Enter your idea

I am in the same position as Janet. We need site, partner, address, and client data on each invoice, and this does not require financial data to be entered. I've tried very hard to switch our procedure to "new invoicing," but it is so time-consuming and lacks basic required functionality that we have to revert to "Classic invoicing" every time. I am horrified that there are less than two months left before Classic invoicing is retired on Xero, and we will be left with only these ugly, dysfunctional "improvements."

We currently have a SITE DETAILS item code and then in the description there is a template to which we add site and job specific details such as site address, operator, job completion date etc.
For your NEW INVOICING to work and look correct we would have to type the whole lot out for each and every invoice. The new invoicing already has added many more keystrokes and inconveniences and I am at the stage of looking for another accounting software package

I agree with comments below to add a description line as suggested or add an option in Products & Services for Notes only which doesn't have any financial links.

Do we have a solution for this?

Add in the description field without a monetary value.
It would be good if we can add a description to the invoice without putting in a monetary value within that row.
Sometimes we have jobs where we describe the work done in the description field (which we could do in old invoicing) and want no $$ there within that row, and then add the $$$ rows underneath.
If I do this, the invoice appears with 0.00 in the description row which looks messy.

I'll add my support to this - I need to be able to have text only lines in some invoices. For frequently used text - reiteration of my payment and cancellation policies, as an example - I have this saved as a "product" so it can be quickly added when needed. Obviously there is no financial value to this, and so it currently looks absolutely ridiculous.
Please listen to your users requesting this - really useful, really simple - feature to be retained in the 'new' invoicing.

Just jumping in on this one - along with the other many threads about the issue with the new invoice format issues - agree with discussion here - being able to add lines to an invoice for notes to customer about detail related to service etc is very important, under new invoice, the addition of qty 1 and $0.00 lines is very unprofessional and looks terrible - another reason to start looking at alternative solutions out there.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is now 15 April. Still no fix to this critical function.
No company reply??

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.

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.

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

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.

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.