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I 100% support this need to show the proper Description in the Description column. I run my own advisory business and my main use case is exporting Expense Reports to my customers for reimbursement. They need to see WHO I paid an expense to, and WHAT IT WAS FOR - e.g. WHO = Hikari Sushi Restaurant / WHY / DESCRIPTION = Dinner with Mr. Important from Big Games Studio.

Right now, I export the report to Excel and manually input the DESCRIPTIONS which I have already typed into the 'Why?' field when I entered the receipt into Xero.

It is great in that I can easily filter by Tag (i.e. a specific business trip) and see which Customer the expense was assigned to, and also show the GL into which the expense has been categorized, but the fact that the exported report shows the Contact name in the Description drives me crazy and means an extra few hours of work.

Support recommended I come here and support this 'feature request' but clearly this is a bug, and I echo the sentiment of everyone on here in requesting it gets fixed asap.

This seems like the MOST BASIC feature request ever! I've been in Xero for a whole 2 days and have spent the last hour trying to figure out why the "description" field isn't viewable for easy scanning! I agree with all of these comments please make this available to us!

If we could please change the description in the description Column in account transactions for all accounts to be the actual item description while in the CASH basis and not who made the payment , the ACRUALS basis has the item description as written when creating the transaction so i basically want it the same. I'm set up as cash and it makes it difficult for me and my accountant not having the description.

I don't want to filter by Contact, I want to filter by Description. When matching transactions, it is easy to set the Description. It is hard to set Contact.

Hi, I would like to vote for this too. To clear things up a little, if you run a transaction report on an accrual basis then the description is included correctly. However, most of our clients want reports on a cash basis - the fact that you also cant post a budget to a cash summary report is also a problem and we have had to write our own and export into excel and this has been a real issue.
We would like to be able to run the account transaction report alongside this to enable clients to see what the transactions were on each of the codes for that month - useless when the report relates back to say payment of the invoice or the contacts name rather than the description on the invoice that has been paid.
This is really a basic report and should not need to take 2 to 3 years to develop.

Thank you Frank, well said

Thanks Frank. Hopefully the developers will understand why the functionality is required.

Kelly, with sincere respect, I don't think you understand what we are asking. We want to run a report for expenses or assets or liabilities, or revenue, not the bank account, and see the specific description field that displays the description of the nature of the transaction. Virtually every general ledger system on the planet does this except Xero and I don't understand the blow back on this issue. We shouldn't have to justify why this is important to accountants but here it is:

Clients who record their own transactions are a disaster and the constantly miss-categorize transactions to improper accounts. If we can see the transaction language they used to explain what the transaction was, we can quickly determine whether there is an accounting error or not. There is more to accounting than the transaction date, vendor, and amount. Description satisfies the 'why' the transaction was incurred for business purposes.

For example, if a client processes a transaction with a transaction description as "dog food for Fido" and they record this to the Manufacturing Equipment account, we can very quickly determine that this an accounting error. However, Xero doesn't allow for the Manufacturing Equipment or whatever account transactions report to display the transaction description column. Instead, we have to drill down to the transaction a few click to see this.

This may seem trivial to a systems developer, but this basic reporting insight helps accountants perform a very traditional procedure called 'scanning', which is a traditional and valid auditing technique used in financial statement audits, tax preparation, and general bookkeeping services. When you see a couple hundred transaction that might be significant but you can't see the client's description, it is a colossal waste of time to click on each item, especially if you are hunting for transactions to reconcile a particular significant account balance.

Thank you for your understanding.

This idea continues to grow but I have been told multiple times that there are not enough votes or comments to get the development team interested in fixing this problem. I have had the one other person I know that uses Xero vote. Every one else needs to encourage users to vote. I was given a work around of exporting the information into Excel but if I have to use Excel to make my information useful then what good is paying to use Xero? I am a small farm, single user, and don’t need most of the features that are included, but being able to use the description to verify my books are accurate is vital.

It would be very useful if the actual description was included in the description column when the account transaction report is run. Repeating the contact name in the description column doesn't help at all. That information is in the Contact columns, so is just being duplicated. We insert descriptions for a reason and it's time consuming to have to go into each transaction to get the description as to what was done and why, when with a few clicks of a button, we could get it from a report. Time is precious and we are wasting a lot of it, having to look at each transaction individually, to see the description. Please can this be looked at as a matter of urgency.

It's been three years and over 4 pages of comments requesting to remove the contact name in the description field. How is Xero waiting for ?

it would be really useful if the description showed actually what the transaction was for and not just who it was for given that this information is already on the report

Like others have said it would be really useful if the description showed actually what the transaction was for and not just who it was for given that this information is already on the report. Having the supplier name show twice is not helpful at all.

This is pretty poor. There is no way to export a report for a credit card account that shows the description explaining what the purchase was for.
Having two report fields showing the same data makes no sense.

When you submit a transaction via the Expense Claims function, it will duplicate the Contact Name and add that into the front of the description, so when you run an Account Transactions report, it then shows the Contact Name twice (because all transactions automatically have the Contact Name added in at the start of the description already) but then the Expense Claims feature does it again, so your transaction report line item will show as "Supplier Name - Supplier Name - Description of transaction" instead of just "Supplier Name - Description of transaction".

Can Xero remove the duplication here?

We too would like to be able to easily see WHAT the transaction was, not just WHO it was to. We are diligent about entering that info into the "WHY" field during credit card reconciliation, but there's no way to see this info without manually drilling into each transaction. Perhaps an option to display columns as in other places. I spent over 8 hours going through ~200 credit card transactions yesterday to see what they were for and if they had been entered into WorkFlowMax2. It would be a killer feature if these apps were able to talk to each other for better cost management.

I am curious since no one else has mentioned cash vs accrual, and I know the details of the report behave differently depending on the setting, are those with problems all on cash accounting?

I also wonder if anyone has any experience in an audit with descriptions that only contain the contact name?

I have been told that a work around would be to export the report into excel and them manually enter the descriptions. So can anyone tell me if I have to resort to that, why use xero?

In my Account Transactions Report, Description column details show up as Payment: (Contact Name) if I have entered it as a bill especially if the bill had multiple lines. But if I just enter the information at the time of reconciliation, the Description details come through as (Contact Name) - (details of transaction) regardless of the number of lines. Why can't the description be in the description for all transactions?

I have asked about a year ago about this and was told they were aware of the problem but had no timeframe to fix it. I was also told a work around would be to change my report from cash to accrual, but as a farmer I need to stay as cash. Here we are a year later with a problem they are aware of but not fixed.

If it can work right for some transactions, why not all?

When reconciling transactions, there is "Who, What, Why". When viewing reports, the "Who" becomes "Description". Not ideal, but okay.

We really need a way to Group and Summarize by that Description field. Especially when looking at annual reports for accounts that have lots of monthly expenses, it would be really great to have them totaled up by Description.