The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

222 [1] YT ⎸ Hubdoc: Audit-Proof Your Business

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 222

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In this episode, I'm walking you through one of my absolute favorite tools for keeping your business audit-proof: Hubdoc. I'll show you exactly how we use it at Of Course Financial to help our clients manage their supporting business documents digitally, save hundreds of hours every year, and stay compliant with IRS requirements. Plus, I've got some exciting announcements about upcoming Xero tutorials, the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops re-airing, and our Black Friday sale!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How Hubdoc automatically organizes receipts, invoices, and statements by vendor
  • Step-by-step process for uploading, reviewing, and categorizing documents in Hubdoc before pushing them to Xero or QuickBooks
  • Pro tips on avoiding duplicate entries and keeping your books clean while building an audit-proof paper trail

Resources mentioned in this episode:

For experienced bookkeepers & accountants:

Learn how to start your bookkeeping business in The Bookkeeping Business Accelerator® >>

Grab my FREE Start your Bookkeeping Biz Checklist >>

Grab my FREE New Client Onboarding Templates >>

For new bookkeepers:

Learn the fundamental accounting skills in Katie Ferro's Become a Bookkeeper** >>

For creators:

Become a client at my firm, Of Course Financial >>

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Welcome to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm Serena Sup, your host, and today our episode is actually going to be best viewed over on YouTube. I'll be demoing and screen sharing an upcoming series on tutorials in Xero, especially for new users. Whether you are a bookkeeper or an entrepreneur, there have been some changes with the zero user interface and I decided it's time for me to do a series on how to set up your books in Xero and use some of the functions that we use inside of our firm. So head on over to youtube.com/ambitious bookkeeper. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of the following videos, because I won't be publishing the rest here on the podcast. Like I said, they're best viewed on YouTube, so if you're interested in that, you can go watch the rest of them there. Also coming up, we will be airing the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops here on the podcast and the YouTube channel. However, these will only be available for a limited time if you've been following along here for the past few years, you know that the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops are a paid workshop series, and I decided I wanted to share them with all you listeners just in case you've missed out and haven't joined those in the past. So those will be. Re aired from this last fall round from November 12th, and they will be taken down on December 2nd. So make sure you are subscribed here to the podcast or to YouTube so that you don't miss when those workshops drop. And lastly, just love another heads up. We are going to be offering some Black Friday specials on our courses. One of them being the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator, Which is why I wanted to air the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops here on the podcast, just in case you're not sure if you are a good fit for the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator, The Bookkeeping Biz Workshops are a great prerequisite before joining BBA or the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator. So those will be available to help you decide if you are ready for BBA another being Elevate along with the rest of our mini courses and workshops. All will be 20% off. So. Go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/store so you can start looking and perusing what your options are so that you're not rushed during the Black Friday rush, and you'll know what you want to get your hands on. So those are the announcements about what's coming up here on the Ambitious Bookkeeper. Like I said, I'm doing a series on zero. Make sure you're subscribed to YouTube and catch those over there. I will not be airing those. Here on the podcast and we will be airing the last round of the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops from November 12th through December 2nd, here on the podcast and on YouTube. But those will be taken down on December 2nd. Our Black Friday sale is going to be. Beginning the Friday after Thanksgiving and go until December 2nd. So make sure you've gone to our website, look at all of our courses and see what you're going to wanna get your hands on. And lastly, I will be taking a hiatus from the podcast after those workshops. There's a couple more episodes, some interview episodes that we are going to be airing, and then. I'll be taking a break and I hope you do too. So that's it for now. Let's dive into today's tutorial and like I said, head on over to the YouTube channel to catch that in its full video format. Alright, I'll see you there. Did you know that when you started a business, you made an agreement with the IRS that you would have a bookkeeping system to keep your records for your business And you agreed to keep supporting business documents. In today's video, I'm gonna go over how we use a certain system to help our clients keep track of those said supporting business documents as part of their bookkeeping system. I am Serena and I run an online accounting firm called Of Course, Financial. We focus on online entrepreneurs, online businesses like e-commerce course creators, and of course any type of creator out there selling their work online. In today's video, I'm gonna show you how we help our clients stay on top of managing these supporting business documents digitally. We use this tool with QuickBooks Online and Xero, although most of our clients, are on Xero. But this Software does also work with QuickBooks Online, so I am sure by now you're wondering what is this magic tool that saves Serena and her clients hundreds of hours of work every year, and that is Hubdoc. It is included with each zero subscription because it's owned by Xero, but it is very affordable in case you want to use it with a different accounting software like QuickBooks Online. One of the main