Account transactions report - Show description of transaction line
Account Transactions Report
It doesn't make sense that you can separately select the 'Contact' column and the 'Description' column, but that the 'Contact' details show in the 'Description' column.
It feels like the 'Description' column in the Account Transactions report is wrongly pointing to the 'Contact' data!
If the 'Description' detail is not available in the Account Transactions report, this column should be withdrawn from the options available for selection.
It would be great to get this issue fixed.

Thank you for your engagement on this idea. To help explain a little on how this works in the Account Transactions(AT) report - what shows in the Description field when running the report is dependent on the type of account you're running the report for.
For example, when running the AT report for a bank account, transactions will show the Contact name in the Description field. This is because the detail that is entered on each description line in the body of a transaction relates to the account the line item is coded to.
To see the detail, you'll need to run the report for the account code, not the bank account. This is also how the report works for some other accounts such as the system sales tax account, Account Receivable, and Accounts Payable.
If you're trying to find the account a bank transaction or system account line has been coded to, you can add the 'Related account' column to the report which should help with look ups.
We appreciate what's being asked in this idea and will continue to keep an eye on the idea here, however we want to be open we don't have plans for changing the behaviour of this in the near term.
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Sumoltamash Rungson commented
Currently, the Account Transaction report showing the detailed descriptions as same as the contact field, as Employee Name.
It would be very useful to be able to show a details in descriptions field for individual or bank accounts type in the Account Transaction reports as same as the detailed descriptions in Xero Expense.
Please find attached for your reference.
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Tracey G commented
Question.
What report can give you the description?
Not the description = contact name.If I need to combine reports, annoying, but ok - but which report shows the description in it please?
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Peter Mason commented
Agreed!
As shown in the attachment, under the heading "Description" the field shown in the column below is the contact field, not the description field as entered for the transaction.
This is true of both the Bank transactions 'account transactions' page, and for the reports/account transactions report too.
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Dina Naran commented
Agreed, we need the full description of the transactions that was entered when the expense claim was created at this stage we only see the supplier name not the full description provided, this must be a simple fix to keep our xero expense claim users happy :)
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Ann Plush commented
This is getting ridiculous. We have all been commenting on this for almost 18 months, when are Xero going to even reply, let alone fix the problem!
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Lynton Davidson commented
I would like the content from the description column to be included in my reports as it is where I record the details of what each transaction relates to (e.g. a booking reference or description of a purchase).
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Shiela Azarcon commented
Totally agree. The description column must have the transaction details as per our recording to help the readers of the report understand the company expenditures. We look forward to getting it fixed by Xero as soon as possible.
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Warrnambool Legacy commented
It would be great if this issue could be fixed. It seems ridiculous that you enter all these details and then you can't print a relevant report as needed?
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Tania Bogle commented
Agreed! The only workaround I can see is putting the description you want on the reports into the "reference" of the transaction instead of the invoice number. Then you can choose "reference" to appear in your report.
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Amy Calcutt commented
Agreed - having the contact name under 'description' makes no sense at all. Why give the option to include the description in the report if it pulls the wrong data across. This is making our job much harder as we are having to go into transactions separately to check what they are for.
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Sarah Hargreaves commented
Totally agree, lack of a proper description is adding hours to my task. I would also like to be able to reports on date of invoice, not just date of payment.
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Sally Hughes commented
I have emailed the design team so let's see if ANYONE in XERO is listening :)
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Cheryl Cowie commented
Looks like a LOT of people want this to happen but no change has been made.
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GREG MANN commented
all these excellent comments but I cannot find any of the responses from Xero. where do I go to find them
I would have thought at the very least a response shows respect to Xero users -
Jayathu Deshapriya commented
For the moment when you run the account transactions report for Bank / petty cash / credit card accounts which are created as bank accounts as Xero suggests, you will only see the contact name even if you select the description column (report will be shown the contact name in both fields). This is very annoying, specially when you are trying to see what the nature of a particular transaction is, specially when you are dealing with 100s of daily transactions in petty cash. The current solution suggested by Xero is to include the Description in the reference field. Rather than this solution, why not enable the description field in the Account transaction report??
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Christine W. commented
Please fix this, it would be greatly appreciated.
We need to be able to view full bank descriptions next to their coded account. Showing a reference / contact name instead of the actual description is a huge handicap on efficiency.
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Bill Fisher commented
This is a complete joke - spend hours filling in the description details when reconciling then you can't export a spreadsheet with those descriptions. And the issue was raised almost a year ago - fix it please...
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Prolec Accounts commented
Need this to be fixed ASAP! We need to be able to export a report with all the details for reporting. This report is now redundant and of no use, and has added hours to what was once a quick task! Quite frusrated!
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Esteon Steyn commented
Spoke to Xero support personally about this - but was sent here... Please fix this. Can we please have someone from Xero support acknowledge that you guys are seeing this and working on it?
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Nicola Grogan commented
Why has this issue not yet been resolved. Can we get a date on when this simple fix can be actioned?