New Invoicing - Allow Item and Description-only lines, with no Qty or Unit Price
When choosing item code and description, I want the ability to leave the rest of the fields blank. Classic invoicing had no problems with it. The new invoicing wants to populate QTY, UNIT PRICE and AMOUNT. Makes the invoice look unappealing.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d655e0c5fad59a3d25d43369cfa99d14?size=40&default=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.uvcdn.com%2Fpkg%2Fadmin%2Ficons%2Fuser_70-6bcf9e08938533adb9bac95c3e487cb2a6d4a32f890ca6fdc82e3072e0ea0368.png)
Thanks for all your feedback here, everyone. The way you add description only lines in new invoicing is a little different to classic and we wanted to explain in hopes it'll help with how you're using new invoicing.
When entering a description only line, you can enter text in the description field of the line. If you add detail to any other field the line will be treated as a 'financial' line and you will need to include Qty, Unit price, Account and Tax rate.
When an inventory item is added this uses the item code field and the line is treated as 'financial', so it's not possible to use inventory items as description only lines in new invoicing atm.
We appreciate this is how many of you here have been making use of inventory and our product team are closely monitoring the feedback we're getting on this. Though we don't have any solid plans for changing this right now we will keep the idea under review, and share if there's any change planned.
-
Deborah Schooley commented
Thanks for pointing me to this explanation Kelly. Perhaps your team should consider how chaotic and confusing many users' financials will appear with endless zero lines appearing in transactions when they shouldn't be there. The alternative is slower entry and a LOT of extra work so I'm guessing many will resort to just accepting messy invoices with lots of zeros. This may seem a small point in the many challenges you are facing with converting everyone onto the new invoicing. However I think there will be many more users who only appreciate how big an inconvenience this is once the change becomes permanent and their accountants/accounts staff have to wade through the reports.
-
Yazz Bhatti commented
@kellymunro - it is entirely possible to transfer a user interface (which is basically what the invoicing system is) from one underlying technology to another. If it is not transferable then surely you need to ask your developer team why not?
If you duplicated old invoicing to the new invoicing system and then added the additional features you were considering, then perhaps you wouldn't have so much push-back.Instead what you're doing is ignoring your customers and stating that there are no plans (in other words, we don't care what you, our customer, thinks).
The way you treat your customers is with utter contempt.
-
Kylie Kirk commented
Having description only lines without the "financials" is absolutely critical for our business.
This will totally upset our way of invoicing and create so much more manual work for us, therefore costing the company more in admin time. Please fix this otherwise allow us to continue to use classic. Not happy with the new product at all.
-
Ulrike Paschen commented
Having description only lines without the "financials" is absolutely critical for our business.
The workaround may be fine for just a couple of lines but we have several if not many on each invoice, so it would double our invoicing time. Not impressed, to say the least.
-
Gordon Lyon commented
One reason many Xero users resort to description-only lines is that Xero new invoicing is inexplicably missing the title and summary lines have long been supported in quotes. So when I convert a quote to an invoice, I don't have any proper place for the order-specific details I had in the quote summary. So I stick them in a description-only item line. It's hideously ugly and unprofessional, but Xero isn't providing any better option. Please add title and summary support to your New Invoicing roadmap! These fields are already there and working perfectly in quotes.
-
Kelly Beveridge commented
Absolutely agree with this!
As a work around i switch back to Classic, delete the content in those fields and then switch back over to New. Super annoying!!
I really hope its changed by the time they remove Classic invoicing. -
Sue Lee commented
Found a work-around. Save invoice with all the unwanted values ('0'). Then delete the values - using tab - and "Update" invoice. The zeros disappear.
Not good enough though Xero. -
Sue Lee commented
It is now 15 April. Still no fix to this critical function.
No company reply?? -
Selina Fredericks commented
Please update your system, so we can use the inventory feature to enter extra lines, we have clauses we add for our clients, each client is different, so not the same clauses. At the moment we are having to hand type this in, means an average quote takes 2 hours, we don't have time for this.
-
Paul McCormack commented
Why change it if it wasn't broken? Clearly many of us were using inventory items to populate line items - without the need to enter quantity etc. This is how it's been done since we started using xero many years ago. You cannot change the functionality and not provide an alternative. Very dissapointed that you arent' listening to the feedback.
-
Amanda Key commented
Thank you for the explanation field and whilst it provides a short term work around - It is exactly that. We use the item field to add all the description fields on our invoices. Without this raising invoices will take significantly longer and also risks multiple errors as we have to key in descriptions each time.
Please can this be worked on as this is a critical issue for our business.
If you cannot create this functionality then please do not remove the classic invoicing until the new invoicing can match its capabilities
-
Craig Millett commented
Thanks for your recent review and update on this request along with your explanation on how this only partly works.
Unfortunately it still does not solve the issue.We ALL want to use the ITEM code field without populating it as a 'Financial' field, and thus leaving it blank as a text entry only.
Because we don't want to enter 10 lines of text on one invoice, then repeat that for 30 plus invoices every week...that equates to about 8 hours of typing. Even with the current ITEM fields, it still takes me 1hr do do 30 invoices as is now.
Surely this is not a hard modification to make if you have good software coders developing your software. I mean Microsoft XL has had this as a basic feature to change the CELL characteristic behavior with simple click of a button between (a choice of 11 different choices from Accounting, date, text, general, currency etc...), I'am sure your software isn't all that different to their CELL format.
-
Tina Walker commented
Thank you Kelly for the confirmation.
Item numbers are used by our organisation for description only lines for 2 purposes.
1. Template information on invoices.
2. Power BI/data warehouse analysis of our data. 'Non-financial' inventory items are used to capture high-level data regarding clients (client name, project, staff member etc). Not allowing this will require us to reconfigure our item numbers to capture more data within one field, if the text string allows. Being able to use inventory items for non-financial data is facilitating a cleaner data set for better PowerBI analysis.Allowing the inventory items to be 'non-financial' would be beneficial with a non-mandatory quantity and unit price.
-
Michael Warwick commented
Thanks Kelly, good to know that part of the old functionality is still availble. So now three useful options exist for you at Xero, 1. allow that item code is not in itself financial, 2. add the ability to insert boilerplate text in another way, 3. allow old invoicing to continue indefinitely until new invoicing reaches equivalent functionality. If you want to stick with "no solid plans" then it would be good to announce that the removal of old invoicing will not be forced any time soon (i.e. option 3).
-
Georgia Brabbin commented
More Freedom needed when creating templates - either Xero standard ones or the Doc.x files - not being a Line Item total, whilst at the same time having the choice whether to show a unit price, and a quantity separately and not together.
-
Rae Thompson commented
I agree, we need description lines
-
Tina Walker commented
The ability to add description lines with specific item codes with no quantity allows us to customise invoices and improve readability for our clients.
We also use these fields in our data warehouse to analyse data. Without description fields, we would need to amend and extend our item code list significantly. Adding this feature from classic invoicing will negate this need.
-
Katie Wilson commented
I agree, we need description lines
-
Tammy McKenzie commented
I AGREE WITH THE ABOVE. WE REQUIRE SOME LINES TO BE BLANK.
-
Barbara Nicolle commented
I still need to be able to ADD Quantity and unit price