Xero - where have all of my bank transactions gone?

Xero - where have all of my bank transactions...

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I am currently bringing a cient's accounts up to date in Xero, and have been reconciling a month manually.  Not sure how this has happened, but all transactions that I have ticked have completely disappeared from the system.  I have checked in the nominal listings, and they aren't there.  I am guessing that when I chose to untick, the thing has actually deleted.  There was no warning, and I can't believe that this would be the intention of the people at Xero.  I know that they did some upgrades yesterday, but this is slightly alarming. 

If anyone has any ideas how I can resurrect the transactions, and save what is actually supposed to be my first week's holiday since the January deadline, I'd be really grateful.  

Replies (20)

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By MissAccounting
25th Mar 2013 13:04

Slightly worrying!  Sadly I

Slightly worrying!  Sadly I can offer no help only becoming a Xero user recently but Im sure someone more experienced than me will be along soon to help out.

Or perhaps if there was a Xero Discussion Group this query might get solved a lot faster, hint hin Aweb ;o)

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By jjswjjsw
25th Mar 2013 14:17

Contact Xero Help

Xero normally asks you to reconfirm you want to delete a transaction before it removes it, from experience completely deleting an item is quite hard.

If an item is unreconciled in the bank it won't appear in the nominal ledger because it hasn't been allocated to an income/cost nominal.

It's hard to comment without seeing the data, have you contacted your Xero Partner or Xero customer care for help (both via Help on the top right) as either (with permission) can also see the data and hopefully put you back on track. 

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Man of Kent
By Kent accountant
25th Mar 2013 14:27

Xero upgrades

Hi Jem, after yesterdays Xero upgrades the 'unreconcile' button is now the 'remove and redo' button.

I don't do any bank recs in xero manually, so when you say the transactions have disappeared is that they have gone completely?

What do you see when you go into the bank accounts tab and select bank statements rather than account transactions?

 

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Replying to Cheshire:
JEM
By jem
25th Mar 2013 22:11

 

 

 

Hi,

What is really scary, is that if I go to an invoice that was previously paid, it now says that I reversed the transaction today.  So it has just taken out everything for the month, without any big warnings regarding what this will do.  I can't believe there isn't more of a safeguard, this can't be right.  

Xero are hard to get hold of, I have logged a problem with them, and they hopefully will come back by the end of tomorrow, according to their own information.

I am stunned by this and not very happy.  

I am hoping that they may have a way of winding back the data to yesterday.

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Man of Kent
By Kent accountant
25th Mar 2013 14:33

@Jem

What do you see when you go into the bank accounts tab and select bank statements rather than account transactions?

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Replying to Cheshire:
JEM
By jem
25th Mar 2013 14:42

 

 

There are no entries for January at all.  

Surely Xero didn't set out to add a 'delete all transactions' functions to the bank rec.  It seems very dangerous to me.

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By DMGbus
25th Mar 2013 15:28

Reconcile / compare in Excel

I currently have a case of £4765 or so difference on a bank a/c in Xero.

Xero does talk about differences in reconciliation which doesn't seem to make sense in the context of the difference that I have, quicker to go as follows...

So, download to Excel as follows:

Reports > Trial Balance > Click on bank balance in YTD column

> Drop down menu show transactions > bank transactions then come up on screen > Lower right corner click on Export, Choose Excel

Result: got bank transactions from Xero - what Xero thinks that they are.

Next get .csv downloads from the bank to compare.

Result: should identify the error.

In my case no obvious missing transactions (things were wrong last week before the system changes at Xero).

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Replying to Cheshire:
JEM
By jem
25th Mar 2013 15:42

 

 

Thanks for that.

Xero has somehow actually deleted the transactions that were manually entered in Xero.  I have a client that doesn't use the uploaded statement method of dong this.    I guess after this, we are going to have to figure out how to do it, I know they had problems with extracting Lloyds TSB files and importing to Xero, it seemed to time-out when they tried.

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By jjswjjsw
25th Mar 2013 16:05

LLoyds TSB

I don't find the Lloyds auto import works very well (although it has improved), but it's very straightforwards to load a bank statement on screen when logged into the online banking then below the transactions select export data and choose the dates and format .qif file. In Xero go to import a bank statement and import the file, although this isn't as good as the feed in real time it works very smoothly. It also copes with my manually entering transactions e.g. at a VAT quarter end when I don't have the bank statement file to import as it matches the transactions once the statement file is imported. 

I'm still bemused by your January transactions going awol as this is concerning to you and shouldn't be possible. I think it would be worth raising with Xero Customer Care. 

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Gary Turner
By garyturner
25th Mar 2013 19:38

Happy to investigate

Hi there, I just spotted this thread.

We're usually able to turn around Customer Care queries very quickly, so if you haven't already done so please drop a note to [email protected] and the team will pick this up.

At first glance it may be that you have inadvertently mis-clicked 'Remove and Redo' which sits next to 'Select All' - which if that's the case suggests we need to do a better job of warning users about the implications of 'Remove and Redo' to trap such unintentional errors.

Either way, Customer Care should point you in the right direction and if it helps would be happy to call you to investigate further.

Gary Turner
Managing Director, Xero
@garyturner

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Replying to User deleted:
Kieran Phelan
By KPEM online
25th Mar 2013 21:40

Hi Gary,

I was with a client today and notice the "Reconcile" button is now removed too and the Help menu must be used to view this button. Multiple items cannot be reconciled manually and it seems that when you move to another page within Account Transactions, you need to reactive the Reconcile button within the Help Menu.

