The walkthrough
69.3 seconds. Captions are burned in; an
.srt and .vtt sit beside the file.
The friction, as reported
“In ‘Bills Awaiting Payment’ it would be useful if you could assign (or at contact level) a payment method. Specifically so that anything due to be taken by DD isn’t inadvertently paid on a payment run.”
Verbatim from the Xero Product Ideas board. Reproduced as a contiguous extract and checked against the harvested record.
What the walkthrough shows
- Payment method, defaulted on the contact record.
- Two older bills predate the field and read as not set.
- Select all takes six of the nine bills.
- The three direct debits are held out of the run.
- This is a default and the way back is one click.
- The method sits on the contact. One bill can differ.
- ABC Furniture is on direct debit. This bill goes by BACS.
- The new column takes its width from the supplier column.
- Longer supplier names now wrap onto two lines.
- Six bills go on the run, at 4,013.32.
- The three direct debits stay in the list, waiting.
- Nothing was paid twice.
The assessment
The opportunity, in a different shape.
A column tells you at the moment you are least likely to look.
Holding direct debits out of the run is the part that stops the double payment.
The reasoning
The job is real and well evidenced. The proposed form does not do it.
A column is passive. It tells you something at exactly the moment you are least likely to read it: mid payment run, at speed, on a long list. The failure the requester describes is a slip, and slips are not fixed by adding information at the site of the slip. They are fixed by changing the default so the slip cannot happen quietly.
The better form has three parts. Payment method becomes a contact-level default with a per-bill override, which is the data change and is unavoidable. Bills collected by direct debit are then excluded from batch payment selection by default, visibly and reversibly, with a bar that says so. The column comes along for free and is the least important part of the change.
Reshaped rather than a constraint because nothing existing breaks. Bills with no payment method set behave exactly as they do today. The cost is a new field and one squeezed table column, and the mockup shows both rather than hiding them.