We have just released the ability to mark an invoice as sent through the API (http://blog.xero.com/2012/10/developer-update-mark-as-sent-through-api/). We hope that this, in addition to the ability to retrieve a PDF copy of an invoice will allow most developers to do the email part themselves.

Work is underway within Xero to provide more flexibility around the emailing of invoices, templates and being able to set a sender address other than the current user. Until this has been done and we can then expose it via the API, we will not be providing the ability to email invoices from Xero via the API.

No ETA yet, but please note you can still apply a discount to an invoice via the API by adding an additional line to the invoice with a negative amount.

I have merged the “callback URL on Invoices” idea with this webhooks idea as we are leaning more towards web hooks, but still very much open to ideas.

We agree it would make working with the API much more efficient.

Please keep sharing your use cases and ideas if you haven’t already: they are a real help.

I’ve reopened this issue just to be clear we haven’t forgotten about this and know this is a big issue for some developers. We’re looking to get overdue and outstanding amounts displayed separately in a future release.

We have exposed a number of reports via the Xero API recently. The AgedReceivablesByContact and AgedPayabledByContact reports will download a summary of all outstanding invoices for a specified contact. This report also provided the total amount outstanding.

See http://blog.xero.com/developer/api/Reports/#AgedPayablesByContact for more information.

If you have any questions, have a look at our new developer answers site: http://answers.xero.com/developer/

Dan..

Great to see votes and use cases so far. We have done some initial scoping with the payroll development team and will look to deliver this functionality in 2013

We have no current plans to provide this functionality via the API as we have more sought after features to deliver and external systems using the API can easily create invoices on demand. Xero is not suitable as a billing engine, which is what the net effect of exposing repeating invoices via the API would be.

We appreciate there is demand for this feature so we will keep this request open, but it is unlikely to make it onto the development schedule for the next year.

Our initial priority would be to allow developers to retrieve a list of repeating invoices already created

Work is now underway to expose the ability to apply a credit note as a payment on an invoice and
also to apply a payment to a credit note (refund).
Note that these are separate streams of work but we will leave them as a combined request for now.

Make sure you subscribe to the developer mailing list to stay up to date with API releases: http://developer.xero.com/subscribe-to-the-xero-api-developer-mailing-list/

We introduced Reporting API’s earlier this year – see http://developer.xero.com/api/reports/ and the ability to get all journals for an organisation – http://developer.xero.com/api/journals/

You currently need to be a standard user in Xero to grant rights to a 3rd party application. Adding permission options for apps is on our radar

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

For some of your scenarios consider using the approach described in our guide for handling payment processor receipts in Xero could be a whole lot more efficient. http://blog.xero.com/developer/handling-payment-processor-receipts-in-xero/

Even if you have a statement line for every invoice payment (rather than a statement line equalling many payments) you could utilise a clearing account to pay off invoices and then use Xero cash/fast coding to code all the bank statement lines of a similar pattern to the clearing account.

Unfortunately I can’t commit to progressing this request further at the moment. We’ll keep listening to your feedback and can add more examples in the guide above if you think that would be helpful.

No ETA on when we might be able to do this yet, but definitely something we want to get to – keep voting and let us know of specific use cases you might have – they are always useful when we look at scoping development.

We’re currently working on the Payments endpoint, adding GET method and adding more fields when creating the payments (e.g. currency rate).

We will consider adding a POST method, but this wouldn’t add the ability to update a payment – this is a limitation of the core accounting engine.

You might consider adding a comment-only line item to the invoice. This would get printed on the PDF of the invoice.

If the message is to be added to lots of invoices, you could even consider defining a price list item with a description only. This would save re-typing the comment for each invoice.

A third option is adding a comment onto a docx branding theme template. If all EC customers could be assigned the same branding theme, the comment could be hard-coded onto the docx template.

We’ll certainly consider other options to make life easier for our customers.