Payroll Journals - Customise Description for Transaction Reports to provide better context
When running reports to review Staff costs & looking into account transactions, Payroll journals provide descriptions that don't give correct/clear context. For example, under Employers Pension Contributions, the description provided is "Benefits" rather than Employers Pension Contributions. Or under Employment Costs it just says Earnings rather than "Gross Earnings". A final example was when an employee took unpaid leave, however the only description provided was "Deductions". This does not reflect clear context. It would be helpful if Xero had the means to be able to customise these descriptions or maybe have the option to ask Payroll/Reports to mirror the descriptions provided in the Pay Item settings or use the name of the Pay Item as the description?
The present work around is to either use Transaction Listing Details Report as an extra document or go into the pay run to locate the contextual information but this doesn't enable a means to provide physical data for external parties that do not have access to Payroll.

Hi Sophie ✨, thanks for your feedback on this idea. We're well aware how the generic descriptions in pay run journals can be confusing when they don't align with your specific payroll settings. We understand that you've been using workarounds like exporting reports to Excel and manually editing them to get the detail you need. While this can help in the short term, we recognize it is a time-consuming process that shouldn't be necessary.We've shared your valuable feedback with our product team. As with all new features, we have to balance this against other development priorities. We can't promise a specific timeline, but the more support an idea gets, the higher it climbs on our list. Please continue to vote and comment on this and similar ideas to show your support. We'll be sure to provide another update when we can✨