Introducing a new bills experience in Xero

Last updated 17 April 2023

Bills is one of Xero’s most loved features. It helps you track and pay bills on time, have a clear overview of your accounts payable, and gain a better understanding of your cash flow.

As part of our commitment to ‘Building on Beautiful’ — which is about continuously upgrading our technology to build new features faster, giving our platform a consistent look and feel, and making sure we keep accessibility top of mind — we’re refreshing the bills experience in Xero.

What’s new in bills?

Latest enhancements in April 2023:

You now have the option to select your own default pages in bills, so that whenever you go to ‘Bills to pay’, you land on the information that’s most useful to you. These could be ‘Awaiting approval’, ‘Awaiting payment’, ‘Draft’ or any other tabs you wish to see as default.

Our new ‘Automate bill entry’ button brings together two popular features — e-invoicing (Australia, New Zealand and Singapore only) and email-to-bills — in one convenient location. This automates the process of entering bills into Xero, so you can send invoices to Xero and populate bills in a few clicks.

Introduced in September 2022:

• The new, responsive design is in line with our other upgraded pages in Xero, with increased font size and white space that supports our journey to meeting global accessibility standards.
• If you like, you can use the ‘compact view’ toggle — available in the overflow menu — to reduce the size of the table and fit more bills on your screen. We introduced this as a direct result of your feedback on other upgraded pages across Xero.
• The search bar will now live at the top of your bills list rather than behind the search button, and will dynamically update as you type.
• Start and end date filters will live on the right of the search bar, as well as behind a filter button.
• You can use the filter button to find deleted and voided items, as well as expense claims. All filters will appear at the bottom of the search bar for easy reference.
• If you switch tabs, your filters won’t travel with you. But when you return to a previous tab the original filter will still be applied.
• The ‘New bill’ button will be green and located on the right-hand side of the page, like many of our other upgraded pages in Xero.

• A new green dropdown menu will include key actions like ‘New repeating bill’, ‘New credit note’ and ‘Import bills’.
• Additional actions like ‘Export bills’, and lending (Australia and UK) will live in the overflow menu on the right-hand side of the page.
• On some tabs, individual bills will have an overflow menu that lets you take more actions, like ‘Approve’, ‘Submit for approval’, ‘Delete’ and ‘Print’. 
• The order of the columns within the table has changed, and any files previewed will display next to the list rather than over it (you won’t be able to drag the file preview around anymore).
• When you approve bills in bulk and select ‘view’ within the pop-up message, you’ll be taken to a stand-alone ‘Approved bills’ page next, rather than the ‘Awaiting payment’ tab. 
• When bills are selected, the total number of bills and amounts will dynamically update as you select and deselect bills in the list.

When previewing bills in the list, you will now only be able to preview one file at a time, rather than several. This change has been made so the files being previewed don’t obstruct the list of bills. We appreciate this update may take some getting used to. However, changes like this are an important step in our journey towards making Xero more accessible.

We’re always listening

We hope these updates make it easier for you to keep up to date with your bills, and stay on top of your cash flow. We’ll continue to improve the bills experience and add more functionality over time.

If you need a hand with any of the changes we’ve introduced, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team for support. Remember, you can also share any feature requests in Xero Product Ideas, so our teams can get your feedback on what you’d most like to see in Xero.