Smart document capture

50% of Hubdoc documents never reached Xero, it's a significant gap in AI capability and future intelligence growth at Xero. Also, Making Tax Digital for UK sole traders are facing new tax mandates. My responsibility was to unify document management, making it easier for UK customers to maintain compliance, and unlock new data layers for AI and payments.

MY ROLE

Lead product designer

SCOPE

Web · Mobile · AI extraction

SHIPPED

March 2025

The challenge

Users needed a way to process document fast & accurate, not a better filing system.

Across Hubdoc and Xero users revealed a very consistent JTBD: publish and archive every document as quickly and accurately as possible. There were a lot of opportunities to build that workflow in mind.

We assumed

  • Users would match documents from the bills workflow: review a bill, find the document, attach it.
  • Users wanted a better place to organize and store all their documents inside Xero.

What research found

  • Users cleared bank rec first to handle easy transactions, then triaged what remained in the inbox.
  • Users wanted an empty inbox, not a better filing system.

3 Decisions that shaped the product

Bank rec matching first

V1

Bookkeepers always start in Xero with bank reconciliation. If the books aren't accurate, nothing downstream (paying bills, sending invoices, triaging the inbox) makes sense. The matching experience had to respect that mental model.

What I fought for: We shipped matching from bank rec before the inbox, aligning with user habits. Bank Rec, however, belonged to a separate team in another portfolio. I negotiated their roadmap through several sessions, making the case for mutual user benefit.

File Inbox second

V2

After shipping bank rec matching, document uploads jumped 23%. With that insight, we built File Inbox, a dedicated space for triaging documents outside the bank rec flow. We shipped without data extraction, making the roadmap clear so stakeholders trusted our iterative approach.

The trade off for v2: users were redirected to manually create transactions, with limited prefill. But shipping an early version to real users mattered more than waiting for perfection.

File Inbox — document triage UI

Matching from File Inbox last

V3

Sequenced matching directly in the File Inbox last, aiming for both deterministic and probabilistic outcomes and prioritized quality over speed. We've also made it possible to create bills, receipts and invoices directly from Inbox, effectively reducing page refreshes and additional clicks to create the documents.

Matching from File Inbox

Impact in the first 3 months of launch

43.8k

Weekly active users

394k

Transactions created

37.8k

AI-linked transactions

The business shift

Eliminated the need for separate Hubdoc/Dext subscriptions (~$20/month). But the bigger shift is downstream: every document processed through the File Inbox is a potential payment transaction Xero can monetize through payment providers. File Inbox is now the top of the payments revenue funnel.

CUSTOMER QUOTES

“

Data extraction looks really good though, picking up payment method, descriptions etc.

“

The new files experience is great to see. We will be recommending this to our clients going forward.

“

As much as I love some 3P tools, having it within Xero will streamline doc management for us.