Noticed Some Changes in Xero Practice Manager & Tax Form Status? Here's What's Going On

Xero has been busy behind the scenes rolling out its new Xero Partner Hub and with it the implementation of Xero’s Tax Manager. For those of you who accessed the Beta of the Xero’s Partner Hub you may have spotted Year End Compliance Tax Forms automatically displaying against existing jobs within your XPM. These Tax Forms are marked “Ready to Start” and are displaying for each member within the group that your firm is responsible for completing their tax work. Below is a friendly rundown of what's changed and why. ​

What's happening 
Xero recently rolled out a new Tax Manager feature (currently in BETA) that lets users start tax returns directly from within a job. Off the back of that update, some firms have started seeing tax forms showing up as “Ready to Start” across jobs they don't relate to at all. For example: 

• Tax forms appearing on internal, non-billable capacity jobs 

• Trust or company tax forms showing up on BAS jobs 

• Large client groups displaying multiple available tax forms on every job, even when only one is actually relevant 

We have received feedback that this is creating confusion for firms that use jobs to manage specific types of work. A BAS job, for instance, should only ever relate to BAS work, so having unrelated tax forms available to start there makes it unclear what's actually meant to be completed.  

Why it's happening 
We raised this directly with Xero Support, and they've confirmed this is not a bug or misconfiguration on your end. By design, Tax Manager currently shows “Ready to Start” returns for every client connected to a jobs’ client via Relationships or client groups, rather than only the returns relevant to that specific job or job type. 
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The one lever available is a client group’s “taxable” status. Tax Manager only pulls “Ready to Start” returns from client groups marked as taxable, so if an affected group isn't correctly set that way, fixing it may reduce some of the noise. For groups that are correctly marked taxable (which is the norm for most practices), there's currently no setting to limit which forms display on a given job, or to hide the irrelevant ones. 

What Xero is doing about it 
The good news is that this has already been raised as beta feedback by multiple practices, and Xero's product team is actively aware of it. An improvement released in March 2026 scoped “Ready to Start” returns down to taxable client groups only, and further work on tightening client group controls is documented internally as a known pain point, for exactly the reasons above: unrelated tax forms cluttering jobs, difficulty removing incorrectly started forms, and confusion in single-purpose jobs like BAS or internal capacity. 

In the meantime, Xero has confirmed there's no workaround that avoids the underlying issue without other trade-offs and removing client relationships isn't recommended, as it affects other workflows. Xero has said it will continue to push for this to be addressed as the beta progresses toward general availability (on the 01st of September) 

What you can do 

• Check that your client groups' “taxable” status is set correctly, this may reduce some unnecessary forms showing up. 

• Add your firm's experience to the open Xero Product Idea (linked below) so the product team can see the scale of the impact. 

• Take care when starting tax forms from within a job, double-check the form actually relates to that job before proceeding, since it can be difficult to unlink later. 

If you run into this on your own jobs, know that it's a recognised issue on Xero's side, not something to troubleshoot on your end. 

Helpful resources 
Xero Central – How Ready to Start returns work 
Xero Product Idea – Tax Manager: Remove ‘Ready to Start’ tax returns from existing jobs 

Have questions about Xero Tax Manager or how it's affecting your jobs? Get in touch with the Clarity Street team.