Book-keeping for businesses is no longer about having someone sitting at a desk 5 days a week. Trawling through endless invoices and receipts and entering them into ledgers is a thing of the past. It has come a long way from there. Automation is no longer the future for book-keeping, its now, and its firmly here to stay.
The amount of time spent doing this type of work has halved thanks to automated services, such as ReceiptBank, and works hand in hand with some of the top providers of Cloud accounting packages, such as Xero.
Using a package like Xero and Hubdoc, it is now even easier to see how your business is doing on a daily basis, without having to wait until the yearly accounts are finished. By this point, the information is out of date.
Who are Hubdoc and what do they do?
Hubdoc is not a new business. Founded in 2011, Hubdoc joined a fairly new market to bring automation into book-keeping for small businesses.
Now they’re a big player in accounting automation, revolutionising book-keeping for businesses. Having been acquired by Xero in 2018, Xero will be including Hubdoc as standard in their Xero packages from the 18th March 2020.
What is Hubdoc?
Hubdoc is a piece of software that effortlessly feeds your receipts and invoices into Xero, with the use of the latest in AI technology.
Hubdoc reads the data on PDF and photo images, and turns it into information that Xero can use. It then is pushed through to Xero, and a digital image is attached to the transaction. This means that you no longer have to keep hold of your paper receipts and bills!
By simply taking a photo of a receipt using your phone camera, its AI technology can pick out key information, and turn it into data. This data feeds into Xero and some other cloud accounting packages, doing the hard work for you.
Where perhaps each receipt or invoice may have taken 3-4 minutes to enter into accounting software, it enabled ten times that many in the same amount of time.
How much is your time worth?
How much is your time worth? This is a question asked very often, but it’s a hard one to answer.
Business owners tend work on a fixed fee basis, so working out how much your time is worth is difficult. A more appropriate question, and probably easier to answer, is how much do you value your spare time?
Do you find yourself stealing time away from your family and friends? How often do you find yourself scrambling to pull together all your receipts and invoices ready for that VAT return, or to update your books?
The Federation for Small Businesses (FSB) published a report in May 2016, stating that small businesses spend on average four days a month on business admin, including their book-keeping.
Those four days spent working on admin tasks instead of connecting to new customers or serving your current customers could cost you considerably.
How we can help!
We’re on hand to help get automation into your business. Automating your book-keeping with the use of Hubdoc and Xero can free up those four days, to allow you to do what you do best.
If you’d like to know more about how automation can help your business prosper, get in touch on 0114 4000053, or by email info@freedominnumbers.co.uk, and we’d be happy to help.