reasons why I love this tool versus maybe what's built into QuickBooks Online or other softwares is that when you upload the documents, it immediately pulls the vendor information or the supplier information. From that invoice receipt or other business document and creates a folder for it and files it away in that folder with all the rest of the documents that belong to that same vendor. So if you ever need to go searching for something but you're not sure what the amount was and you maybe don't remember the vendor name, you can scroll through the list of your folders and just scan them to see and jog your memory. You can also open that folder and see all the documents that you have related to that vendor. I'm sure you're chomping at the bit to see what this software looks like. So let's head on over there. If you're already using Xero, you're gonna want to set up your Hubdoc account through your Xero account. So go ahead and click on the dropdown where your company name is. Click on More with Xero and then Hubdoc and it will open it up for you and walk you through the process to setting up Hubdoc. You'll click this set up Hubdoc button and follow the rest of the steps to set up your Hubdoc account. You'll be able to use your Xero login to log to Hubdoc and everything will automatically be integrated when you set it up this way. One of the ways that you can upload documents to Hubdoc is to click this button here from your desktop where it says upload document. You can click browse or you can drag and drop the documents. I have all of my documents in a folder that I'm going to upload all at once. So as you can see, you can drop. As many documents in at once as you'd like. If you're doing multiple documents, I suggest choosing this document upload default. If you are uploading one PDF with lots of different actual documents combined, you want to do this multi-page PDF split. You can also convert a bank statement from PDF into a CSV from certain banks. If you are wanting to email in your documents and forward emails, this is where you're gonna find the email address that you want to bookmark in your email client. And of course, you can also upload from your phone right on the go. And this is what I actually recommend, especially for physical receipts. So once we've uploaded all of those, we can close that window and Hub talk will do its thing in the background. As you can see, this particular document has a clock on it, meaning it's still processing, it's still pulling the information off of the receipt. These with the orange triangle they are ready to review. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on. The first one that's ready to review. As you can see on this right panel, you can choose the document type. I always like to fill this in, although this is not a requirement. This is a receipt as it says at the top payment receipt. In this particular receipt, I happen to know about this client. They are going to also probably be submitting an invoice, so I'm probably gonna come back to this just to make sure I don't enter a duplicate. So I'm gonna leave that as is. This is a bank statement, so I am going to categorize this as a statement. I don't need a CSB because we have this bank linked to their accounting file, and I'm gonna leave the dates and the amount and everything. But for this one, we're not actually pushing it over to the accounting system. We are just going to archive it so that it gives us that green check mark. And then the Next step that I'm going to do is actually download the bank statement to. The client folder, and this is a step that we take as a bookkeeping firm just to make sure we are keeping all of the documents internally for the work that we're doing as well. So when we reconcile the bank account, we print out a report showing that it's reconciled and we save it alongside the actual bank statement. Now the next one's another bank statement. I'll come back to that. And then this one is an actual invoice, so we're gonna choose invoice on the document type. It's already selected the supplier for us in the invoice number. Sometimes it doesn't recognize invoice numbers, but we actually want to type this in ourselves. So we are going to take this invoice number here and type it in. For the most part, I found that Hubdoc actually is able to extract the invoice number, so hopefully you don't have to do this very often. We're gonna just double check everything else that it's pulled up for us. August 30th is the date of the invoice, and September 6th is the due date, and then the amount is 4,999. Down here, we've already processed invoices from this particular vendor, so it's remembering what we selected last time because I checked this save configuration checkbox. I typically don't ever choose this autosync checkbox because I like to review everything before it actually gets pushed in and attached to the transactions within the accounting system. But for this particular. Vendor. I like everything except I always like to update the description. So as you can see, the date range is a little bit different, so I'm going to remove that piece and add September 30th, and then we're gonna hit. Publish and proceed. Sometimes you have to click that button twice for it to respond. And here we have an example of receipt for the exact same transaction. I don't wanna record this twice because then we're going to end up duplicating that transaction. So I'm gonna mark this as a receipt and I'm gonna just click that archive button. You'll go through that same process with all of the documents that you've uploaded each month for all of the transactions and receipts and invoices that you have in your business. Your next step is to go on over to your accounting software, whether that be QuickBooks or Xero. In the next video, I'm gonna show you the process in Xero. If you're ready to start using Xero and Hubdoc, check the description and the pinned comment to sign up for your free trial of Xero. If you know you're ready to work with my firm and get you either moved over from QuickBooks to Xero or to set up your Xero, head over to ofcoursefinancial.com/contact and fill out our new client interest form. Watch this next video to learn how to import your bank statements or this next video. If you have bank feeds connected and you're ready to move on to your matching and reconciling process.

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