Hubdoc alternative

Looking for a Hubdoc alternative? It depends what you used it for.

Hubdoc covered a wide surface — receipts, bank and supplier statements, vendor bills — and the right replacement depends on which part of it you actually leaned on. We have a reasonable claim to knowing the difference: InletAP's founder was Hubdoc's founding engineer. If what you leaned on was vendor invoices for a property portfolio, InletAP is built for exactly that, and picks up where document capture stopped.

The free plan processes 25 invoices a month with unlimited users, takes no credit card and does not expire. You get your own intake address at the end of setup.

Document capture and AP automation are not the same product

The distinction matters when you are choosing a replacement, because most of the tools marketed as Hubdoc alternatives sit firmly on the capture side.

Some context on where this comes from. InletAP's founder was the founding engineer at Hubdoc, which was acquired by Xero and has since been folded into Xero itself. Building it settled one question and raised another. The settled one: email and forwarding beat every other capture mechanism on adoption, because they are the only ones a vendor is already using — a lesson InletAP is built directly on top of. The open one is this page's subject.

A document capture tool solves a bookkeeping problem: get the paperwork out of inboxes, portals and shoeboxes, read the header fields off it, and publish it into the ledger so the transaction has a source document attached. Hubdoc, Dext, AutoEntry and Datamolino are all shaped like this, and for a bookkeeping practice serving many small clients that is genuinely the right shape.

An AP automation tool solves an operational problem, and capture is only its first step. The questions it exists to answer are: which building is this invoice for, which GL account, who is authorized to approve this amount, has this invoice already been paid, and can we prove who signed off on it in nine months. None of that is document capture, and a capture tool that publishes a bill into your ledger has, by design, done none of it.

For a property management company the second set of questions is where the cost sits. Getting the PDF out of the mailbox is a nuisance. Working out which of forty buildings it belongs to, getting the right site manager to approve it before it goes late, and being able to answer an owner's question about it later — that is the work.

Note also what a capture tool typically does not do: score confidence per field so you know which values need checking, apply property and entity coding by rule, escalate on an amount threshold, detect that the same invoice arrived twice by two different routes, or keep an append-only record of every field change with the actor attached.

Capabilities

What InletAP adds after the document arrives

Forwarding is the primary path

Your own verified subdomain with a catch-all address plus per-property mailboxes. Auto-forward from your current mailbox into whichever of them should handle that mail.

Property and entity coding

Property, unit, entity, GL account, class and cost center as fields on the document — set by rule, correctable on review, and splittable where one invoice covers several buildings.

A rules engine

Source email to vendor, vendor to default coding, amount to approver. Ordered, explainable on the document, and simulated against the last 500 documents before you enable it.

Approval routing

Amount tiers, per-property approvers, escalation when extraction confidence is low, SLA timers with overdue alerts. Approvers see the policy that routed the invoice to them.

An audit trail

Append-only, with actor, timestamp and before/after value on every field edit, routing decision, approval and export attempt. No role can edit or delete it.

Traceable export

QuickBooks Online bills or a mapped CSV, with external IDs recorded so a posted bill traces back to the original email, and retries that cannot double-post.

Why this one

Who should switch, and who should not

  • Switch if: vendor invoices for a property portfolio were the bulk of what you were capturing.
  • Switch if: you were already handling coding and approvals outside the capture tool, by email.
  • Switch if: you post to QuickBooks Online, or you can import a CSV.
  • Do not switch if: you relied on automatic bank and supplier statement fetching.
  • Do not switch if: mobile receipt capture for expenses is the main use case.
  • Do not switch if: you need a native Xero connector rather than a CSV import.

Compare

Capture tools versus AP workflow, feature by feature

Generalized from the public documentation of document capture products. Check any specific vendor's current feature set directly — this category changes.
If Xero is your ledger and you need a native connector, that is a real gap in InletAP today — CSV import is the current route.
 InletAPDocument capture tools
Email forwarding intakeYes — the primary path, with per-property addressesYes
Field extractionYes, with a score on every fieldYes, usually one score or none
Bank / supplier statement fetchingNoOften yes
Mobile receipt captureNoOften yes
Property / unit / entity codingFirst-class fieldsGeneric categories
Rules engine with simulationYesLimited or none
Approval routing and thresholdsYes, with SLA timersRarely
Duplicate detection at ingestMessage ID, fingerprint and field heuristicVaries
Append-only audit trailYes, with before/after valuesVaries
Publishes to XeroCSV import onlyUsually native
Publishes to QuickBooks OnlineNative, as billsUsually native

If Xero is your ledger and you need a native connector, that is a real gap in InletAP today — CSV import is the current route.

Pricing

Free for 25 invoices a month, then $39

No credit card to start and no demo call, so you can forward a batch of your real vendor invoices and compare the output against whatever you are using now before you commit to anything. QuickBooks Online sync is in the free plan, and users are unlimited on every plan, so a bookkeeper testing on one client can bring the client into it at no cost.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude sales tax, which is added where it applies.

Paid plans renew automatically at the price shown — every month, or every 12 months on annual billing — until you cancel. Cancel any time in billing settings: the next renewal stops and you keep the period you have already paid for.

See all plans

Switching — common questions

Keep reading

Compare it against what you use now, on real invoices

Forward twenty-five of your awkward vendor invoices to a free workspace and look at the extraction, the coding and the audit trail side by side. That is a better evaluation than any comparison table, including the one on this page.