Hubdoc vs. Xero

When I am out purchasing items for my business I can quickly take photos of receipts and upload via the app and not have to worry if I lose or damage a receipt. This is very handy for me. Hubdoc also allows me to get all my invoices, payments and statements to my bookkeeper very easily which saves me money and time. I only use Hubdoc for business purposes which is where I feel it is most suitable. I probably wouldn't use it for personal stuff as I don't track personal that strictly.

Incentivized

In my opinion Xero is well suited for: 1) Standalone organisations, 2) Organisations where the accounting team bench strength is thin, 3) Organisations which are able to leverage on new technologies and apps 4) Organisations which get most of their tech infrastructure within the APAC region Xero may not be as suitable for: 1) Organisations with group structures (especially complex ones) 2) Organisations which are constrained in their use of startup technologies and apps by startups 3) Organisations which get most of their tech infrastructure from the US or EU

• Extracts data from documents both from a feed and a scan really quick.
• Availability of automated feeds directly from the supplier.
• Integration with accounting software e.g. Xero (now owned by them) and QBO.
• Ability to auto-archive to many different cloud storage locations such as Google Drive and ShareFile.

Incentivized

• Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
• Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
• Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.

Incentivized

• Although it is great that they can automatically get bank statements and transactions once linked, these links have been very unreliable historically.
• Figuring out how to set up the automatic feed is cumbersome. You can land up being inundated with useless transaction data.
• you have to upload each document separately. The program cannot differentiate/split PDFs.

Incentivized

• Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
• Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
• More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.

Incentivized

In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.

I think this is one of the easiest apps to use on both mobile and desktop. Once it was all set up by my bookkeeper all I needed to do was upload things. I recall the set up being quite simple and we've only made a few small changes over the years.

Incentivized

The dashboard is a simple design where all accounts can be seen from the same screen, unlike other softwares that makes you search for bank accounts that you want to work in. Our clients love that they can easily find their way around their books without having to call our firm to help them.

Incentivized

We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.

Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.

Incentivized

At the time we implemented Hubdoc (more than 2 years ago) it was quite cutting edge and did have strong advances from the competition plus its pricing was definitely more competitive (flat rate vs price per data extraction model). However, currently the competition has caught up and now many of Hubdoc's core features are being built into online accounting software natively.

Incentivized

Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.

The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.

Incentivized

All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.

If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.

Incentivized

We did not get far into evaluating other solutions we were looking at because Hubdoc came highly recommended from peers, coupled with Xero and Gusto. The cost for Thompson-Reuters is high. We quickly honed in on Hubdoc due to cost and recommendation and are very glad that we did.

Incentivized

Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.

I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing

Incentivized

• We are processing much faster than expected
• Clients are getting receipts in faster and allowing us not to stalk them to process their banking
• It is a file for us besides attaching to the invoice we also have the history of bills/receipts in Hubdoc

Incentivized

• We have saved 1 hour per month on reporting on one of our not-for-profits, which is 12 hours a year at minimum from an investment of 30 minutes on initial setup.
• On cleanup files, we are able to save at minimum half the time we would spend and be able to get them cleaned up and moved to a monthly file quicker
• Using cash coding on one client as an example it would take us a week to do their bookkeeping last year it took me 8 hours from start to finish.