Our journey to new invoicing: an update from Diya Jolly, CPTO

I wanted to reach out personally, as we officially retire classic invoicing in November after more than a year of transitioning. While we’re thrilled to introduce even more features on our new invoicing platform, I know this change has been difficult for some of our customers. I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of insight into our journey at Xero and explain how changes like this fit into our bigger plans. 

Accelerating innovation

We know how important continuous innovation, product improvement and delivery is to you and your business. That’s why we’ve made it a key priority and delivered many new capabilities across core accounting, payroll and payments this year that our customers love. Some examples include: Tap to Pay for Australia, an updated tax manager for the UK and a localized bank reconciliation for the US.

As part of our efforts to innovate and deliver more value faster, we sometimes need to consolidate our back-end platforms, and make changes to your workflows and user experience. We know this can be hard for some of our customers. When we make these changes, we conduct significant user testing across both our accountants and bookkeepers and small business customers to ensure the adjustments will meet your long-term needs and expectations. 

Consolidating invoicing capabilities onto the new invoicing platform is one such example. I am very grateful for your support and partnership as we have undergone this transition together over the past year. It is customers like you and your trust in Xero that allow us to continue to innovate for you.

Changing for a better future for our customers

Invoicing is one of our top three mostly widely used products in Xero. For the last seven years, we have supported two invoicing products: classic invoicing (built when Xero launched in 2007) and new invoicing (built seven years ago). Since we serve millions of businesses with varied needs, both classic and new invoicing have garnered significant usage.

However, supporting two invoicing products has created downsides and complexities for our customers. It makes our platform less stable and less fault tolerant, resulting in more bugs and outages. It also reduces our ability to innovate at speed for you, because we have to build everything twice. We believe the best path forward is to consolidate to one invoicing platform. The new invoicing platform is more stable and scalable, and it allows us to deliver more features to you. 

Incorporating your feedback

Over the past 24 months, we collected feedback from our numerous classic invoicing users and built many new features in new invoicing that classic invoicing users love. These include recording overpayments, viewing tax rates breakdowns, history and notes and more. 

We’ve also added new features and capabilities into new invoicing that were not possible in the old platform due to its outdated technology. These include:

• more customisation tools for email templates, including live previews when editing
• the ability to send an invoice via SMS (currently in beta in Australia)
• viewing and enforcing credit limits

Today, 90% of Xero customers have switched to new invoicing. Our data shows that these users have a strong customer satisfaction of 70%. Your feedback has been essential in this process, helping us to refine and enhance the experience for our community.

New features landing before retirement

Xero invoicing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We acknowledge that for some of you, new invoicing doesn’t currently meet your needs. We will continue to work closely with you via our XPACs and user groups to ensure we understand your feedback. Also note that new invoicing as a platform allows us to build your specific workflows and other ideas faster from classic into new invoicing. 

Although some features will function differently from those in classic invoicing, we continue to introduce familiar workflows and updates weekly that you loved in classic. We are also reducing the number of clicks in workflows before we fully transition away from classic. Examples include the ability to:

• attach a file by dragging and dropping anywhere on the page
• add new tracking options via a modal in the page
• add keyboard shortcuts to make it faster to choose a preferred action (e.g. approve)

Navigating change together

The team and I are committed to listening to and reviewing your feedback to better understand your concerns and determine which features and improvements matter most to you. 

I encourage you to stay up to date on the changes we are making on our new invoicing hub and to reach out to our team if you need a hand. As a reminder, you’ll now be defaulted to new invoicing whenever you log in, and you can continue switching back until we retire classic invoicing on Wednesday 20 November, at 9am NZDT.

Change is never easy, but I firmly believe it’s how we’ll stay innovative and help you prepare for whatever the future may bring. Thank you for your continued support and partnership.

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Source: Xero Blog