Remittance advice and tracking on budgets
Today’s release contains two highly requested features – we’ve had lots of community requests for both remittance advice (yes, you have all been very patient!) and also tracking on budgets, so it’s great to see these coming into the product.
Sending remittances to your customers has been built into the batch payments workflow – simply select one or more bills, follow the existing batch payment steps, and instantly send out individual remittance advice emails to your suppliers.
The remittance itself goes further than simply recording the current payments but also highlights any previous activity, not only showing previous payments but also, for example, whether any credit notes have been applied. I’ve created an example here to give you an idea of what to expect.
Creating budgets has got some loving too – you can now create multiple budgets and even associate them with tracking categories. So it’s possible to do things like create best/worst case budget scenarios and play these out against actuals throughout the year. Or, if you’re using tracking to identify, say, regional costs and sales, you could create different budgets for each region and report on these – lots of possibilities.
We’ve also released a number of other updates that we hope you enjoy.
- Export contacts for a specific contact group
- New default US chart of accounts for our new US users
- The sum of selected invoices now shows in both local and invoice currency (this ticks off another suggestion from the comments on our sniper post)
- Design refresh on login screens
- Extend address auto-complete to address dialogs (New Zealand and Australia only)
- Support for Rabobank (NZ/AU) and HSBC (NZ) batch payment files
Be sure to head on over to our release notes for more details.
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45 comments
Chris
Danny Hayden
Great work Tokes and team. These features add more awesome value and my clients will be wrapped!
Yahoo! these updates will make a fantastic addition to our clients. Love it!
James R
“The sum of selected invoices now shows in both local and invoice currency”
Hooray!
A total on the Due column (invoice currency) on the invoice report would be a massive help too.
John H
Nice to see that Remittance advices are in, but what about those of us who don’t do Batch transactions. I should be able to PDF and email an individual remittance advice, This is standard function that should be in the system. 
Great work Xero! love it
Awesome. You have made a lot of people very happy today.
Xero Team.. they just keep nailing it with the innovation and continuous improvement.
And thanks again for listening to your customers / clients / users.
ab fab troops!
Good work on the budgets, but here’s hoping that full Cash Flow forecasting is in the pipeline.
Bill
I’ve been hanging out for this improved budget functionality for ages and am excited to see it finally released. Unfortunately I seem to have a technical hiccup with the client who is most desperate for this feature, and the budget manager refuses to open. Works fine in other organisations. Problem is logged and I’m confident that Xero’s usual excellent support crew will be on to it in no time. 
I aggree with John H, what if we do not do batch payments…..but, i do love the new feature.
Keep up the great work. I just love the Enthusiasms.
Best to you all
Kim
These are the two biggest feature changes since I joined Xero 18 months ago. Good work! (I don’t count bank feeds – pointless unless you have support for my bank.)
The video above is pretty much a marketing video. It would be great if we could have a how-to type video too, and maybe some tips as to how to get the best out of the feature. It’s (necessarily) one of the most complex from the users point of view in the product. (BTW, your video library is really hard to find these days. It’s what sold me Xero in the first place.)
@Nigel – thanks for the thoughts on the Budget how-to video. Videos lose their impact if they’re too much longer than 2-3 mins so maybe a webinar on budgeting would be useful? Ideally we’d like to see this project done in conjunction with a bookkeeper or accountant as you’re right that it’s often a complex, industry-specific process.
On the video library front – we’re in the process of designing a new section for our videos and reviewing where they’re hosted (quick tip for anyone out there doing this stuff – Vimeo lets you host vids on your own page which is better for SEO than the YouTube approach). We’ll have this sorted soon.
Chris, Stephen and others who are looking for full Cashflow Forecasting capabilities – this is available now using Calxa http://www.calxa.com.au/information/budgets-and-cashflow-forecasts-for-xero
There’s a free trial and regular webinars for those who want to know more
Mark Lawton
Great work with the budgets and Remittance advices. I agree with John that it would be great to be able to send these individually. Also do you have something in the pipeline where you can roll up departmental budgets (using tracking) into a consolidated budget?
The remittance advice is great… just curious as to how long Purchase orders will be? Then we will be really “cooking with gas”…
Ivana
Fantastic on the remittances, have a few clients which have been screaming out for this feature.
Agree with @Peter with the Purchase Orders
Noel Roberts
Well done guys. I’ve used the remittance advice already and it’s great! I’m wondering though, is it possible to change the default “message” somewhere or does it need to be done each time you send a remittance advice?
