Dext
Dext is bookkeeping automation software that captures receipts, invoices and statements from mobile, email or bank feeds, extracts the data with AI, categorises it and syncs it to accounting platforms such as Xero, QuickBooks and Sage.
What is Dext?
Dext is a bookkeeping automation platform: the layer that sits between a pile of paperwork and an accounting ledger. It is sold in two shapes, one for small and medium businesses and one for accounting and bookkeeping practices, and the homepage frames the work in five steps: capture, extract, process, store and collaborate.
Capture is deliberately promiscuous. Documents reach Dext by mobile scan, by forwarding an email, by drag-and-drop, through WhatsApp, through the Dextension browser add-on, through bank feeds, or by automatic fetching from supplier accounts. Once in, the extraction engine reads supplier names, amounts, tax treatment, invoice line items and due dates. Dext advertises 99.9% accuracy on its homepage, though the figure drifts to "over 99%" and 99.5% elsewhere on the site. Paid extraction add-ons handle detail that the core product does not: line items, supplier statements and PDF bank statements.
The processing layer applies supplier rules, categorisation and duplicate detection, then publishes to the ledger. Connectivity is the strongest claim in the product: 36+ accounting platforms, including Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Zoho Books, MYOB and FreeAgent, plus more than 11,500 banks and financial institutions and e-commerce sources such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, eBay, PayPal and Stripe.
Dext AI Assist is the newer, agentic piece. It watches how a user categorises items and applies VAT, then proposes automations with an explanation attached. Suggestions can be reviewed one by one or applied automatically, and users can write their own instructions. It currently covers the Costs and Sales spaces and must be switched on by a practice administrator.
Around this sit Vault for document storage, employee expense and mileage management, and Dext Payments for supplier, expense and payroll payments through a partnership with Airwallex, several parts of which are still marked as coming soon. Practices additionally get client deadline dashboards, data health scores and reporting. Launched as Receipt Bank in 2010 and renamed in 2021, Dext claims 12,000 firms and 700,000 businesses, and has been part of IRIS Software Group since 2024.
What it does
- Capture receipts, invoices and statements from a phone, an email address, a drag-and-drop upload, WhatsApp or the Dextension Chrome extension
- Read supplier details, line items, tax treatment and due dates off each document without manual entry
- Categorise transactions and apply tax rules automatically using supplier rules and learned behaviour
- Publish finished entries into Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and more than thirty other accounting platforms
- Flag duplicate documents, reconcile supplier statements and chase missing paperwork
- Submit, approve and track employee expense claims and GPS mileage
- Store original documents in Vault, sorted by AI and kept available for at least ten years
When to use Dext / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Dext is the right fit.
When to use Dext
- Accounting and bookkeeping practices collecting paperwork from dozens or hundreds of clients at once
- Small and medium businesses still keying receipts and supplier invoices in by hand
- Finance and office teams running employee expense claims, approvals and GPS mileage
- Owner-managed firms in construction, hospitality, retail, e-commerce or property management
- Businesses already committed to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Zoho Books, MYOB or FreeAgent
When not to use Dext
- Private individuals after a personal expense tracker: the terms restrict Dext to business use and set an 18 minimum age
- Anyone hoping for a permanently free tool, since there is a 14-day trial but no free tier
- Developers who need a public API to build on, as no API documentation is published
- Practices with fewer than ten clients, below the stated minimum on the partner plans
- Businesses looking to replace their ledger: Dext feeds Xero, QuickBooks or Sage rather than replacing them
How to use Dext
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Start the 14-day free trial at app.dext.com, with no payment card required
- Connect the accounting package: Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Zoho Books, MYOB or FreeAgent
- Link bank accounts and, where relevant, e-commerce and marketplace sources
- Invite team members or, for a practice, the clients themselves, and set access levels
- Send documents in by mobile scan, email forwarding, drag-and-drop, Dextension, WhatsApp or automatic fetching
- Let the extraction engine read supplier, amounts, tax and line-item detail off each document
