Dext
The gold standard in document-capture accuracy for accounting firms, sitting on top of Xero, QuickBooks and Sage.
What it is and who it's for
Dext is a bookkeeping-automation platform: it gathers documents, extracts data from them via OCR and posts it into your accounting system. It's a layer that sits 'in front of' the general ledger, not accounting software in its own right.
Formerly Receipt Bank (rebranded in 2020), it was acquired by IRIS Software Group in December 2024. Its audience is accounting and bookkeeping firms (the practice track) and small businesses (the business track): 12,000+ firms and 700,000+ businesses. It's GL-agnostic, with integrations into 36+ accounting platforms and 11,500+ banks.
AI and automation
The core is OCR with a claimed 99.5–99.9% accuracy, trained on 1–2 billion+ accounting documents (not on the 'open internet'). It extracts date, amounts, tax, currency and supplier, and handles handwritten receipts and multiple currencies. In March 2026 Dext AI Assist launched — an AI agent that learns from your decisions and suggests automation with a rationale, but applies nothing without confirmation.
- Capture channels: mobile app, email forwarding (Auto-Inbox), drag-and-drop, Fetch (auto-pulling supplier invoices)
- Supplier rules and Smart Suggestions — auto-applying coding by supplier
- AI Assist flags duplicates and anomalies; it's the highest priority in the rules hierarchy
- Dext Commerce — an e-commerce module (Shopify, PayPal) with automatic tax-code recognition
Advantages
- Very high, consistently praised OCR accuracy — the key differentiator in reviews
- Speed: under 30 seconds per document on average, up to 5.5 hours saved per client per month
- Multi-client infrastructure built for firms: a single portal and approval workflows
- Extremely broad integrations (36+ systems, 11,500+ banks); it slots into your existing stack
- AI Assist with a visible rationale and mandatory human oversight
Real use cases
Documented results and typical scenarios — no invented testimonials.
Lucent Advisory reports saving more than 100 hours a month with Dext Prepare.
Bright/Shift: 10,000 fewer physical documents a month and 10+ hours saved; invoices flow automatically into Xero.
Geneviève Pesant (Dext Commerce): about an hour saved for every 30 sales transactions thanks to automatic tax-code recognition.
Pitfalls
- Opaque, risen pricing for firms: a per-client model (minimum 10 clients); there's a documented case of a jump from £325 to £1,368/mo
- A credit system (bank-statement and line-item extraction spend credits) makes the final cost unpredictable
- Dext AI Assist is a paid add-on, not included in the base plan
- Support reviews are mixed: a high Trustpilot score but Capterra complaints about slow responses and billing
- OCR isn't perfect on edge cases: non-standard and handwritten receipts need checking, and bank connections can drop
Pricing
Dext doesn't publish a fixed price table — only a configurator. The figures below are indicative (from G2, Capterra and the configurator, checked summer 2026).
| Plan | Price | What's included / limits |
|---|---|---|
| Business (US) | ~$31.50/mo ($25.21 annual) | 250 documents/mo, up to 5 users, starter credits |
| Business Plus | ~$34/mo | 5 users, 300 documents |
| Premium | ~$67/mo | 20 users, 3,000 documents |
| Practice (firms) | from $239/mo | per-client, minimum 10 clients, ~$17–19/client |
| AI Assist (add-on) | $7–10/client/mo | practice $7, business $10; 14-day trial |
Because of the per-client model and credits, the final bill for firms with many clients can come out noticeably higher than expected. Check the configurator against your own volume.
Our honest verdict
One of the most accurate and mature document-capture tools on the market. It's ideal as a reliable receipt-to-ledger layer on top of Xero, QuickBooks or Sage — especially for accounting firms and SMBs that care about consistent accuracy.
The main downsides are economic: per-client pricing and the credit system make cost unpredictable, and AI Assist comes as a separate charge.
Accounting and bookkeeping firms and SMBs that need accurate document capture on top of an existing accounting system.
Anyone looking for full accounting (Dext doesn't keep the books itself), and firms with many small clients — the per-client model and credits make the bill painful.
Compare Dext with other services
All eight reviews, with scores and pricing, in one catalog.
To the review catalog