Do you do your own bookkeeping in Xero? – we have something that might save you some time!

Xero have recently added a new feature for posting purchase invoices from your suppliers that we wanted to share with you.

In the ‘bills’ section on Xero, there used to be two main ways of getting data inputted into Xero. You could either manually type out the purchase invoice, or copy it from a previous bill and attach a pdf copy of the bill on Xero, or you could have used something like Hubdoc or Dext which integrates with Xero, which would analyse the purchase invoice for you using AI and post it to Xero for you along with a copy of the pdf.

Using a separate app like Hubdoc, Dext or Autoentry, although was a bit of a speedier way of processing purchases (especially if you had a lot of them), was a bit confusing at times having to go into a separate app. Plus, Dext and Autoentry have a separate subscription cost.

Xero have released a ‘upload bill’ function. When you are in the bills section of Xero, click the green down arrow next to the ‘New Bill’ box, and select ‘upload bills’.

You can then drag and drop pdfs of your purchase invoices into the upload bills box (or select them from a file on your computer). Xero then works its magic, and creates draft bills for you to approve. It will try to automatically populate as many fields as possible, such as the contact, date, total, due date and reference fields. It might not capture everything for every bill, so you’ll need to check it before you press post, but we’ve been impressed by it so far.

If you process a lot of purchases, something like Hubdoc or Dext might still overall be best for you, but if you are only processing a relatively small number of bills each month, we think this is a really good option.

Do get in touch with a member of our business services department if you need further details.

By Emma Green