Introducing a new bills to pay experience in Xero

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

Last year, they updated the ‘import’ page in bills. Next on the list is ‘Bills to pay’. Here are some of the changes you can expect to see on this page in the months ahead.

What’s new in bills to pay?

• 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’, ‘Create bill from email’, eInvoicing (Australia, NZ and Singapore), 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.

Changes you need to know about

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.

Some functionality previously available on the repeating tab will not be available straight away, but will be reintroduced once our technology upgrade is complete in the months ahead. This includes being able to search, filter and preview files directly within the repeating bills tab. In the meantime, you can use Ctrl+F to search on this page.

You will still be able to access the repeating template from the repeating tab as well as other list pages, (depending on the status of the bill) just as you do now. You will also be able to search for repeating bills in these tabs.
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Let us know what you think of the changes! If you have any questions or we can help you with any Xero support, please get in touch.
Email the team hello@thebusinesshut.co.uk or call 01858 289 189.

Thanks for stopping by,

Charlotte & The Business Hut Team

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