Extract invoice line items into Xero
Push a bill into Xero from most capture tools and you get the supplier, the date, and the total — but open it and the line items underneath are blank. That is not a setting you missed. Header-level capture reads the top of a document, not the detail. Here is how to get the full line items into Xero instead.
Header totals are not line items
Hubdoc — the capture tool Xero acquired — reads the header fields off a bill or receipt: supplier name, invoice date, and the invoice total. What it does not do is break out the line items: the individual rows of what was bought, each with its quantity, unit price, and amount. Xero has also said no further development of Hubdoc is planned, so that gap is not closing on its own. Most other capture tools stop at the same header level.
Why the line items matter in Xero
A total tells you what you paid. The line items tell you what you paid for — and that is what the rest of your books need:
- Accurate account coding: different lines on one bill often belong to different accounts or tracking categories.
- Cost of goods and inventory: per-item quantities and prices feed COGS and stock, which a single total cannot.
- Line-level tax: tax treatment per line gets flattened the moment you keep only the total.
- Spend analysis: you cannot see what you buy most if every bill collapses to one number.
With header-only capture, someone still opens the document and types the lines in — the manual entry the tool was supposed to remove.
Docusift extracts the full lines and pushes to Xero
Docusift reads the same bills and invoices and returns the complete line items — every row with its description, quantity, unit price, and amount, plus the header fields and tax — each with a per-field confidence score. It then pushes the itemized result straight into Xero as a bill, so you keep the ledger, bank feeds, and workflow you already run and only the capture step changes.
- Upload the invoice or bill, or forward it to your workspace inbox.
- Docusift extracts header fields and full line items, tying each amount to its description.
- Review anything flagged low-confidence — the rest is ready.
- Push to Xero as a fully itemized bill, ready to code.
For the side-by-side, see Docusift vs Hubdoc and the Hubdoc line-item fix.