I had intended to continue my “Xero wish list” posts all week (and probably next week too) but in this post I am going to write a few thoughts on today’s new release from Xero – it includes a lot of new features (some of which were also on my wish list).

Over Payments & Prepayments

This was high on my wish list! Until now users have needed to use a manual solution for over or pre payments.  For example the customer owes you $300 but pays you $400 or they pay you a deposit for work you have yet to invoice.  In both cases the solutions involved crediting the payment to a balance sheet account (which you needed to keep reconciled) and then double handling the payment once the invoice was created, or to pay a refund.

Now you can enter the payment (as either an over payment or a prepayment, and if you are not sure which to use please get in touch), then when the invoice is raised Xero will prompt you to allocate the payment (or you can arrange a refund).

All of this works on the supplier side also, for example if you need to make a payment as a deposit but haven’t yet received the invoice.

Grid layout on send / receive money

Whilst this is a minor enhancement it does make data entry of spend / receive money transactions easier especially when they have to be split over multiple lines.

Wish List!

But that then brings me to a wish list item that I was going to put up next week – being able to attach documents to spend money.  When a supplier invoice is entered to Xero the user can attach a PDF (or various other file formats) to the transaction, saving the supporting document in the Xero database.  But you can’t do this with a spend money transaction, which is how many smaller businesses enter their payments to suppliers.

Would you like to be able to attach documents to spend money transactions?  It seems to me that this is a feature lots of smaller businesses could use.

Duplicate AP Invoice Check

Simple, but nice – enter a supplier name and their invoice number, if it has been entered before you’ll get a warning.  This will help you to minimise the risk of duplicated payments to suppliers.

Lots more besides

There are a whole bunch of other new features released I’m not going to list them all here as I wanted to keep this post brief, plus you can read these at on the Xero blog at http://help.xero.com/#Changes_23November2011