No, and Hubdoc is not trying to be. It is somewhere to put documents once you have them, and finding them is the half that takes your evening.
| Stage | Hubdoc | Clerk.AI |
|---|---|---|
| Before | Nothing to set up. It is switched on with your Xero plan. | You start it and go away. You never tell it who your suppliers are, because working that out is the job. |
| During | It waits. You email, upload or scan each document in yourself. | It reads the month's bank and card lines, works out which payments have no document behind them, and goes and gets those, from your mail, supplier portals, and photos on your phone.1 |
| After | What you put in is coded and ready to match against the bank feed in Xero. | What it found is in a folder on your Mac, and goes into Hubdoc like anything else you would have emailed it. |
1 It does not get every one: some suppliers block automation, and when that happens it names the supplier and asks, rather than leaving a hole you hear about six weeks later.
Two halves of the same month. Numbers point to the fine print under each table.
| Fact | Hubdoc | Clerk.AI |
|---|---|---|
| Works out what has no document | No | Yes, from your own bank lines |
| Goes and fetches a document | No — email, upload, or a ScanSnap scanner2 | Yes |
| Reads the receipts on your phone | You photograph and upload each one | It reads the camera roll itself |
| Signs into your bank | No — you supply a PDF statement3 | Yes, in a browser on your Mac |
| Reads the data off a document | Yes | No |
| Publishes into Xero | Yes | No |
2 Xero's own help page, About getting documents into Hubdoc, lists those three and nothing else. It used to fetch: Xero retired Hubdoc's fetch connections in April 2022, saying they had become outdated and were often blocked by banks and online suppliers. 3 It turns a statement you downloaded yourself into a CSV of transactions.
| Fact | Hubdoc | Clerk.AI |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Included with any paid Xero plan4 | Free, or what you decide |
| AI subscription | Not needed | Your own Claude, about €18 a month |
4 Starter, Standard and Premium; Early, Growing and Established in the US.
Download it, point it at a month you have already sent off, and see what it says is missing.