How to Find Bills Without Receipts Attached in Xero
Short answer
Xero has no built-in report that lists bills missing their source document. You can see a paperclip icon on individual bills, but you cannot filter, sort or export by attachment status. To find them across a whole client file you either check bills one by one, or use a tool that reads the HasAttachments field through the Xero API.
This matters more than it sounds, because in Australia a bill with GST coded to it and no invoice attached is an input tax credit with no evidence behind it.
Why bills without attachments are a problem
Under Australian GST rules, a business must hold a valid tax invoice to claim a GST credit on a purchase over $82.50 including GST. No tax invoice, no credit.
The bill in Xero is not the evidence. The supplier's invoice is. A bill entered manually or imported from a bank feed, coded with GST and never matched to a document, will look completely normal in the accounts and completely unsupported in an audit.
Two things make this easy to miss:
- Nothing in Xero flags it. The bill sits there looking finished.
- The person who entered the bill is usually not the person who would notice the invoice never arrived.
The ATO requires records to be kept for five years. A missing invoice from eighteen months ago is not something you can usually go back and recover.
What you can do inside Xero today
Check bills individually. Open Business, then Bills to pay. Bills that have a file attached show a paperclip indicator. You can scan the list visually, but there is no way to filter to only those without one.
Use the Files inbox. Xero's Files area holds documents that have been emailed or uploaded but not yet attached to a transaction. It tells you what is unfiled, not which bills are missing something.
Export and reconcile by hand. Exporting bills gives you the transactions but not their attachment status, so you would still be checking each one.
There is an open feature request on Xero's product ideas forum asking for a report of transactions without attachments. It has not been built.
Why this gets worse at scale
For one business with thirty bills a month, checking manually is tedious but possible.
For a bookkeeping practice with forty client files, it is not. Forty clients at thirty bills each is 1,200 bills a month to eyeball, and the checking has to happen every month because the problem accumulates quietly.
In practice most firms discover it at year end, when the accountant asks for support on a large purchase and nobody can find it. By then the supplier may have changed systems, the client may have lost the receipt, and the credit has already been claimed.
The information is available through the API
Every invoice returned by Xero's Invoices endpoint includes a HasAttachments boolean. It is not surfaced in the interface as a filter, but it is there in the data.
That means a tool with read access to a Xero organisation can list every approved or paid bill where HasAttachments is false, along with the supplier, the amount, the date and the GST coded to it.
Sorting that list by GST amount descending puts the largest unsupported claims at the top, which is where an accountant should start.
Options for handling it
- Manual monthly review. Free, works for a single business, does not scale past a handful of client files.
- Uncat syncs uncategorised transactions and transactions missing fields, including attachments, and lets clients upload receipts through a magic link. It is priced per client per month, which suits firms with a small number of high-value clients.
- Receipt capture tools such as Dext and Hubdoc solve a different half of the problem. They get documents into the ledger efficiently, but they do not tell you which existing bills are still missing one.
- DocChaser reads the ledger, lists every bill without a source document ranked by GST exposure, lets the firm select which ones to chase, sends the client a single request, and attaches the returned document back to the bill in Xero automatically. Pricing is per firm rather than per client.
A practical monthly routine
Whichever approach you take, the routine is the same:
- Pull the list of approved and paid bills with no attachment, for the last twelve months.
- Sort by GST amount, largest first. That is your exposure, in dollars.
- Ignore anything below the $82.50 threshold unless the client wants complete records.
- Exclude transactions that legitimately have no invoice, such as internal transfers or bank fees, and keep a note of why so the same items are not re-examined next month.
- Send one request to the client covering everything outstanding, rather than an email per transaction.
- Attach what comes back to the bill in Xero. Until the file is on the bill, the exposure has not been closed.
Step six is the one most often skipped. Receiving the invoice by email does not substantiate anything if it stays in an inbox.
Frequently asked questions
Can Xero report on transactions without attachments?
No. Xero shows a paperclip on individual bills that have a file attached, but there is no report or filter for transactions missing one. The data is available through the Xero API but not in the interface.
What is the GST threshold for needing a tax invoice in Australia?
$82.50 including GST. Below that, a business can claim a GST credit without a tax invoice, though it still needs some record of the purchase.
How long do records need to be kept?
Five years from when the record was prepared or the transaction completed, whichever is later.
Does a bank feed transaction count as evidence?
No. A bank statement line shows that money moved. It does not show what was purchased or how much GST was included, which is what a tax invoice provides.
Does a paid bill still need an invoice attached?
Yes. Payment status has no bearing on substantiation. A paid bill with a GST credit claimed still needs the supporting tax invoice.
What about bills with no GST?
The GST substantiation rule does not apply, but the record keeping obligation still does. These are lower priority rather than no priority.
This article is general information about record keeping in Xero and is not tax advice. Confirm anything material with a registered tax agent.
Finding unsupported bills every month?
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