How to Find Xero Transactions Without Attachments

No — and it is worth being precise about the shape of the gap, because it determines which workarounds are viable.

Xero’s reporting tool has no filter for the presence or absence of an attachment. Neither does the search in Bank transactions. There is no “Transactions without files” report, no saved-search equivalent, and no way to add attachment status as a column to an existing report.

The idea has been formally raised. “Reports — Generate a report for transactions without receipts attached” was submitted in August 2023 and has accumulated votes and comments from auditors, bookkeepers and business owners since. The official Xero response, posted on 8 December 2025, acknowledges the need and then declines it for now: not on the roadmap, interest being tracked, no commitment.

This is the part that is easy to miss. Xero’s API exposes an attachment flag on a transaction, so a connected application can ask Xero directly for the entries that have nothing attached and get back only those. The search is exact rather than inferred, and it is cheap because Xero does the filtering rather than the app reading everything and comparing.

That is a meaningful difference from some other ledgers. For comparison, both QuickBooks Online and FreeAgent have no equivalent per-transaction flag, so a tool has to read the transactions in the window and check each one against the attachment list. Same answer, more work per sync. Sage Accounting, like Xero, can filter down to the records with nothing attached.

All of these work. All of them are linear in the number of transactions, which is the problem.

The friction is not the individual scan; it is that the scan is per client, per period, forever, and produces nothing reusable. Ten clients at twenty minutes each is a little over three hours a month spent generating a list, before a single client has been asked for anything. Put your own figures through the cost calculator if you want the annual number.

A list is only useful if it becomes work. The step that actually saves time is not the detection — it is that each detected transaction turns into a request line the client can answer, and then back into an attachment on the original entry once you have approved it.

Against a Xero organisation, BilagPilot does this as follows.

Some transactions will never have a document. The card was tapped at a car park machine, the supplier emailed nothing, the client lost it in June. A workflow that treats this as failure leaves items open forever and makes your completion figures meaningless.

Model it as its own outcome, alongside “received” and “still waiting”. What the file needs is a record of four things:

Give the client a way to say this on the same page they would have uploaded to. If the only option is uploading a file, a client with no file simply does not reply, and you cannot tell that apart from a client who is ignoring you. BilagPilot has explicit responses for this, including “no longer available” and “already sent”, and each one carries the client’s explanation into the audit trail. Items can be closed as not needed, so the period can complete honestly.