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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.

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?

Hope Xero Team can emphasize on this issue as it would be good and standardise to sort by the description at first rather than sort by the contact name

This would be really helpful. We have a new manager who wants to know WHAT the payments coming out of a credit card account are for and not just WHO the payment was made to. The Bank Transactions report we were using for review and approval of transactions does not provide any sort of relevant description.

I'm never really sure of the point in commenting on these things just to repeat the same frustration expressed by everyone else. There will be several other identical 'ideas' with the same frustrated users, plus tenfold users who see the complete lack of action and don't even bother voting or commenting. Then there are the thousands of users who find this similarly irritating but just quietly get on with their working lives unaware that there is a product ideas forum where you can waste even more of your time writing comments that get ignored.

However, on the Account Transactions screen I would love to see the Contact in a contact column, the Description in the Description column and the Tracking Categories in a Tracking Categories column. Why not have the ability to select the columns that users wish to have visible - like every other database-type software (I acknowledge the initial request was about the Report, but the same issue relates to the bank account view).

The contact name is blocking the sorting criteria which has first been entered into the description box making sorting in the report unable to be used.

Please delete the contact information from Description. This is frustrating.

Hello,
So are you basically confirming we have no way of pulling a report with information that has already been entered in the system?
Description field should show the description and not the contact name, we already have a field for that.

You need to have fixed asap, but before you should assume it is a major issue you don't see this is a problem after so many people complaining about it for so long.

Can we also see "item" as a separate column as an option in Account Transactions.

"For example, when running the AT report for a bank account, transactions will show the Contact name in the Description field"

"we don't have plans for changing the behaviour of this in the near term"

Kelly, it's been over six months since you posted.

I'd think half a year is not 'the near term' so my question is: when will this defect in the software be addressed? Do you have a timeframe for a remedy? Is it hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years?

Or is there no timeframe at all?

Is it the official position of Xero that "transactions will show the Contact name in the Description field" forever and ever? And we should stop waiting on a bugfix?