Kerry Gemmell
Thanks Xero! I have been waiting for the Remittance Advice change and the Budgets by tracking group after suggesting them both over 3 years ago. I know the budget by tracking group has been a big one for you guys. Well done and keep it up! Love it!
Helene Mason
Thank you Xero for releasing the tracking category budgets, much appreciated :0)
Thanks for the recent budget improvements. NEXT STEP: Full cashflow functionality with receivables, payables and bank balance fed into the cashflow. pLEASE…..
Braden
Great news…finally !
When are we going to be able to attach a supplier credit note to a credit note ?
Great to see remittance advices – this has been the biggest request from our clients.
BUT ! All our XP machines running internet explorer in the office will no longer log in to Xero as you have pulled support for IE 8, we also have lots of clients confronted with Xero not working – why weren’t we warned of this change in advance ? We have no wish to have different browsers on different PC’s within our offices and certainly some of our clients are not happy at all !
As I’m sure you know IE v9 does not work on Windows XP and many of us don’t wish to change browsers.
Can you explain why this change has been made without warning ?
@Richard Can you just double-check the version of IE that you’re using? We have definitely not dropped support for IE8.
Littlehead
@Richard @Craig Interesting. Just checked with two different versions of IE8, one says they browser is out of date, the other sees the log in screen fine. Wierdly it’s the most upto date version of IE8 that is “out of date”
Out of date browser version:8.0.7600.16385
Out of date user agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0;
Working browser:8.0.6001.18702
Working user agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0;
So it looks like Xero has dropped support for IE7, not 8, but IE8 browsers running in compatibility mode, or using IE7 as a user agent, are not working.
Interestingly enough, the IE8 that’s not working isn’t using compatibility mode. I can’t do any testing with it as it’s locked down by user policies.
@craig @Littlehead I am relieved Xero haven’t formally dropped IE 8 but I understand you can’t support all older browsers. There does appear to be a problem with recognition of the browser versions ?
Our older XP office machines are running IE v 8.0.6001.18702 – I have just checked 4 of them and none of them are working. Ironically my PC at home worked fine last night when I checked it but not sure on the version number – I can check that later once I get home.
Is this an issue for tech support to look at ?
[...] find out more about the update, visit the Xero blog. If you have any questions about what this means for your business and how you use Xero, contact me [...]
@Richard @Littlehead No need to raise an issue – we’ll be releasing a fix for this over the next couple of days. In the meantime make sure Compatibility Mode is turned off (the problem is that your browser is being identified as IE7).
@Craig Thats great, thanks.
Good work. Can you email me that spreadsheet shown in the video?
@Thomas the spreadsheet is a work in progress that belongs to one of our Accounting Partners (Deloitte) who built it specifically to show off some of the cool features of Excel in Office 365. So not something you’d currently find useful for creating a functional budget.
Peter Morgan
Please can we have purchase order functionality. I have a big client I am struggling to convince to persist with Xero because they can’t access this feature like they did with MYOB. Saasu is looking a better option for them at present, but with purchase orders in Xero it would be better to stay with Xero. Why is this so hard?
We are also hanging out for purchase orders. Xero is fabulous but the lack of this fundemental capabillity confounds me weekly.
I have another pair of wishes as well. I would like to be able to send a copy of any email to my Highrise CRM cloud. An extra check box on the mail dialog like the “send a copy to myself” or a permanant address (set as a preference) to which all mail is sent as a cc would work well.
Secondly I would like to be able to select a form letter (from several options) when sending an invoice e.g. Thank you for your order. Here is your deposit invoice. A proforma will follow.
Thanks for a great service Xero.
Troy
Has Jeff Nutbeem commented on remittances yet?
Michelle
Any chance on getting a reply from xero regarding the purchase orders please? With myob account right live getting released next week, it’s definitely looking the better option in this regard!!
Adrian
Another plea for Purchase Orders!
Philip Gale
Any news on remittance advices for non batch payments?
mike durante
Would be great to have the option to select various tracking category (child) budgets to total up to the overall (parent) budget.
The key benefit being, if you update any of the child budgets it automatically flows through to the parent so no need to manually reconcile between them.
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A lot of people will be very pleased with the long-awaited addition of remittance advice. Next step wtih budgets – full cash flow forecasting capability.