- Set supplier rules so recurring documents are categorised the same way every time
- Switch on AI Assist, choosing review mode or automatic mode, and refine or reject its suggestions
- Publish the entries to the accounting package, manually or with auto-publish
- Pull original documents back out of Vault whenever an audit or a query needs them
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Unusually broad connectivity: 36+ accounting platforms, 11,500+ banks and the main e-commerce marketplaces
- Many ways to get a document in, including WhatsApp and a browser extension, which lowers the barrier for reluctant clients
- High claimed extraction accuracy, advertised at 99.9% on the homepage
- Original documents kept available for at least ten years, which matters when an audit lands
- Security is documented rather than asserted: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, annual third-party penetration tests
- A published Data Processor Agreement naming every sub-processor and its jurisdiction
- A genuinely separate practice product, with multi-client dashboards rather than a single-business tool stretched to fit
Cons
- No permanent free plan, only a 14-day trial
- The practice plan prices are rendered in JavaScript and never appear in the page's static HTML, so Essentials and Advanced cost the reader a sales conversation
- Pricing is tiered by document volume and user count and varies by region, making the advertised figure a starting point rather than a quote
- A long list of paid add-ons sits on top of the base plan: line item, supplier statement and bank statement extraction, Commerce Lite, Data Health and AI Assist
- Dext Payments is still marked "coming soon" across much of the practice feature grid
- Practice subscriptions require a minimum of ten clients
- No public API documentation, and no published list of interface languages
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Dext offers a 14-day free trial that requires no payment card, after which a subscription is necessary. The cheapest published entry point for businesses is USD 25.21 per month, billed annually at USD 302.50 and excluding VAT, covering 250 documents and five users in the default "Rest of the World" region. Annual commitment is advertised as up to 20% cheaper than monthly billing. Prices change with the region selected, and practice plans are quoted per client per month with a ten-client minimum, though those amounts are not published on the page.
- a single plan scaled by a slider on document volume and user count
- billed monthly or annually
- from USD 25.21 per month for 250 documents and 5 users
- with free extraction credits included
- capture
- processing and bookkeeping management for business and self-employed clients
- priced per client per month with a ten-client minimum
- the amount is not published in the page's static HTML
- flagged as Most Popular
- adding advanced automation
- insights and practice controls
- priced per client per month with a ten-client minimum
- the amount is not published in the page's static HTML
- offered for more than five business entities
- for high document volumes and for tailored practice packages
- arranged on request
- AI Assist
- Commerce Lite
- Vault storage above 100MB
- Line Item Extraction
- Supplier Statement Extraction
- Bank Statement Extraction and Data Health & Insights
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Dext handles your data.
GDPR overview
Compliance is claimed outright, "Dext is fully GDPR compliant", and it is backed by artefacts rather than a slogan. A Data Protection Officer is named and reachable at dpo@dext.com. A Data Processor Agreement is published, incorporating EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, and its Appendix 1 lists every sub-processor by name, purpose and jurisdiction. The privacy policy, effective 31 July 2024, sets out the full catalogue of rights: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, objection to automated decision-making and breach notification, with a one-month response target and the ICO named as supervisory authority. Three ICO registration numbers are disclosed. One gap stands out: no Article 27 EU representative is designated anywhere on the site.
Who owns the data?
The terms leave little room for doubt: as between the two parties, the customer owns all right, title and interest in the Customer Data, and carries sole responsibility for its legality, reliability, integrity and accuracy. Dext's own use is bounded by purpose, the customer consenting to Dext and its hosting provider processing that material solely to deliver the products. Where the account sits with an accountancy firm, Dext acknowledges that the firm's own client may be the true owner and returns the data to that client on request. Intellectual property in the platform itself stays with Dext. For personal data inside uploaded documents Dext acts only as processor, with Dext Software Limited named as controller for account data.
