The first gap: a bill in dispute has nowhere to live
A supplier queries an invoice. The bill is real, it may be wrong, and it should not go into a payment run until someone answers. Xero has no flag on a bill for that: no disputed or queried status, no place for the question and the answer, and no chase date.
On Xero’s Product Ideas site the request is for a status that marks a bill as in dispute or queried, with a note and a chase date, and one list of every open query. It was opened on 24 November 2022. On 2 November 2026 it showed 1,292 votes and its status was: Accepted.
Source: Xero Product Ideas: flag a bill as in dispute or query. Read 2 November 2026.
Xero’s reply on 29 October 2026 says a standalone flag is “not directly in the pipeline yet”. Xero says it is considering a broader bills approval flow, with rules by amount, supplier, account code or submitter that route bills to approvers, and says that flow would not be a direct answer to this request. So Xero could solve part of this, all of it, or neither.
Today the workarounds are to hold the bill in Awaiting Approval, add a note to the bill, put it in a tracking category, or move the due date so it misses the payment run. Each one is a signal to whoever set it up; none of them keeps the query, the answer and the chase date in one place.
The second gap: leave balances, one employee at a time
A UK employer on Xero Payroll can see one employee’s leave at a time, in that employee’s leave tab, or read the figures off payslips. There is no single report of every employee’s entitlement, leave taken and leave remaining.
On Xero’s Product Ideas site this request was opened on 2 November 2022. On 2 November 2026 it showed 184 votes and its status was: Accepted.
Source: Xero Product Ideas: UK payroll leave balances report. Read 2 November 2026.
Xero replied on 27 November 2025 with what is available today: “Currently the options for viewing this information is via individual payslips or within each employee's leave tab”. Xero said the report “isn't on our immediate roadmap right now” and that it is “formally on our radar”, and that its Leave Requests report is “not the equivalent”. No later reply from Xero was on the page, and people were still asking for an update in October 2026.
Today the workaround is to open each employee’s leave tab, or to gather the figures from payslips, and add them up yourself.
What the two tools would rest on
Both tools would work through Xero’s published API descriptions, so neither needs Xero to change anything first. That is what makes a small build possible; it is not a promise that the build is easy or that Xero’s terms allow it.
For bills, the description lists an endpoint that reads and writes history notes on an invoice or bill (PUT /Invoices/{InvoiceID}/History, in the accounting transactions scope). A note written there shows in the bill’s history in Xero. The invoices list takes a filter, so a tool can fetch the open bills it needs, and it can keep its own record of status and chase date against the bill’s ID.
For leave, the Payroll UK description lists per-employee leave balances (GET /Employees/{EmployeeID}/LeaveBalances, with a statutory balance at GET /Employees/{EmployeeID}/StatutoryLeaveBalance). Both are per employee, so one report is one call per employee plus the employee list.
Source: xero_accounting.yaml, XeroAPI's published Xero Accounting API description on GitHub and xero-payroll-uk.yaml, XeroAPI's published Xero Payroll UK API description on GitHub. Read 2 November 2026. Paraphrased, not quoted.
What was not checked: whether the history write is allowed on paid or voided bills, whether bill history notes can be searched or filtered by status through the API, and the rest of the leave description, which was read only in part. The page does not claim any of them.
What already exists
Neither gap is empty ground, and this page does not claim it is.
For bills, approval tools such as ApprovalMax add approval routing to bills in Xero, and a paid invoice approval tool called InBill advertises dispute handling as part of a wider approval and capture suite, with a starter plan listed at $49 a month (its page did not state a currency). Neither is a single-purpose disputed-bill tracker at the price tested here.
For leave, LeaveCal by Finlert is listed for Xero and is focused on leave calendars and alerts; its listing does not describe a report of every employee’s balances.
Source: ApprovalMax, a bill approval tool listed for Xero, InBill homepage and LeaveCal by Finlert, a leave calendar tool listed for Xero. Read 2 November 2026. Paraphrased, not quoted.
The two tools we are testing
The two tools are separate products at separate prices. Each button is counted on its own, so a press on one says nothing about the other. The page’s view count is one number shared by both; a button’s rate is its presses divided by the page’s views.
This page is a test of interest, not a shop. There is no payment form and no email field anywhere on it. Pressing a button records one anonymous count for the day, and a short tag if the link you followed carried one. There is no limit on presses: press again and it counts again.
Not on sale yet. These tools do not exist yet and may never be built. No payment is taken. Pressing only counts your interest.
How this page is checked
Every quotation above is a line of the page’s one data file, and a test fails the build if a quoted line on the page is not in that file. A second test fails the build if a banned word appears. The counts are kept per button and per tag, with no cookie and no address. If a source changes or we find an error, we correct this page and record it here. Read 2 November 2026.
No corrections yet (the idea pages and the API descriptions read 2 November 2026).