard. It's a very simple thing to set up, and it's how it's done in, for example, Quickbooks. We used Quickbooks desktop for 20 years, and for the past 15 or so, we had all outgoing emails sent from our mail server.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
We switched to Xero a few weeks ago. Only sent out a half dozen invoices or so at this point, but so far half of them have been filtered to spam. Most of our customers are large institutions like universities and museums, and they tend to have pretty aggressive spam filtering setups. This needs to be fixed because if we're not getting our invoices to them, we're not getting paid.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
Obviously the ideal solution here is to allow users to add their own email server settings. FWIW, Quickbooks desktop has done this for at least 12 years, probably longer. In the Send Forms preferences, you can specify common providers (gmail, yahoo, etc), but you can also set up your own email server. ours requires SSL and authentication. Your password is requested the first time you send an email in a session and remembered until you log out. See attached.
As far as the complexity, let people decide for themselves. We have used Quickbooks to email invoices for years and have SPF/DKIM configuration all dialed in with our web host, who also hosts our email server. It wasn't complicated or hard to set up at all.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
Our clients pay online. When you send the email from Xero, the email is HTML formatted and includes buttons to the payment link and to a page where the client can view their past/overdue invoices. It also merges in stuff like the client name automatically. It looks nice.
Yes, we could do something similar manually but it's a lot of work per email compared to just clicking a button from the invoice page. I'm just suggesting that the same thing could be done from the Xero UI, to automatically fill out a new email, already formatted to match the template in Xero, with buttons and maybe a PDF attachment. It saves several steps and a bunch of copy/pasting/editing of boilerplate text that you'd have to keep handy, if you did it the way you describe.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
@Christopher Dunham: It may not work for your use case, but it would work for ours and many others. We invoice our customers individually. As I said, a workaround. I'd prefer that the emails just go through our server as well but this would be a quick and easy way for them to implement something that works for individual emails.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
There is a relatively simple solution to this, or at least a workaround that doesn't require Xero to send the mail through your own SMTP server: All Xero needs to do is create a mailto link that pre-populates your local mail application. Here is a simple example: https://htmlf1.com/snippet/create-mailto-link-with-pre-populated-content
This is something that Quickbooks did for a long time and maybe still does. Basically it creates a new email with the To, CC, even BCC fields, the subject line, and the body pre-populated with the template text. Your default email program opens up with a new email already filled out and ready to send. I'm not sure if it's possible to attach a PDF to it, but it should work for online payment emails, and worst case, Xero could generate a PDF as part of the process so you can manually attach it.
As a bonus, this could also address the issue here: https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/45150577-contacts-allow-multiple-addresses-for-a-single-c
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
We've used Quickbooks for 20+ years and just switched to Xero. I'm kind of floored that I can't sent invoices through our mail server. This is basic stuff - please make it so that the user can use their own SMTP server (authenticated) for outgoing emails. I sent 5 invoices out today and just found out that 2 were filtered to spam. That's not good.
Perry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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56 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
I just noticed that Xero seems to have implemented Stripe ACH Debits. We have enabled it in our settings, and have a client in the next couple weeks who typically pays via ACH, so we'll have to see how this works. But if they really did implement this correctly, you can strike one of the three things off our list of why we're leaving Xero!
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
"I just asked Stripe to implement this."
It is already implemented in Stripe. There are two ways to collect an ACH payment with stripe: one works just like a credit card where the user enters their bank info just like a credit card number. The other is the way Xero does it. The problem isn't Stripe, it's Xero being too lazy to implement the other method that Stripe already offers.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
Roy - the issue is that Stripe offers two ways to do ACH: one that's completely seamless to the end user like a credit card transaction, and one that provides the end user with a virtual bank account number and requires them to do the work to initiate the transaction. At least in the US, this just isn't a thing people do, so lots of friction with that option.
We disabled ACH transactions because there is a possible side-effect to option 2: the virtual account Stripe creates is tied to a specific invoice. If an accounts payable person enters that as "our" bank account number, they can apparently send a transfer there for a future job. But it will be incorrectly applied to an already-paid invoice. The whole setup is just kind of dumb, to be honest, and feels like a temporary work-around that somehow stuck.
That said, it's the one Xero has chosen to go with, probably because it was easier to implement.
Given that, I don't expect them to bother implementing the frictionless version of ACH payments with Stripe, because it would require more work. As demonstrated by many other issues that have been lingering here for many years, they don't seem to like fixing problems as long as they can keep onboarding new suckers.
We're leaving the platform as soon as we're done with our taxes for this year. (Zoho Books is integrated into Stripe for ACH using the first option, by the way, and that's what we're doing). It's too bad. I actually like most aspects of Xero but the complete lack of interest in fixing basic issues is mind-boggling.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
Adding my name here, though I'm sure it's pointless. Between this and not sending emails through our mail server, I'm on the verge of looking for new accounting/invoicing software.
