At Designer IQ, we’re all about streamlining processes and making the administrative tasks of your business easier. That’s why we’re going to talk about one of our favorite tools to help you run your business: Hubdoc.
Hubdoc is a cloud-based storage network for receipts, bills, invoices, check images, bank statements and any other paper documentation you use in your business. There are a myriad of benefits surrounding Hubdoc; below, we’ll talk about 7 of our favorites.
7 WAYS HUBDOC CAN HELP YOU ORGANIZE YOUR DESIGN BUSINESS
1. Save Space
We’ve all heard stories of accountants sifting through boxes and boxes of past receipts in order to classify expenses. And while we’re all about cute storage boxes, we’d rather you filled them with fun items as opposed to receipts.
Hubdoc saves physical space by keeping receipts in the cloud and out of your office. It also saves mental space because you can quickly upload receipts from your phone or forward invoices from your computer. No more remembering to file receipts away, or finding receipts at the bottom of your bag 6 months from now and not knowing what they’re for. You can simply snap a picture of the receipt and then drop it in the nearest trash can.
2. Save Time
Not only do we have to keep receipts, but we need to remember what they’re for. If you keep paper receipts, you have to file them away and, at some point, you have to organize them so you can easily match them with transactions. This takes time out of your day, and you sacrifice the value of providing services to clients in order to classify your receipts.
By using Hubdoc to upload receipts, you skip the organization step because Hubdoc does it for you. It automatically identifies the vendor, and receipts, bills and invoices are classified based on vendor. You can even add notes to uploaded documents to help you remember what they’re for.
3. Easily Find Receipts
Along that same vein, Hubdoc’s automated vendor folders allow you to easily find receipts when you need them. There’s also a search bar at the top of your Hubdoc homepage, where you can search by vendor, invoice number, amount or date. No more sifting through boxes to find specific receipts.
4. Learn About Client Profitability
At Lolana & Co, we use Hubdoc not only as a document management tool, but as a way to tag project related expenses for our clients. When clients send in receipts, invoices or bills, they can either add a handwritten note (for items uploaded via the app) or add an email note (using the #note {xxx} #note feature).
By using these features, our clients can tell us what project an expense is related to, or if it’s related to administrative costs. Every expense that comes in is classified to a specific project, which means you can see how much you’re invoicing for a project compared to how many related expenses it has. By netting these two amounts together, you can see what your profitability is per project.
5. Keep Track of Taxes
Product costs are taxable, and you should be keeping track of your sales tax liability as you sell product throughout the year and collect sales tax. However, this sales tax liability should be offset with sales tax that you pay to vendors when you first purchase the product. We can use Hubdoc to see actual tax amounts paid, and we can enter a line item offsetting our sales tax liability that pushes into your accounting software.
6. Help Out Your Accountant
Hubdoc saves you time on the accounting side because your accountant doesn’t have to ask you what certain transactions are for. Using the tagging feature, receipts, invoices and bills can be tagged by you to specific clients and projects. Your accountant can use this feature to classify expenses as they come in through the bank, and she won’t have to ask you to classify expense transactions at the end of the month.
7. Reduce Stress
Running your design business is hard work, and being able to streamline processes is key to helping you grow in a positive way. With Hubdoc, you don’t have to worry about keeping paper receipts, you don’t have to think about how long you need to keep them, and you don’t have to stress about getting your accountant everything she needs. By taking time and stress out of the administrative task of organizing and storing receipts, you can focus more on your core business.
Hubdoc is one of our favorite tools, and we’d love to help you leverage it to your advantage. All of our new clients undergo a Hubdoc Onboarding Process, where we show them how the software works, how they can use it, and how we use it to match source documents to transactions in your accounting software. If you’re interested in using Hubdoc in your design business, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via our contact form!
Happy Designing!
