The GL transactions report is using the description of the ‘form’ and not of the line item in some of the inventory transactions. i.e. Cost of goods sold.
Have just been advised by my ATO person that they want to see item descriptions.
Apart from this issue the GL transaction report gives me all the information I need, and can be manipulated in a spreadsheet easily to produce individual reports, unlike using custom reports that do not yield required results and are not in the same easy to read and print format.
The ‘inventory sales’ and ‘GST payable’ sections of the report show that this can be done.
The ‘Inventory-cost’ and ‘Inventory on hand’ sections of the report make no sense if they are not going to show the actual inventory item description.
Surely this is just a matter of those sections of the report showing the wrong ‘description’ field?
Edit
By the way the ‘Inventory on hand’ section does show the item description on purchases.
What you are seeing is the program including the Description field from a line item when the account involved is the one directly posted to by a transaction form. For example, your first receipt is the equivalent of:
Dr CASH ON HAND
Cr Inventory - sales
The CASH ON HAND account does not have any description associated with it. That is, there is no description of the cash account. So the only content that can be shown is the Description of the overall transaction. For Inventory - sales, there is a line-item Description, so that can be shown. It is taken directly from the transaction entry form. If you edited that field, the corresponding entry on the report would also be changed.
The entries to Inventory - cost and Inventory on hand, however, represent the transfer of inventory cost from assets to expenses. The transfer debit and credit are automatic. There is no transaction entry form for them, so there is no line-item Description field from which they could be copied. So the program uses the Description field for the overall transaction, just as it does for the cash account.
@Tut Your explanation makes no sense to me AT ALL.
The General Ledger Transaction report used to (quite a while ago) show the item description under Inventory on hand and inventory cost!.
If the report can pull the GST payable item description WITHOUT the form description and likewise the Inventory sales then why does it not show it under the others?
It does give the values so therefore IT IS getting the information from the transactions.
Blind Freddy can see what the problem is.
Your argument falls in a hole with the purchase example I gave.
And it doesn’t matter which account I use, Bank, Paypal, Card, Cash on hand.
It is clear that that the report is retrieving the form description not the item description, otherwise the sales and GST would show the form description too. @lubos can you please have a look at this, it is going to take many hours to try and get this report (two years worth) for the ATO rep otherwise.
The GL report is composed of transaction lines and it will therefore show line descriptions. On the other hand, the tabs show the invoice header so it should show the header description.
Similarly any hidden lines (as my friend @AJD described) like Cost of Sales already inherit the item name and quantity from a specific user entered line, so they’re actually paired. To me it only seems logical for a line to get the line description whenever possible.
Because both of those come from the line item, Inventory - sales from the explicit account allocation and GST payble from the tax code contained in the line.
No, it does not. The Inventory on hand account shows explicitly on the payment form, and there is a line-item Description from which to take report content. It is exactly the same situation.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not defending what the program does. I am only explaining it.
The item descriptions should be able to be displayed in the generic ‘General Ledger Transactions’ report!!
If I can have them in a custom report, why not in the included report??
And the reason I don’t just use custom reports? Because not everyone auditing/reviewing my accounts is an expert on the terms used by this program and able to manipulate the reports as they need. And the values can’t be drilled down on for further investigation.
My example proves beyond doubt that the item descriptions can be extracted as necessary, so why not in the included GLT report?