Reuse rights
Customers may reuse their own data without asking: nothing in the terms makes re-use conditional on Dext's permission. Extracted entries are pushed straight into the customer's own ledger, and original documents stay retrievable for at least ten years. Within ten days of a contract ending, Dext will return the data rather than delete it, at no extra cost. Dext is explicit that keeping copies for audit and statutory invoice-retention duties remains the customer's own responsibility, which makes regular exports prudent rather than optional. Should data be lost, the sole contractual remedy is restoration from Dext's most recent backup.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Dext hosts on Amazon Web Services. The Data Processor Agreement is specific about the primary location: AWS Ireland is the active region and AWS Germany in Frankfurt is the backup. Infrastructure spans multiple availability zones, point-in-time and snapshot backups are copied to a second region, restorability is tested automatically, and a disaster recovery plan allows redeployment to a new region. AWS data centres are certified to ISO 27001, PCI DSS Service Provider Level 1 and SOC 1 and 2. Beyond that core, the sub-processor list spreads across jurisdictions: Salesforce, NetSuite and OwnBackup in the United Kingdom; Intercom in Dublin; Snowflake, MongoDB and Mailchimp on AWS Ireland; Stripe, Segment, Sentry, Slack, HubSpot, Mixpanel and Google Workspace in the United States; Microsoft Azure with OpenAI across the UK, EU and US. Transfers outside the EEA and UK rely on Standard Contractual Clauses following a prior assessment. Dext states that data processed by AI Assist stays within EU and UK regions.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Dext.
- Automation compounds mistakes: a supplier rule or a categorisation applied without review can propagate a single error across hundreds of entries
- AI Assist offers an automatic mode, which makes human review optional while the accounting responsibility stays entirely with the customer
- The terms place sole responsibility for the legality, reliability and accuracy of the data on the customer, including data the AI extracted
- Claimed accuracy varies across the site between 99.9%, over 99% and 99.5%, and whatever residual error remains is the user's to catch
- Sensitive financial records are centralised with a third party and a long list of sub-processors, several outside the EU
- The no-training statement covers external models only, while the company's own press release describes an AI trained on more than a billion receipts and invoices
- Skills atrophy quietly: a team that stops checking VAT treatment or supplier reconciliations loses the ability to notice when the automation is wrong
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low. Sign-up takes minutes and needs no payment card, connecting an accounting package is described as a few minutes' work, and a practice is expected to be live in days rather than weeks. No development skills are involved, since there is no API to integrate against. The heavier work is organisational rather than technical: deciding submission channels, setting supplier rules, and getting clients or colleagues to send documents consistently. Support is provided through a UK-based team, a help centre, more than 250 tutorials, training sessions and a Dext U certification. AI Assist must be enabled by a practice administrator.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Behind Dext
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Dext.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free trial, and does it need a card?
Is there a permanently free plan?
How much does Dext cost to start with?
Which accounting software does Dext connect to?
How do documents get into Dext?
Is Dext GDPR compliant, and where is the data hosted?
How long are documents kept?
Is customer data used to train AI models?
Are there mobile apps, and is there an API?
Who is behind Dext?
Should you pick Dext?
Dext is not a newcomer trying to look established. Launched as Receipt Bank in 2010, renamed in 2021 and absorbed into IRIS Software Group at the end of 2024, it occupies a well-defined slot in the accounting stack: it does not want to be the ledger, it wants to fill the ledger. That focus shows in what the product does best. Getting a document in is easy from almost anywhere, extraction is fast and well rated, and the connection list, more than 36 accounting platforms and over 11,500 banks, is the kind of coverage that removes the usual objection about switching.
The security and privacy posture is more transparent than most tools of this size manage. ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, AES-256 at rest, annual third-party penetration tests and a published Data Processor Agreement naming every sub-processor and its jurisdiction give a buyer something concrete to review rather than a badge to trust.
The friction is commercial rather than technical. There is no free tier, the base subscription is scaled by documents and users and shifts with the region selected, and a good deal of the interesting functionality, line item extraction, supplier statement extraction, bank statement extraction, Commerce Lite, Data Health and AI Assist, is charged as an add-on. Practices face the additional annoyance that Essentials and Advanced prices are never rendered in the page, so evaluating them requires contact. Dext Payments, prominent in the marketing, is still largely marked as coming soon.
One point deserves a careful read: Dext says data is not used to train external AI models, a qualification worth clarifying with the vendor before signing.
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