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There's currently no way to display the Payroll Expense Journal identifier (such as PD-47) within the Payroll Activity Details report. This is a limitation of Xero's current reporting functionality.

When a pay run is posted, Xero creates a single general ledger journal titled Payroll Expense Journal - PD-[number]. The PD reference corresponds directly to the pay run number and payment date shown at the top of the Payroll Activity Details report for that period. This is the ONLY UNIQUE LINKING KEY between the general ledger and the employee-level detail in Payroll.

Many NFP's need to be able to report on employee time and cost spent on a number of grant-funded projects. Timesheets allow this information to be captured (using the combination of Pay Items and a singe tracking category in timesheets) but no report is able to be generated that contains time and total cost per employee per project over a custom timeframe. To do this requires a combination of the Timesheet Details report, the Payroll Activity Details report and a GL transaction report for payroll expenses. The missing key that enables these reports to be linked uniquely is the Payroll Expense Journal identifier. Without that there is ambiguity and duplication when joining the Payroll Activity Details with the GL transactions (which currently has to be done only on the pay date).

Crazy thing is that Xero already generates a Payroll Activity Details report specific to a Payroll Expense Journal identifier when you select that report from View Reports menu of an individual payrun. Why the heck can't the Payroll Activity Details report from the general Reports menu provide the same filtering and field-inclusion functionality so that reports spanning multiple payruns can be generated.

Adding the PD-XX reference to the Payroll Activity Details report would solve this cleanly and must surely be a very trivial modification to the Payroll Activity Details report codebase.

Support specialist Artjoms encouraged me to submit this on Xero Product Ideas, and I hope - as he suggested - that it's the most direct route to getting it prioritised.