By Jonathan Rivlin
In our continuing series on apps, we’re now going to turn our attention to document management.
Have you ever had the joyful experience of asking your clients for bank and credit card statements? Let’s be brutally honest here: it’s been my experience that such requests often cover multiple years. For clients with multiple bank and credit card accounts we can be talking about quite a few PDFs if you’re lucky; usually it’s reams of paper.
And then there’s that additional joy of having to ask for copies of cancelled checks, or check stubs (many companies still have paper checks). Sometimes you need to ask your client (I’m sure they’d say pester: CPA = Certified Pain in the Ascot) for additional documents, invoices, receipts, etc. The key here, which was not as apparent in the analog age, is that we need a uniform and efficient method of capturing data. If we’re moving away from “bookkeeping” towards “data science,” then the data capture portion of this cycle is mission critical.
We started this series on apps with Xero. Think of Xero as the hub of a wheel. Hubdoc is an app that should be the first spoke on that wheel.
Hubdoc is an app that integrates with Xero specifically designed for capturing bank and credit card statements — including check images — bills and receipts, auto sorts those bills, in real time, with OCR and assists with internal control.
Hubdoc is one of the apps that finally puts internal control into the hands of our small business clients. Take a moment and let that sink in.
In the same vein as in Jerry Maguire’s “You Had Me At Hello,” Hubdoc Had Me At Check Images. Internal control is the icing on the cake.
The key here is automation, a concept that is one of the primary drivers of the Cloud way of accounting. Automation in Hubdoc is accomplished when your client provides their login credentials (without needing to disclose them to you) during the setup phase and that’s it. They never need to enter them again, unless they change their password. AND, you never need to ask your client for statements, cancelled checks, and other items again. Talk about a time saver.
If Xero is the center for how you manage your clients’ data, Hubdoc is the means for how you collect that data. You can’t have one without the other.
Peanut butter and chocolate, steak and potatoes, steamed crabs and old bay (I was hungry when I wrote this post), and Xero and Hubdoc — the cloud based AI equipped general ledger app and the automated secure data gathering app.
Future posts will feature additional apps to snap into our cloud based framework.
Remember the point of all these apps isn’t to make our lives more complex — these apps make our lives easier! It’s a different way of thinking.
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Thanks, and catch you next time!
TT