The current ACH setup through Xero is bizarre and unfamiliar, and can potentially lead to overpayments. Why isn't Stripe's ACH Direct Debit flow enabled in Xero? Stripe describes exactly what we want, which is what we had with Quickbooks:
“ACH Direct Debit payments enables customers to pay by providing their bank account details. Customers must accept a mandate authorizing you to debit their account and verify ownership of the account through instant verification or micro-deposits.”
This is a payment flow that makes sense to the end user, because it's EXACTLY like the credit card payment flow. The only difference is that instead of entering your credit card number, you enter your bank account/routing number.
When the user is presented with a list of account/routing/SWIFT numbers and told to go to their bank to initiate a transfer, guess what? They're not going to do it. We've had this enabled for a few months and not a single customer has used it.
Also, nobody in the US that I've asked has ever heard of GoCardless. Why should I have to pay $25 per month to get something I already have enable through my Stripe account?
Perry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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1,201 votes
Hi community, we understand your needs in this feature and want to assure you were taking on board all your feedback.
As many of you accustom to this idea will know, multiple addresses requires a complex solution. It's been something we’ve been moving towards for some time and we’ve done a lot of back end work that will allow us to bring it to you in the future.
We have 12 different products within Xero that rely on contact data, as well as many of our app partners. This means that contacts need to seamlessly flow across technology, products and all connections on Xero. And that’s exactly what we’ve been working on.
One of the reasons we announced the retirement of classic invoicing is because many of the features being asked for, just can’t be brought into classic invoicing. The old technology has too many technology limitations to enable this.…
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
@Martin - We've been using Xero for about a year. As soon as (US) tax season is over, we're switching to Zoho, which seems to not have the issues we've had with Xero. And they seem to actively update the software with actual user requested features. Xero pays lip service to user requests, but doesn't seem to be doing any active development beyond tinkering with the invoice layouts.
Real issues like this feature request, and the problems with sending emails through their server (which often get flagged as spam by our customers, who never see invoices), are critical. But they seem to have no interest in fixing them. Honestly, I'd keep looking if I were you.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
We have been using Xero for about a year. Between this issue, the inability to send email through our own server to avoid getting tripped up in spam, and the inability to do an ACH payment through Stripe that doesn't involve the customer going to their bank to transfer to us, I've decided we're done.
The canned responses I get from support feel like a slightly more polished version of what we used to get with Intuit - repetition of what you just said, with no satisfactory answer. And here, almost a year after Kelly posted that they're working on it, this still isn't implemented. I honestly don't think they have any plans to fix any of this stuff. This issue is #2 in the top requests list, for crying out loud.
We're probably moving to Zoho. Cheaper per month, I've already test-imported all our company data, and they do regular updates and seem really responsive. They also respond (officially) on the Zoho subreddit, and seem to be more together than this mess. Too bad, I actually like Xero - the interface is nice, it's simple, and it mostly just works. But I mean this kind of stuff is a really big deal and they have not demonstrated they care.
As soon as tax season is over, we're switching to something else.
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
many of our customers are large organizations (like universities). While all the bills for invoices to different departments are paid by the university, we invoice the individual departments separately, and they all have separate contact information (emails, phone, mailing addresses).
In Quickbooks, we used "Jobs" (which are basically folders inside the customer), for each department. Each Job could have its own contact info. Something like that would be welcome. As it is now, we have to have 22 separate customers just for one university, because that's how many departments we work with. Even though the checks for all of those come from the same place.
Perry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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74 votesPerry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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80 votes
Hi everyone, we've begun rolling out a new feature that enables you to reconcile a period in Xero which'll be available to users with the Standard or Advisor roles. This'll appear as a new tab within a bank account (next to Account Transactions). From here, you can capture the period dates and balances from your statement, and Xero will automatically show and select all transactions within the period. Once the period is reconciled, you'll be able to close it to prevent transactions being deleted or unreconciled within that period. You'll find details of how to access and use reconcile a period on Xero Central.
As a start we'll be making this feature available to all US and CA organizations, so I'll be back to confirm once fully live in these regions. 🙂
Perry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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13 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
I have 525 of these. it would be more than 2600 clicks to restore them manually and would take me most of a day. Please add this functionality.
Perry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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134 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Perry Paolantonio
commented
We have duplicate contacts from an import from Quickbooks, where the contacts had "jobs" and were imported in the format Contact:Job_Name -- so one contact with 25 jobs now has 26 contact entries, all slightly different. There is no way to delete these from the list, which seems kind of crazy to me. I get the idea of not allowing deletions for audit purposes, but if that's the case, make an archive-like bucket to put them in, keep track of the deletion and let me get them out of my sight. I made the mistake of archiving them, and now I have 525 contacts stuck in the archive. It will take me more than 2600 clicks to get them out one at a time to do a merge or something like that, which I won't be doing. So my new company file is a mess right from the beginning because it's got an archive full of not-real contacts.
Perry Paolantonio
supported this idea
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"That being the case, this is why we need Xero to climb down off the fence, and start writing some code....."
Exactly. Third party add-ons are NOT as solution. We pay $560/year for Xero and this is totally basic web service functionality. Nobody should have to rely on paid third party apps or browser extensions to make this work.