Life after Hubdoc: how accountants keep collecting client documents
Xero has retired Hubdoc. If you ran your practice on it, your documents moved to Xero Files and your collection workflow moved nowhere. It's simply gone.
That distinction matters more than most of the "Hubdoc alternative" articles admit. Xero Files is storage. It holds what arrives. It does not ask your clients for anything, it does not remind anyone, and it does not tell you which client is still missing their May bank statement. If your clients emailed documents into Hubdoc, that habit now has no destination.
This post is about rebuilding the part that actually hurt: getting documents out of clients every month without spending your afternoons asking for them.
What Hubdoc actually did for you
Hubdoc quietly did three different jobs, and it helps to name them separately, because no single replacement does all three the same way.
- Intake. Clients could email documents to a dedicated address, or upload them. There was one door, and everyone knew where it was.
- Fetching. It pulled some bank and supplier statements automatically, where a connection existed.
- Extraction. It read documents and pushed data toward the ledger.
Most replacement lists are written by OCR vendors, so they focus on job three. But for a lot of bookkeepers, extraction was never the pain. The pain was job one: clients who don't send the documents in the first place. An extraction tool cannot extract a receipt that is still in your client's glovebox.
Before you pay for anything, decide which job you are replacing. The sections below map the options for each job, including the free ones and the tools that compete with us.
What breaks first: the month-end close
Here is how the gap usually shows up. The first month after switching off Hubdoc, a few clients keep emailing documents to the old address or to you personally. Some send nothing, because the tool that used to nudge them is gone. You notice at close time, when the bank statement for one account is missing and two clients haven't sent their payroll reports.
So you write the emails yourself. "Hi, just checking if you could send over..." Multiply that by fifteen clients and you have found the real cost of Hubdoc's retirement: not the software, but the hours of chasing that come back onto your plate. We wrote separately about how to chase clients without burning the relationship, because it is a skill worth doing well even if you never buy a tool.
Your realistic options
Do it manually. A spreadsheet checklist per client, calendar reminders, and your own email. Free, and it works. It is just your time doing the chasing. If collection costs you under an hour a month across all clients, this is genuinely fine. Keep the spreadsheet.
Extraction tools (Dext, AutoEntry). Excellent at reading documents you already have. They still rely on clients submitting things, and practice pricing tends to be per client, which adds up fast for small firms.
Request tools (Content Snare and similar). These send clients a list of named upload slots. They work when clients fill the slots. Forwarded emails, photo dumps, and PDFs named scan_final_v2 don't fill slots, so you end up sorting by hand anyway.
Full practice suites. Real platforms with document requests built in, alongside workflow, proposals, and billing. If you want the whole suite, good. If you only want collection, you are buying a truck to carry a lunchbox.
Whichever category fits, check the per-client pricing math before you commit — that's where most of these quietly get expensive as your client list grows.
Whatever you choose, rebuild these three things
The tool matters less than the workflow. Three habits made Hubdoc-era collection work, and they are worth recreating on day one.
One intake door per client. The close falls apart when documents arrive by email, text, portal, and paper. Pick one door. Tell every client that is where things go. Route stragglers back to it politely and consistently.
A written monthly checklist per client. Not in your head. A list of exactly which statements, reports, and invoices this client owes you each month. The checklist turns "did they send everything?" from a feeling into a yes or no. If you don't have one, our free checklist generator builds a client-ready list in about thirty seconds, no signup. We also published a walkthrough of what belongs on a monthly bookkeeping checklist if you'd rather build your own.
A cutoff date with teeth. Reminders without a deadline train clients to ignore them. State the date the close happens with whatever has arrived. Most clients respond to a calm, specific date far better than to a third "just checking in" email.
Where PapersIn fits
PapersIn does the collection job, and only the collection job. Each client gets a monthly checklist, a drop link for uploads, and an email-in address you can hand to the clients who prefer forwarding, so that habit survives the switch. Documents PapersIn can place confidently tick their checklist item on arrival; anything it can't place waits in a review queue for you, two clicks from filed. Through the month it sends polite reminders that escalate through four stages and list only what's still outstanding. When the last document arrives, the reminders stop on their own. Whenever you want it, you export everything as a ZIP, foldered by client and month, with sensible filenames instead of whatever the client called them.
We don't do OCR-to-ledger and we don't do bank feeds. If extraction is your main pain, pair us with an extraction tool, or don't use us at all.
The short version
Hubdoc's retirement took away the door your clients sent documents through and the nudge that kept them sending. Storage was the easy part to replace; Xero Files already does it. Rebuild the door, the checklist, and the deadline, whether with a spreadsheet or a tool.
If you'd like the chasing handled for you, PapersIn is priced per firm, never per client or per document, in tiers by client count. Founding seats start at $19 a month, in limited number. The details are on our pricing page whenever you're ready to look.