Very poor change to the system for those that still need to do manual reconciliations!

Any plans to reverse these changes? 

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Replying to User deleted:
JEM
By jem
25th Mar 2013 21:48

 

 

 

Hi Gary,

I did get a response and assistance from your technical support department, and they were great.  However, I have to say that after using various accounting software packages, and taking into account what would normally be expected from functions within the bank reconciliation screen, I would not expect a button that says 'Remove and redo,' to actually delete all bank transactions permanently, whether they be bill payments, straightforward bank transfers, payments or receipts.  I think you need to view this in terms of what users are going to expect as a bank reconciling option.  Accounting entries are not normally deleted from the bank rec window, and I can't emphasise enough, what a 'no no' this is in accounting terms.  The last time I used Sage, you had to enter the maintenance section to make deletions and in Quickbooks you need to go into each entry individually to delete, and even then, if the entry has been reconciled for VAT, you will have problems making the deletion.  If I had been reconciling a  few months worth of entries, just think how much data would have disappeared in that one action.    

I completely understand where you are coming from, and maybe to you it seems perfectly obvious what 'Remove and Redo' means, but I just don't think someone reconciling a bank account, would actually take that to mean 'Your accounting transactions will be deleted forever,'  they are more likely to take it as 'This will remove all of the ticks and you need to start again.   Your technical support chap did explain that this was really brought in to address issues with reconciliations carried-out using imported bank statements, and that data would still be retained in the statement, so I guess its not such an issue.  Unfortunately that isn't everybody and will catch out casual users, such as accountants who don't work with your software on a regular basis.

Saying all of that, I really do like your software, and it is incredibly easy to use, but please rename that button or at least put a warning on for those dealing with manual entries.

 

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Gary Turner
By garyturner
25th Mar 2013 22:23

Thanks

@sparkey999 - Yes, you're not alone in expressing frustration today about this weekend's change. The rationale behind rethinking the button options was that after analysing customer care feedback, for users with bank feeds the button was somewhat redundant and confusing, so we re-thought the workflow. However after the feedback we've seen today I think it's fair to say we undercooked the thinking around how we should have implemented this change and it's clearly far from ideal for quite a few people who actively worked with it as it was originally designed.

So, the good news is we're now looking into how we resolve the design issue so that everyone's happy, probably by making it a permanent toggle rather than by session. (There's also a bug we'll be fixing this week whereby it forgets your choice if you page across to a new page, but that's a quality issue rather than design).

(For completeness, here's the thread on our Community site tracking the whole discussion from proposal to implementation to proposing a resolution.)

@jem - I appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts - it's sometimes too easy just to huff in frustration and get on with your life. I'll make sure our product manager gets your feedback.

Regards,

Gary Turner
Managing Director, Xero
@garyturner

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Replying to User deleted:
JEM
By jem
25th Mar 2013 22:07

 

 

 

Hi Gary,

 

Thanks so much for listening and responding.  

 

Jackie

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Replying to bernard michael:
Gary Turner
By garyturner
27th Mar 2013 14:20

Design update

Hi Jackie,

I raised your points with both our CTO and our Product Manager and as a result we'll be making a design change to the 'Remove & Redo' button to add a confirmation step before proceeding. I don't have a timescale yet for when that change will go live, but it should be reasonably soon.

Thanks for flagging it, very grateful - and a great testament to AccountingWeb's community members for flagging this issue and helping us make sure we build the best product we can. From now on I'll think of that button as the Jackie Button!

Regards,

Gary Turner
Managing Director, Xero
@garyturner

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JEM
By jem
27th Mar 2013 14:47

 

 

That was really good timing, as I have just sat down to re-enter January's entries.

Knowing that Xero now has a 'Jackie' button has made my day!

 

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By User deleted
27th Mar 2013 16:41

Audit/Transaction log ....

Surely a separate record is kept of all transactions in a transaction log table?

This record would hold the fields making up the original transaction and can be easily displayed in summary form (with drill down) to identify or confirm what has taken place

In some circumstances this would be called an audit log

Essentially this approach would probably employ the concept of physical/logical delete in order to operate properly - accordingly no record would actually be physically deleted until specifically cleared down from the audit/transaction log

At least this method would allow one to determine precisely what had taken place by simply looking at the transaction log - so whilst the damage might have been done at least one could see what had happened

Does this process exist in Xero?

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Gary Turner
By garyturner
27th Mar 2013 17:20

Journal Report in Xero

Hi JC,

You are correct.

The Journal Report in Xero captures every interaction with the financial database and would show a record of this kind of user activity, user name, time and date of change or deletion of transactions.

Regards,

Gary Turner
Managing Director, Xero
@garyturner

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By Rachael White
03rd Apr 2013 17:26

Hi all, 

Hi all, 

I'm pleased to say there's now a brand new Xero discussion group live on the website. 

Take a look if you're interested! 

Rachael

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Gary Turner
By garyturner
04th Apr 2013 16:16

Issue now fixed

We rolled an update to Xero last night that fixed the issue highlighted by Jackie, and when users now click on the Remove & Redo button in the Bank Reconciliation screen in Xero, a confirmation box now appears warning the user of the implications of proceeding, as shown in the screen grab below.

 

Thanks again to Jackie for unwittingly volunteering to be be our crash test dummy in this instance, I hope it didn't inconvenience her too much.

 

Gary Turner
Managing Director, Xero
@garyturner

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