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If the 'Description' detail is not available in the Account Transactions report, this column should be withdrawn from the options available for selection.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.
Peter Martin
shared this idea
Hi team, we want to acknowledge your feedback and the needs you’ve expressed for being able to view the transaction line description in the account transactions report.
While we appreciate not the news you’re hoping for here - we want to be honest with you all that there are no plans at this stage to change the behaviour of this report.
We appreciate there can be some confusion of what is shown as it does differ based on the account and the line’s origin. We have added detail within our Xero Central article, but I’ve also noted below for ease of reference.
- For accounts receivable, accounts payable, bank accounts, and tax account, it shows the contact’s name.
- For all other accounts, it shows the contact’s name and the item line description.
- As manual journals don’t have contacts, it shows narration and description.
- For wage payments, Payroll Employee displays in place of the employee's name.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the interest this idea continues to build and votes will remain open. If anything changes with the status or if there are any updates to share, we’ll be sure to post them here so you’re among the first to hear.
-
Jennifer Feranda
commented
Invoice description should flow through to payment description for reporting.
My company runs daily receipt reports with a combination of invoiced and non-invoiced items. The Description column on the account transaction report does not show a description of the invoice for which the payment was made, but rather shows the contact name for the invoice. This information is redundant as this is already part of the option for the Contact column.
-
Frank Burnham
commented
Account Transactions Report Description Cash Basis - please use the same transaction description text for cash basis reporting as it is displayed for accrual basis reporting. Currently cash basis description text is limited to "Payment: [Vendor Name]" which is utterly useless in performing analytical procedures of scanning to see the general business purpose for a cash basis report. This is a very common practice by CPAs to quickly gain an understanding of the nature of transactions in a given account for tax compliance reasons.
Currently users must drill down in each suspect transaction to the originating bill to see the actual description text entered by a client.
QuickBooks uses the same description text regardless of the basis of accounting for reporting purposes for this very reason. Just sayin....
-
Jodi Stewart
commented
Can we have the option to toggle or remove the contact name from the description column (ie in Account Transactions) so it is not duplicated and the description contains only the description now that we have the option to add Contact as a separate column which is a great new feature?