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This is SO important - i might need to revert back to Quickbooks as that software does it and i didnt realise sales invoicing would be so hard to do on xero. For a practice that invoices clients contractors costs - but those contractors see my clients books thus process my invoice......there must be something that can be done.

How about creating the ability to create a product or service which is multiple items, eg, I can call this (and bill this) as "Breakfast", but the product is composed of eggs, bacon, potatoes and labor.(each of which I track seperately) The customer only sees Breakfast and the price...

Xero Support, how many votes do you need ?
Meantime, let us export the template to excel ...at least. Let´s improve this please, URGENT.

Looks like this has been continuously requested for over a decade :O
We will potentially look to move to another platform - by the looks of it all other big platforms offer this ability. I'm not sure why this couldn't be a part of the new invoice system that is being rolled out??

Xero really couldn't care about this - this is regularly highlighted but for well over ten years continues to be ignored

VERY disappointing "customer service"

Long term / short term? I’ve been waiting for more than 10 years.
Having reset the voting clocks some time ago / the number of votes shown doesn’t truly represent the need for this.
Without it - management reporting / sales analysis is painfully limited.
No doubt as with other topics, there are also many other vote headers essentially for the same thing - diluting the number of votes seen for this item.

This function would really help us internally, but don't want to change my MO of giving an all in price to clients.

Xero might be slipping here, would have thought it would be easy enough to do.
Will have to start looking elsewhere, maybe back to MYOB?
Hope Xero will get its priorities figured out

So why can we do this on the current invoice system and not the new invoice templates? If you put a . in the description box of the say the parts you want to enter and not show the client how much the parts were, this works perfectly ok? You do not see the parts price on the invoice. It is only happening on the new invoice templates you have created?

I would definitely take advantage of being able to group line items on an invoice. Or be able to hide/combine so that the customer doesn't see certain admin fees I'd like to include in pricing, that need to be taxed or recorded differently. Seems complex, but I don't write software. Would love to see this functionality in Xero invoicing!

This has been around since 2012, or 11 years. I don't expect that this will change.

Because of changes in how we invoice for contract items, we're going to have to move away from Xero. I've been a staunch supporter of Xero for over a decade, because A) it's not Quickbooks, and B) it had the features we wanted/needed and C) it's included in almost all web based SaaS apps integration lists. Oh and it's not Quickbooks.

But now, it seems we'll be forced to move to Quickbooks just because Xero won't entertain the idea of having "combos" or "builds" that are a single item made up of various other items/accounts so that your chart of accounts, and balance sheet/profit and loss, all make sense.

Oh well. I guess it's time to move on.

Hi Hannah,
Are you able to provide a link or instructions on how to set this up?

Hoping by adding a comment, this will bump this issue up a bit. It seems like there are a lot of people in the same situation given the number of votes and comments.
It is something offered on other software, so I can't imagine it would be a difficult thing to look at implementing.

@Tom David

Appreciate the comment but doing a journal entry is what we all have to do at the moment - and we are desperately wanting Xero to come up with a solution which is simple coding for them enabling multiple line items on an invoice which are hidden on the invoice issued to the client

Sadly Xero are not interested in helping us

@Tom David Nice idea but as we have hundreds of monthly invoices and it is fluid (regular scope reviews and annual fee reviews etc) getting the journals to balance and balance a clearing account would be extremely time consuming. What we are doing is posting all to our general fees account then doing one journal to estimate splits between other sales accounts - not ideal but better than nothing.
It’s such an obvious product feature I can only assume the reprogramming is the stumbling block!!

Hello all, regarding hiding lines on your invoice from your client, and still having all the backend of your invoice allocating to all your different accounts, this CAN be achieved using the manual journals feature in xero - woot.

Our accountant told us to create a simple invoice for full amount and allocate all line items to a “sales clearing account”, rather than all the usual accounts you would create allocations to.

Then, create a separate manual journal item that allocates the new invoice total amount from the “sales clearing account” to accounts exactly as you would as if you were building a more detailed invoice that you wouldn’t otherwise want your client to receive.

Then just send and reconcile your invoice from xero as you always would - the journals item handles all the accounts distribution rather than the invoice item. As long as the journals item adds up to the amount on the invoice (before gst or vat etc) then the “sales clearing account” should always tally zero once the invoice has been paid and reconciled.

So this is possible in xero - just ask your accountant about manual journals in xero on how to achieve this if you don’t use these already (they are an advanced accountant feature, but straight forward once you’ve made your first invoice in this fashion).

We have manufacturing components as part of our sale products and it would be helpful to get a full idea of the costs involved for the full job. At present we have to keep a separate system to do this. We are having to double handle everything which is not cost effective at all. In Myob you have this function. Can't believe I'm saying this but it is one of my regrets in moving over to Xero.

is this feature addition in the technical development queue yet?

Agree with all the other comments.

This appears to be something Xero users have been screaming out for, for years with requests dotted all through the Community posts.

Xero came out all guns blazing in the beginning, but sadly it's fallen into the pattern of so many other software packages ... all about revenue, no customer service and not listening to important feedback from users.

Oh well, leaves a gap in the market for some new techy software to steal the limelight!

That's a pity xero has been a leader in the past now it's in catch up mode. So sad that you don't listen to your subscribers