Hubdoc Looks to Take Accounting Automation to the Next Level

The team at Hubdoc certainly gets it. Today, accounting automation is key for getting past the more mundane side of managing your books.

Friends since the 80’s, lawyer Jamie Shulman & marketing guru Jamie McDonald took a look around them and started asking themselves why their personal and business lives felt so cluttered. Too many recurring bills, too many receipts, too many invoices. To retrieve each and every one of them required a separate web login and with that, a corresponding timely, inefficient process.

With nothing on the market that chases after your bills and centralizes them and with too many websites and passwords to remember to fetch them, the Jamies set out to create their own platform that would do so.

With that in mind, Hubdoc was launched in 2012 as a product geared specifically for individuals. “We wanted to build a platform that would consolidate all bills in 1 place. There are too many sites you need to go to get your bills and too many passwords,” says Jamie Shulman.

After launching Hubdoc, the team quickly realized that an even bigger opportunity existed for the product: the small business market.

Small businesses have the headache of needing to do their bookkeeping on a regular basis. Chasing after bills and entering data has typically been a big part of process. As an accountant, I can vouch for this first hand. Hubdoc easily and beautifully centralizes this all into one “hub.” Not only that, but Hubdoc also aims to automate some of the more manual parts of your accounting by parsing data from bills and receipts and then effortlessly syncing them with your cloud accounting system. This equates to an unprecedented amount of time savings in an area of your accounting that was typically painful.

Upon logging in to your account, Hubdoc greets you with an easy to understand dashboard. On the left you’ll have a folder for each different account that has been connected to Hubdoc as well as a stream of bills that have been downloaded. Connecting an account is super simple as all that’s needed is the login credentials for any bill that you want Hubdoc to retrieve. There are a ton of different accounts that you can add to Hubdoc. Example include Rogers, Bell, bank accounts, credit card accounts and a bunch of different SaaS products. The selection certainly isn’t lacking.

Once an account is connected, Hubdoc will automatically fetch the invoice for you, sort them into their respective folder and then parse the most important data such as the date, due date, invoice number and amount, thereby eliminating much of the manual data entry.

But the main benefit of Hubdoc, in my opinion, is its ability to integrate with your cloud accounting system as mentioned above. Currently Hubdoc supports integration with Xero and Quickbooks Online. Once integrated, you can set Hubdoc to automatically transfer bills that have been retrieved by Hubdoc into your cloud accounting system using the data that has been parsed. This will then populate into Xero and Quickbooks Online as a bill awaiting payment or a bill that has been already paid, depending on how you had set up that account in Hubdoc. So not only will Hubdoc chase after bills for you, but they’ll also enter it into your accounting system. Can you say automated goodness?

The team at Hubdoc have also launched an iPhone and Android app so that you can scan those annoying little receipts that you are constantly getting and sticking in a shoebox and instead upload and organize them on the go.

In terms of pricing, their consumer account is 100% free which limits you to a specific type of bill that you can connect to Hubdoc. Business accounts allow you to import every bill from their list and will run you $20 per month.

The product is both made for the consumer and small business markets, but the ones that would benefit the most would be those in small businesses that receive a pile of bills on a recurring monthly basis and need to be absolutely organized for accounting purposes.

The best part about Hubdoc is that it puts a large emphasis on automating some of the more manual parts of your accounting. This is what we live for at Xen Accounting and this is certainly the future of accounting. No doubt, Hubdoc gets this and they are certainly doing their part in taking your accounting to the next level.