Design your own invoices
Phew….today’s release is one of the biggest we’ve done and has some of your most requested features. Santa’s come early!
There’s quite a bit to take in as you’ll see, but let’s start with customizing your invoices. You may remember in June we introduced invoice branding to let you personalize your invoices and statements with different themes. Now we’ve added a new type of theme that lets you take complete control of the layout by uploading your own Microsoft Word templates. You can do things like add a packing slip to your invoice, write in any language and add style with color and images. Watch this video to see the magic.
Other features you’ll love:
Bulk Emailing statements or invoices – This makes chasing up overdue invoices and sending regular statements even easier.
Detailed Account Transaction Report – Select any period and review all your transactions in one place. Double check everything is correct before closing off a period or preparing reports.
Edit Reconciled Spend/Receive Money Transactions – A handy companion to the Detailed Account Transaction Report. If you come across a mistake you can now easily edit to correct them without have to first unreconcile
Edit Manual Journals – Flexibility to fully edit manual journals with a complete audit trail to track your changes.
US Date Entry – US date formats are now accepted, just select United States as the country on your profile and you can enter dates in the right format.
API Updates – You can now return manual journals, set the branding theme on submitted invoices and allow custom URLs to be attached to invoices. Check out our latest developer update for more details.
UK VAT Rate Change – We’ve got this covered for 4 January 2011.
NZ Differential Annual Reporting – helping accountants to produce annual reports for clients qualifying for differential reporting. Next step is to release similar functionality for Australia and the UK.
It’s been another huge year and we’ve got lots of exciting things planned for 2011.
To find out more about this release, see our release notes.
Read more about Business
32 comments
Hi.
Thanks for this really needed upgrade!! Very easy to customize and work with!!
Great update! 
Brilliant – always ahead of the game …. which helps us to stay the same
Fantastic, looks like you can do just about anything with invoices now!
@Adam Yes we will be soon – bit of an exercise/audit underway to move videos from one place to another!
Anton Gerner
Well done guys !
Fantastic work! But, a Microsoft Word template for invoicing? How do all your Mac customers utilise this?
Cheers!
When will price levels be available? Need to be able to set diff price levels (% or $value per item) instead of creating multiple items. Diff customers have diff rates on some services and items.
D
Xero is fantastic – a fantastic accounting engine with a fairly open architecture that anyone can hook into to extend the features.
So why did you choose a proprietary dead-end format like docx for templates?
Please keep things open and usable by everyone, not just the ms-drones.
Hi, really need to apply discount rates in % of cost, Otherwise shipment invoice looks ridiculous saying I am selling 0.75 of an item. And also have Mac.
James R
Bulk emailing is awesome. Our accountant will have her RSI cured for Christmas and our customers will be showered in invoices and statements.
Well done Xero! The customisation of invoices has long been a pain for professional bookkeepers and using a commonly used word-processing platform makes a lot of sense compared to some of the clunky proprietary programs used by some of your competitors. Allowing clients to customise invoices to give them a specific look and feel will make a big difference in presenting a more professional image to customers.
We are on Macs as well and +1 to a non-Office method of designing the invoice.
Sue Mills
When watching the video I find the commentary too fast to follow easily and would love to have rather slower speech.
Karl
why not in open document format, that can be used in microsoft word but also Openoffice?
I have to admit I detest Office and anything to do with it, but given the fact that just about every business runs it I can completely understand why you’ve chosen this program.
With regards to an alternative, is there any reason why a web UI couldn’t interact with the CSS files directly….add 20px left hand side of this *.jpg etc.? Thus doing all this inside of Xero (kind of like a wysiwyg editor)?
Anyway just my 2 cents
To those who can’t afford it and those MAC people, OpenOffice is free and to my knowledge opens docx perfectly fine.
I continue to be very pleased I switched to Xero.
My last accounting package is still providing an editor that came from the days of DOS… and about as easy to use.
In spite of the obstacle to Mac users, windows continues to near 90% of the market (PC’s, sorry iPods and iPhones don’t count!), so understand your approach.
However, using something like Open Office, will allow opening and saving in Word format, so it is not much of an issue, really.
Tim
Just seen the announcement about the new template design feature.
Brilliant! This really is a huge step. It’s a feature that was sorely lacking.
Now, all I need is the ability to add a discount column to my invoices so that I can show discounts on a line by line basis. The current workaround is far too clumsy and it confuses the heck out of my clients. It is unusable.
Please add a discount feature, it really is very much needed.
Peter
When will there be the ability to generate quotes?
Allan
can we move the the feilds ie move invoice and customer feild to the left or up and down?
For those Mac users or perhaps those who don’t have the time or skills you could outsource this task to a Virtual Assistant for minimal cost.
Check the list of Xero-Friendly VAs and/or Bookkeepers here:
http://www.xero.com/advisors/virtualassistants/
http://www.xero.com/advisors/bookkeepers/
Hope this helps?
Regards
Sarah
@Carl Crowther that’s a great suggestion. A web UI for generating templates is fairly straight forward, and that would mean people don’t need to rely as much on desktop software in Xero.
With regard to how programmers would do this: OpenDocument and OOXML files are just zips of XML so when programmers learn the syntax it’s not much more difficult than HTML. OpenDocument uses CSS properties (as XML attributes e.g. css:text-align=”left”) and OOXML has their own complex syntax, but it’s quite possible to generate these files.
Programmers could generate OpenDocument and then use (for example) OpenOffice to convert that to DOC and DOCX. They could run OpenOffice in a server-mode (if you’re on Debian/Ubuntu then just “apt-get install docvert-openoffice.org”) which will listen on a port and you can just stream conversion jobs at it. Basically you’d be treating OpenDocument as an abstraction layer format for the various office formats out there.
If anyone at Xero wants to talk this over let me know.
Tony
Its a shame you can’t include a physical delivery address on the invoice along with a different postal address. The field codes you provide for this just revert back to the potsal address when printing.
We love Xero so much that we have provided some templates for free – http://www.hypnoticzoo.com/freebies/xero/
F Lam
Hi, we would seriously consider switching to Xero if different pricing level and discount functions (as % by line item and/or at total) are available. Please keep us in the loop if this happens. Cheers.
Joan
How can I generate the subtotal for each page?
When invoice is more than a page, is it possbile to show the subtotal for each page?
Cheer~
Paul
Do you have a timeframe as to when you would be implementing different pricing levels? This is a deciding factor for us
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Can you guys please start uploading those videos in HD?