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Current Behaviour

When using comparison periods in Xero financial reports (such as Profit & Loss), the report automatically displays periods in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest).

Whilst users can manually reorder columns using the Edit Layout function, this change only applies to the specific report layout and does not dynamically adapt when different reporting periods are selected. As a result, users must manually rearrange the columns each time they run reports for different months, quarters, or years.

Problem

For businesses that regularly prepare management accounts, board packs, investor reporting, or trend analysis, reviewing financial performance from oldest to newest is often more intuitive and aligned with standard reporting practices.

The current approach creates several challenges:

Manual reordering is required every time a new reporting period is selected.
Saved custom report layouts do not maintain chronological ordering across different reporting periods.
Exported reports require additional manual adjustments before being distributed to management, investors, lenders, or external stakeholders.
The process becomes increasingly time-consuming for organisations producing regular monthly or quarterly reporting packs.

Suggested Enhancement

Introduce one or more of the following options:

A report setting allowing users to choose the default comparison period order:
Oldest to Newest
Newest to Oldest
An organisation-wide reporting preference that controls the default ordering for all financial reports.
Dynamic custom report layouts that retain the chosen column ordering regardless of the reporting periods selected.

Business Benefit

This enhancement would:

Reduce manual report preparation time.
Improve consistency across financial reporting.
Better support management reporting and trend analysis.
Eliminate repetitive manual column adjustments.
Improve usability for finance teams, accountants, CFOs, boards, and business owners.

Expected Outcome

Users should be able to run and export Profit & Loss and other financial reports with comparison periods automatically displayed in chronological order without needing to manually rearrange columns each time.

I would really like to see an income statement trend report by month showing January through most recent month closed with a YTD at end. I don't want to see the entire year because it then shows months that aren't completed/closed. QBO has a report called YTD to Prior Month - I now have to update this trend report every month, for every client when it should be accessible at the click of a button. I too would like to see our current year with earliest month on the left with other months added to the right. Ability to reverse would seem to make everyone happy.

We've only been using Xero for a couple of years, but as time passes it's going to become increasingly more annoying that the default date is earliest first !!! - NOONE WANTS TO SEE THE EARLIEST FIRST - we USUALLY WANT MOST RECENT FIRST - it cannot be difficult to programme the software to default to this preferred setting by default - surely XERO can sort this very easily.

IF NOT PLEASE LET US ALL KNOW WHY

Very interesting that Xero is happy to ignore this request. Shouldnt the purpose of the accounting system to discourage us away from spreadsheets?

A simple work around by using the report editor would be great, but there's no way to set the columns up to equal current month +/-1, so I have to edit the custom P&L every time I need a new period.

I am almost never going to want to view the oldest transactions first - but the default option is set to oldest to newest. So means I always have to click the date in order for it to show most recent items - not sure why this isn't the default?

It would be so much more useful - please change default for all reports to newest to oldest.
Or at least give me the option to make that the default for my Xero account. Thanks

Ended up working around this by exporting to Google Sheets and creating an AppScript function.

Change the start and end columns for your use case.

You need to adjust the column numbers in the script to suit your needs.
Also, ensure that a date-type header is present in Row 5.

You can check the script at:
https://github.com/Flozad/awesome-appscript/blob/main/UseCases/xero-sorting-reports.js

I just had a demo with a consolidation company called Translucent which connects to Xero and is has implemented this simple button which lets you choose from "ascending" or "descending" dates. It would be great if Xero could implement this feature natively. Rearranging on the layout editor is too time consuming and restricts other functionality. In my opinion, this is a major issue for making progress in the US market as most of us are coming from QuickBooks and are so used to the left to right, oldest to newest format.

I would love a simple button to click to be able to reverse the order of the date columns in Reports - I know that I can manually edit the layout and drag the date columns to be in the order I want but to do that for every new custom report we make takes up time.

When creating your own report, the dates are automatically in the order of newest on the left to oldest on the right. In a lot of forecasting we look at historics with oldest on the left and newest date on the right. Please can you implement a functionality to reverse the order of the date columns?

For Xero reports when running comparisons, the data is listed from left to right as newest perido to oldest.

I have been an accountant for over 20 years, and nearly all other softwares show these reports as oldest to newest from left to right.

Was wondering if there could be a button to just switch this around.

Thanks

Adam

Yes please.
Can we please have a button to switch the order of the columns. Need this flexibility - as you need it different ways for different purposes and its very time consuming to switch it around exp if you are monthly reports for 12months.

Very frustrating that this is not possible. @kelly setting a fixed custom report is fine if you're always comparing to a certain number of periods (i.e. 6 months), but this feature completely lacks flexibility.

Every stakeholder wanting to see a P&L, Balance Sheet or Cash Flow are expecting dates to be from left to right, allowing the ability to forecast future numbers by simply inserting new columns to the right.

I can't understand why you would design this backwards.

Highly frustrating that this is not yet possible....and the answer like go to lay-out editor and change it each time is just much to time intensive...Would be great if this can finally be sorted....pun intentional

Are you REALLY saying this is not a setting I can change in Xero? That's ridiculous. This is not a fun difference to making accounting "easier" or "more interesting" - it is requiring lots of extra work to integrate in a task that no - one wants to spend extra time on. Ugh.

Kelly,
Investors want to see sales and income going "up and to the right". For some reason, Xero is committed to making it difficult to show it that way.

Your comment is technically true. It is *possible* to manually sort date columns. But to manually sort date columns on a report for 36 months is impractical.

It's far better to have a toggle to sort the date columns either ascending or descending.

Hi @kelly, dragging all 12 columns to a new order in the layout editor is a pain, and then you lose the ability to change some of the other settings for a report. It's especially annoying when trying to create a reusable report pack a small group of reports can quickly be refreshed with up-to-date data. Robbie's idea is a good one: so many time based reports in Xero are counterintuitive, at least for non accountants.