The walkthrough
68.1 seconds. Captions are burned in; an
.srt and .vtt sit beside the file.
The friction, as reported
“Ability to include more information that’s unique to customers/business/industry that assist the transaction and relationship between customers”
Verbatim from the Xero Product Ideas board. Reproduced as a contiguous extract and checked against the harvested record.
What the walkthrough shows
- The invoice header now carries four custom fields.
- Two of them come from the contact record.
- Two are entered on this invoice only.
- They are defined once, for the whole organisation.
- Every invoice, quote and bill in the org gets them.
- Four is not a limit. The header grows with each field.
- At 1280 by 800 the line items start below the fold.
- This is the grid the user opened the invoice to fill in.
- This is the document the customer receives.
- None of the four fields are on it.
- The branding theme has nowhere to put them yet.
- Three themes need editing before any of this reaches a customer.
The assessment
The constraint.
The fields land in the editor. The document the customer receives has no room for them.
Three branding themes need rebuilding first, and the header grows with every field.
The reasoning
The feature is implementable and the job is genuine. It is not viable as asked on the invoice editor alone, and a mockup showing two tidy new rows in the header would be a flattering lie about what this costs.
The field is invisible where it matters. The stated purpose is customer facing. The customer sees the PDF. The PDF comes from a branding template the field does not exist in yet. So the feature ships in a state where the editor shows the value and the document does not — the exact inverse of the request. Three themes need editing before any of it reaches a customer.
The header grows and the invoice gets longer. Custom fields are unbounded by definition. At six fields the line grid starts below the fold at 1280×720, on a screen where “I have to scroll” is already an in-development complaint with 247 votes behind it.
The tempting reshape — contact-scoped fields that flow onto invoices — is what the description already asks for. There is no better form to show here. There is a bigger bill to show.