Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Awesome Apps for Accounting: Genius Scan, Hubdoc and Xero (by Dustin Wheeler)


Dustin Wheeler for his blog Diving into the Details writes: In my search for a fully automated, completely paperless, and mobile-friendly accounting system, I’ve discovered three apps I love that have almost made it a reality.

Genius Scan, Hubdoc and Xero
Unless I’m near a desktop scanner, every receipt or document enters my virtual file cabinets through Genius Scan.  I don’t know how it does it, but it turns my iPhone’s camera into a high-quality PDF scanner.  I love being able to crop my receipts, make them black and white, and make the PDF file sizes less than 100 KB (while image files from the camera are normally several megabytes).  I then use the app to easily upload documents to programs I use to organize them such as…
Hubdoc recognizes the text on the receipts and puts them into a list showing the vendor name, date and amount of each receipt.  It also automatically gives them file names (such as Wal-Mart_20150126_$20.00) when I download the files.  Hubdoc has some good organizational tools for marking documents as paid, adding tags and notes, and putting documents into folders.  Hubdoc also automatically pulls online statements from my Amazon, credit card and utility accounts and similarly names and organizes those documents.  Hubdoc exports the electronic documents and transactions into online accounting systems such as…
Xero has been my personal accounting software for some time now.  I’m a fan of the beautiful web interface and the mobile app that lets me reconcile transactions on my iPhone.
I have a wish list that would make the process perfect:
  • Genius Scan can automatically upload to several apps, but Hubdoc is not on that list.  I currently e-mail each receipt to my Hubdoc e-mail address to do the job which isn’t too much of a hassle.
  • I’ve created many bank rules in Xero to automate how it classifies bank transactions it downloads, but they don’t apply to transactions coming from Hubdoc.  Although the two programs do an amazing job auto-categorizing them, I wish I had more control.
  • The Xero reconciliation screen doesn’t show me how the transactions from Hubdoc are categorized, so I have to drill into the reports to find them and make sure they’re categorized right.
To comment visit Dustin Wheeler's blog on accounting & technology by clicking here. Dustin’s accounting experience includes tax, audit, financial statement preparation, accounting software consulting, and spreadsheet modeling (see LinkedIn profile for more details).  

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