Sales Invoices - Combine and hide line items for customers
Ability to combine and hide line items in the invoices.
Purpose: To have good accounting and tracking of sales without showing the client the breakdown of all the items involved

Hi all, appreciate the interest and rationale for wanting to be able to combine and hide line items on an invoice for sending to your clients, while having your usual detail tracked on the invoice in Xero.
While this may be a function we look to explore in the long-term we want to be upfront that this is not something we’ll be developing in the near term. Our team is focussed on other key priorities right now such as improvements to invoice branding and getting paid.
If you want to hide all line item details, you can create a custom invoice theme where you can decide which data fields appear on the PDF invoice. For example to print only the Subtotal and no line items.
However we’re aware that in other cases you want to be able to show some line items and not others. We’ll leave this idea open as it’s something we may be able to revisit in the longer term. We’ll be sure to let you know if there’s any change around this, here.
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Maree Creedon commented
Hi Hannah,
Are you able to provide a link or instructions on how to set this up? -
Niki Bolton commented
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. -
Bob Crawford commented
@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
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Jon Baggot commented
@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!! -
Tom David commented
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).
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Luisa Magao commented
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.
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Danielle Susanne Hooper commented
is this feature addition in the technical development queue yet?
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Liz Peter commented
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!
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Hilton Johnson commented
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
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Steve Quinn commented
Thats a shame because Quickbooks can do this. It's so important that to us we are looking to move. If this is critical for your business, I would advise moving to QuickBooks.
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Trina grant commented
every invoice we write needs to not show our cost items and just our task items but have the reporting ability at the end of a job..
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Bob Crawford commented
Sadly Xero continue to ignore this really important request and don't even have the courtesy to make a comment
Makes this notice board forum farcical
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Melissa Shepherdson commented
I usually have lumpsum item lines that are handled by 2 different departments so I will require my line items to be split accordingly without needing to show my client the details.
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Opo Drainlayers commented
We use a summary line quote which is then made into an invoice.
We track our inventory, so when the customer has paid we have to go back in and put all the stock in to take this out of inventory.
This is very time consuming and should be able to be noted in the quote and then taken out of the inventory when the invoice is created, including adding billable items (not showing to the customer) so that the customer still gets the one liner and we have our stock taken out at the time.
The only problem I see is that the stock would need to go out at zero dollars therefore making our average price null and void, but still better than nothing.
Please help, I am getting desperate, 4 months in to my new job. -
Hellie Kellett-Clarke commented
This feature would make a huge difference to the manual workarounds our team are doing as we similar sell bundled services that we breakdown for cost and revenue internally but only charge the customer as a single fee.
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Julia Rickards commented
I have clients, and I assume this would be standard practice in the industry, they have dockets for delivery of products, and get invoiced for several dockets at a time. Client has always subtotalled as this was a feature in Reckon and MYOB. I have tried to come up with a work around using the price column and zero quantity but doesn't look good. I have seen so many posts in the Xero community where this is a wanted feature.
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Hilton Johnson commented
Well raised Amanda, this will be an excellent tracking tool, Xero if so many users over so many years have requested this feature -what seem to be the problem? Can you please give us all some feedback, or are we asking too much?
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Bob Crawford commented
Sad to say Amanda that despite multiple requests over YEARS for this solution to be integrated into the Xero product the powers that be at Xero simply ignore us all
Moreover they don't even acknowledge our request which makes a total mockery of this ideas board
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Amanda Roothman commented
Good morning, Xero agent. Could you please help me with my problem? I'm trying to create invoices for my clients with a single line item, but I want to divide that one line into multiple "consultant" categories. How can I split a single line into separate "consultants"? I have included a screenshot to show you how I would like to split the invoices, while still displaying a single line item to the clients in the actual invoice.
Is there no solution for this yet? - I see that this need has already arose in 2012? See the file attachments of the actual problem at hand. -
David Pugh commented
This would be super useful to our clients.