01What actually happened
On 8 May 2026, Xero retired Hubdoc, its bundled receipt and invoice capture tool. In its place sits Xero Files, a storage area for documents. Xero Files keeps a copy of whatever you upload, but it does not read anything: no supplier, no line items, no VAT, no total, are extracted from a document dropped into it.
Hubdoc, while it existed, only ever extracted header-level fields, supplier, date, and a total, never the line items beneath them, and Xero had already said no further development was planned for it. Its retirement removes even that header-level capture, not a deeper one.
02What Xero Files does, and doesn't, do
Line up what the two tools actually cover:
The one thing that survives the change is storage. Everything Hubdoc did on top of storage, reading the document and turning it into usable data, has no replacement inside Xero.
03What happened to your existing Hubdoc data
Documents that were captured through Hubdoc migrated across to Xero Files as flat attachments. The files themselves are not deleted. What did not carry over is the data Hubdoc had already extracted from them: line items, supplier rules, and bill-matches built up over however long a practice used it.
Practically, that means a document sitting in Xero Files today is exactly what it looks like: a stored file, with none of the structured data a bookkeeper would once have seen alongside it in Hubdoc.
04What to do now
Four things worth doing across the client book this quarter:
- Stop routing new documents through Xero Files expecting extraction, since nothing reads what lands there; it is storage, not capture.
- Pick a replacement capture step for new receipts and invoices, one that reads line items and VAT, not just a header total, before the backlog of unprocessed documents grows.
- Re-process anything Hubdoc-era that still needs re-keying by pulling the original file back out of Xero Files and running it through whatever capture tool replaces Hubdoc in your workflow.
- Keep posting into the same Xero account, since none of this changes where confirmed entries end up, only what reads the document before they get there.
This describes Xero's own published retirement of Hubdoc and the behaviour of its replacement, Xero Files, as documented at the time of writing. Product behaviour can change; confirm current Xero Files functionality before advising a client on next steps.
If your practice is choosing what replaces Hubdoc for capture, the Hubdoc alternative page lays out line-item extraction, per-line VAT across jurisdictions, and posting straight into the same Xero account.