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Reporting - Set default date columns from oldest to most recent

A button you can click to reverse the order of the columns in Reporting
Typically the reports show the month in question closest to the account descriptions and then the prior months in columns to the right but we'd like to look at our current year starting with the earliest month in the column next to the account descriptions and the remainder of the year in columns to the right. This is particularly useful when building out projected cashflows.

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Robbie Gibb shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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submitted  ·  AdminKelly Munro (Community Manager, Xero) responded  · 

You can re-order the columns of your report with the layout editor, Robbie. 🙂


Once you've got the report set up as you like you can Save as Custom to easily access the report with this layout. 

If you're like to make this the default layout there is also an option for this - see our help here & here

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  • John Massey commented  ·   ·  Report

    I just had a demo with a consolidation company called Translucent which connects to Xero and is has implemented this simple button which lets you choose from "ascending" or "descending" dates. It would be great if Xero could implement this feature natively. Rearranging on the layout editor is too time consuming and restricts other functionality. In my opinion, this is a major issue for making progress in the US market as most of us are coming from QuickBooks and are so used to the left to right, oldest to newest format.

  • Alvin Hu commented  ·   ·  Report

    I would love a simple button to click to be able to reverse the order of the date columns in Reports - I know that I can manually edit the layout and drag the date columns to be in the order I want but to do that for every new custom report we make takes up time.

  • Sophie Gossage commented  ·   ·  Report

    When creating your own report, the dates are automatically in the order of newest on the left to oldest on the right. In a lot of forecasting we look at historics with oldest on the left and newest date on the right. Please can you implement a functionality to reverse the order of the date columns?

  • Anita Wildman commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yes please.
    Can we please have a button to switch the order of the columns. Need this flexibility - as you need it different ways for different purposes and its very time consuming to switch it around exp if you are monthly reports for 12months.

  • Robert Bright commented  ·   ·  Report

    Very frustrating that this is not possible. @kelly setting a fixed custom report is fine if you're always comparing to a certain number of periods (i.e. 6 months), but this feature completely lacks flexibility.

    Every stakeholder wanting to see a P&L, Balance Sheet or Cash Flow are expecting dates to be from left to right, allowing the ability to forecast future numbers by simply inserting new columns to the right.

    I can't understand why you would design this backwards.

  • Taco Sieburgh Sjoerdsma commented  ·   ·  Report

    Highly frustrating that this is not yet possible....and the answer like go to lay-out editor and change it each time is just much to time intensive...Would be great if this can finally be sorted....pun intentional

  • Jennifer Dotson commented  ·   ·  Report

    Are you REALLY saying this is not a setting I can change in Xero? That's ridiculous. This is not a fun difference to making accounting "easier" or "more interesting" - it is requiring lots of extra work to integrate in a task that no - one wants to spend extra time on. Ugh.

  • Jason Chroman commented  ·   ·  Report

    Kelly,
    Investors want to see sales and income going "up and to the right". For some reason, Xero is committed to making it difficult to show it that way.

    Your comment is technically true. It is *possible* to manually sort date columns. But to manually sort date columns on a report for 36 months is impractical.

    It's far better to have a toggle to sort the date columns either ascending or descending.

  • Nigel Godfrey commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi @kelly, dragging all 12 columns to a new order in the layout editor is a pain, and then you lose the ability to change some of the other settings for a report. It's especially annoying when trying to create a reusable report pack a small group of reports can quickly be refreshed with up-to-date data. Robbie's idea is a good one: so many time based reports in Xero are counterintuitive, at least for non accountants.