Gone are the days when you had to pay the likes of DropBox or Google Drive for a monthly subscription for online storage ...
At Busy Bee Business Solutions, when we first speak to clients, many businesses have a monthly charge in their books for the likes of such providers. The truth is, if you are using QuickBooks Online or Xero there is no need to pay extra elsewhere for storage. The newest updates from both cloud accounting providers have now allowed for not only storage but also receipt capture and extraction to be included in the price of their own monthly subscription prices. So the argument now faced by many clients is which one do you go for? Below we compare the two market leading cloud accounting systems and their solutions to online storage.
QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online have just released the newest of their product updates which is a receipt capturing module included in their subscription prices. This had been available for the sole trade version of the software as well as the US market for quite some time however has only just made it to the UK for us to try out for ourselves. Busy Bee Business Solutions tested the new module to see how it shapes up.
Submission
You can upload documents into the new ‘Receipts’ section of the bank by simply dragging and dropping. You can also email in receipts albeit only with email addresses that have access to the QuickBooks Online profile meaning no supplier email-in option. The great thing that QuickBooks has done well is the receipt capture element on the mobile app. It is really easy to locate, use and snap. You don’t even have to press the button to take the photo of the receipt, which is great for those who can never quite take a clear photo without the image becoming a little blurred! There’s nothing more irritating right?
Extraction
For basic receipt capture it works (kind of!). It extracts the information from the receipt accurately 80% of the time (based on us using 10 receipts to put this new feature to the test). For the items it doesn’t pick up, you have to go through and manually enter the information which can be a little time consuming to say the least. We found it also a little clumsy in the sense that you are presented with a dropdown of customers and suppliers in the payee field which seems silly based on the fact that it is more than likely going to be a suppliers name that you will need to be using. On the whole however, the systems extraction of the document took less than 2 minutes on average per document which is pretty speedy in comparison to similar tools on the market.
Transactions processed into QuickBooks Online
The software does not allow you to process bills in this software yet meaning that you cannot add open bills into QuickBooks Online, just expenses. This means that if you are used to using the software to track who you owe money to, then this will not be possible through using the new receipt capture feature. We are hoping that this is at the top of QuickBooks lists of improvements for this new module!
Rules
There is currently no feature to set up supplier rules to speed up the bookkeeping process on the new receipt capture module. This would be incredibly useful for business owners that regularly use the same suppliers for the same things e.g. BP or Shell is always a fuel expense.
Tracking
You can actually track your classes and locations against the receipts entered into the receipt capture module which is incredibly handy for those that are already using this feature for reporting purposes in QuickBooks Online. It also allows you to mark the expenses as ‘billable’ if you are a business that bills your expenditure on to your customers.
Storage
The expense that the receipt capture generates can then be matched against the bank transaction in your bank feed within the software creating a complete record for HMRC record keeping purposes. This makes it incredibly easy to pull up a receipt for a specific transaction at any one time.
Overall we think the QuickBooks Online receipt capture module is okay, and considering it is free it is a great new edition to the cloud accounting software. We hope that in time, QuickBooks will listen to customers feedback of requested new features and improve the elements discussed above, as some of these are in fact already available on the US version. This will be vital if they are to stand out amongst the competition in this market at present.
Xero
Xero also announced quite recently that on the 18th March 2020 they will be pairing up with Hubdoc. The cost for Hubdoc will be free to users that are already paying a Xero Business Edition subscription so it’s a great way to save the pennies on other software such as DropBox or Google Drive (about $20 per month!). Busy Bee Business Solutions also took a look at how this new partnership between Xero and Hubdoc would work for you and your businesses record keeping and document storage purposes.
Submission
Much like the QuickBooks Online’s receipt capture module, you can submit to Hubdoc either via manual upload, mobile app or email with the only difference being that Hubdoc allows any email address to submit to dedicated email address set up for a businesses Hubdoc profile meaning you can get your suppliers to email your documents straight to Hubdoc saving your time having to enter them into the software.
You can also automatically send bank statements, invoices, bills and receipts using Hubdoc from over 700 bank, utility and phone suppliers as well as many others which is a great way to save some time.
Extraction
The extraction is incredibly accurate picking up supplier name, date, total amounts and other details. The software picked up 100% of the receipts accurately when we tested the same 10 receipts we tried with the QuickBooks Online receipt capture module. It even filed the receipts into folders that we specified once we had set up some rules for the system from the beginning. The only downside is that the processing time of the documents did not seem as rapid as the extraction from the QuickBooks Online receipt module. It appears that accuracy takes a little bit more time!
Transactions processed into Xero
Much like QuickBooks Online, you can match your receipts into your Xero bank feed for reconciliation purposes as well as process open bills into the software for you to be able to track your aged payables accurately at any point in time.
Rules
With Hubdoc, you can set up vendor rules which will automate how your receipts and bills are coded. Hubdoc then automatically places the documents in the correct folder once the data has been extracted for your convenience and to save you time filing them.
Tracking
Much like the QuickBooks Online module, with Hubdoc and Xero integration you can assign tracking classes and locations to the receipts or bills.It also allows you to mark the expenses as ‘billable’ if you are a business that bills your expenditure on to your customers.
Storage
Not only does Hubdoc allow you to reconcile expenses to your bank transactions in Xero and process open bills into the cloud based system, it also allows you to send the documents to Bill.com and DropBox if you fancied storing the files somewhere else as well as Hubdoc and Xero although we think that this is unnecessary.
All in all, we will be recommending that our current and future clients continue using the likes of Hubdoc and other similar apps out there as these currently seem more advanced and developed with better features. Just to throw a spanner in the works, if Hubdoc is sounding more appealing to you at this point in time then it does in fact also integrate with QuickBooks Online. The only downside is that it is an additional subscription charge, rather than being offered for free to Xero Business Edition users.
There are also other applications such as Receipt Bank and Auto Entry which provide very similar functions integrating into both cloud based accounting softwares. These apps have a much higher level of extraction including line items, rules, reports etc but these do come at an additional monthly subscription cost. We have experience in using all of these applications
at Busy Bee Business Solutions so please feel free to reach out to us for some more support and guidance on what apps will work best for you and your business.
07473 209992 or emily@busybeebusinesssolutions.co.uk
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