Xero lets down small business customers

The Xero accounting system is said to be revolutionary in its handling of bank imports. Organisations using the system authorise their banks to provide daily feeds to Xero. The banks then provide an import each morning, which Xero then imports into its systems. These transactions then show up in the user's bank reconciliation screen.

Unfortunately this morning something has gone terribly wrong with all ANZ and National Bank customers using Xero. At the time of writing the banking feeds due at 11am, were not operational over 3 hours and 30 minutes later. Normally this time difference wouldn’t be the end of the world, but today is the 1st of the month. This is typically the day that small businesses send out their statements to customers. So if an accounts person can’t reconcile what was received on 31st May, they can’t send out statements to their customers.

At 11:30am Xero’s customer care team were advising frustrated users that the issue was at ANZ National’s end, that they have little control over the timeframes and that "they would be around half an hour late today”. Over three hours later the feeds are still not operational.

UPDATE:As of 10:45am the following day (24 hours late) the feeds are still not operational. Xero says "We understand you have end of month processing you need to get done and are working as quickly as possible to get this issue resolved. I will get back to you shortly with another update."

UPDATE: As of 3pm the following day the feeds where still not processed for 1st June, but feeds for 2nd June are now live. Xero has now notified users with the following warning box and temporary work around until the feeds catch up.

Notice regarding bank feeds for New Zealand customers with National Bank accounts:

Please note we have not received the automated statement data feed for 31 May from the National Bank. We continue to work with the bank on obtaining this statement data. If you cannot wait any longer you can do a manual import of the statement for the 31 May statement.

Here is a link to our Help Centre for instructions on how to do this - Xero Help Centre: Import bank statements for reconciliation.

If you do a manual import now the automated feed will duplicate the statement in Xero when it comes in. You can then simply delete this duplicated statement.

CONCLUSION: At 12:30pm today being 3 days late the feed for 31st May has been delivered to users. Those that used the manual import workaround suggested by Xero, will now need to delete the duplicates created.