Dext vs AutoEntry: the practice comparison, including what statements cost

At a glance

"Not advertised" means the vendor does not describe the capability on its own pages as of July 2026 — a statement about product design rather than a claim about what is impossible.

What Dext actually is

Dext is the incumbent in practice document capture, and its shape reflects a decade of accountants using it. Clients photograph receipts in a mobile app, forward invoices to an email address, or connect supplier accounts; the documents are extracted, categorised and published into the ledger with the image attached; the practice manages the flow centrally.

Its plan structure, as published, is built on Essentials and Advanced tiers. Essentials covers mobile document capture, bank statement extraction and core automation. Advanced adds team and location setup, custom workflows, advanced automation and practice insights — which is to say, the things that matter when you are running dozens of clients through one system rather than doing your own books.

Dext meters the heavy extraction features in credits: bank statement extraction, line item extraction and supplier statement reconciliation each consume from an allowance included with the plan, with more purchasable. Prices themselves are handled as tailored packages built around your client count rather than a published grid, so the number you plan against has to come from a quote. There is a 14-day free trial with no card, which is the right way to find out whether your clients will actually use it.

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What AutoEntry actually is

AutoEntry, branded as AutoEntry by Sage, does the same core job with a much more transparent commercial model. There is no plan ladder of features to decode: you buy credits, and every document type has a published credit cost. That simplicity is genuinely valuable to a small practice whose real question is "what will this cost me in March".

The published tiers, checked July 2026 and excluding VAT: Bronze 50 credits at about $13 a month, Silver 100 at $24, Gold 200 at $46, Platinum 500 at $103, Diamond 1,500 at $298 and Sapphire 2,500 at $469, with GBP, EUR, CAD, AUD and NZD equivalents published alongside and custom packages above the top tier. Unused credits carry for up to 90 days, which softens a quiet month without letting you bank credits indefinitely.

Document coverage is broad for a capture tool: supplier invoices, sales invoices, supplier statements, receipts, credit notes, bank and credit-card statements, and employee expense claims. The integration list — Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, KashFlow, SortMyBooks, ClearBooks — is wider than the Sage ownership might suggest, which matters for practices whose clients are spread across several ledgers.

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The two credit models

The structural agreement between two competitors is the interesting part. Both charge ordinary rates for receipts and invoices and premium rates for statements and line items — because those are the documents where extraction is genuinely hard and the output is genuinely dense. When two vendors with different pricing philosophies land on the same shape, it is telling you what is expensive to do.

What a bank statement really costs you

Do the arithmetic once and it changes how you buy. AutoEntry charges 3 credits per statement page. A twelve-page statement is 36 credits. On the Silver tier — 100 credits for about $24 — that is not quite three statements a month, with nothing left for receipts. A single client's year of statements, twelve documents of around ten pages each, is roughly 360 credits: more than the Platinum tier's entire monthly allowance.

Dext does not publish per-page credit costs, so the equivalent sum depends on your quote and allowance — but the direction is the same, because bank statement extraction is explicitly one of the credit-consuming features rather than something included with ordinary capture.

Now put a catch-up job beside that. A new client arrives with three accounts and eighteen months of PDFs — perhaps 400 pages. In a credit model that is a five-figure credit count and a serious conversation about upgrading a tier for one job. Metered per page, the same work is a small, predictable, one-off cost. This is not a criticism of either product: it is a mismatch between a subscription designed for a steady monthly flow of small documents and a job that is neither steady nor small.

One ordinary client consumes more than the Silver tier's hundred credits, and the two statements alone account for 36 of the 117 — roughly a third of the cost for two documents out of seventy-five. That ratio is the whole argument for handling statements elsewhere, and it holds at every tier because the per-page rate does not change.

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Publishing into the ledger — the part a converter does not do

It would be easy to write this comparison as though extraction were the whole product. It is not, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest about where capture tools earn their fee.

Publishing is the step where a photographed receipt becomes a posted purchase entry: the right supplier record, the right nominal account, the right tax code, the right date, with the image attached to the transaction so the audit trail is intact. Both Dext and AutoEntry learn supplier-level rules over time, so the tenth invoice from the same supplier needs almost no attention. Multiply that by a few hundred documents a month and the saving is real.

FlowParse does not do any of that, and it is important to say so plainly. There is no supplier record, no nominal mapping, no posting into a ledger, no attachment of the source document to a transaction. It converts financial PDFs into validated data and files you import — see accounting export. For the receipt-and-invoice capture workflow, a capture tool is the right purchase and we are not a substitute for one.

Which ledgers each one supports

AutoEntry publishes integrations with Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, KashFlow, SortMyBooks and ClearBooks. For a UK or Irish practice with clients scattered across those systems, that list covers most of what walks through the door.

Dext's integration coverage spans the major cloud ledgers and is a core part of its practice pitch; the detail worth checking is which of your specific client systems are supported for publishing rather than just export, since that distinction decides how much manual work remains.

For file-based routes — the ones that matter when a ledger has no capture integration or when you are handling a one-off job — FlowParse writes QBO, QFX, OFX, a Xero-ready CSV, DATEV, plus Excel, CSV and Google Sheets. Different mechanism, different job.

Capture: phones, email and fetching

Both tools accept the three routes documents actually arrive by: a mobile app for photographing receipts, a per-client email address for forwarding invoices, and bulk upload for the folder a client hands over. Both are competent at all three, and choosing between them on capture features alone is unlikely to be decisive.

The thing that is decisive is adoption. A capture tool nobody uses is the most expensive line in a practice's software budget, and adoption is a function of onboarding rather than product quality: whether you set the client up properly, whether you nag for the first month, whether their bookkeeper actually switched from the shoebox. Both vendors offer a free trial precisely so you can test this with two or three real clients before committing the whole practice.

FlowParse sits outside this conversation. There is no client-facing app or inbox — a bookkeeper uploads PDFs, or a system calls the API. That is a limitation for the capture use case and a non-issue for the statement use case, where the documents arrive as files anyway.

Running a practice on either

At the practice level the questions change. Not "does it read a receipt" but: can I see which clients are behind, can I assign work, can I onboard a new client in ten minutes, can I standardise the process across staff who come and go, can I report on what the tool is saving.

Dext's Advanced tier speaks directly to this — teams and locations, custom workflows, practice insights — and the tailored practice packaging exists because a firm with sixty clients is buying something different from a firm with six. If practice management is your bottleneck rather than extraction, that is where the money should go.

AutoEntry's answer is simpler and cheaper: one credit pool, a straightforward client list, predictable cost. Many small practices genuinely prefer this. Fewer moving parts, no per-client licence arithmetic, and a bill that never surprises anyone.

The client-behaviour problem neither tool solves

Every practice discovers the same thing: the constraint is rarely the software. It is the client who sends nothing for four months and then a shoebox, the one who photographs receipts at an angle in bad light, the one who forwards the delivery note instead of the invoice, the one whose bank feed broke in February and nobody noticed until the year-end.

Capture tools help with the first three by making the easy path easy. Nothing helps with the fourth except catching it — which is a statement problem, not a capture problem, and it is why the historical-statement workflow keeps reappearing in practice life even for firms with excellent capture discipline.

That is the honest reason a converter earns its place beside a capture tool: not because capture is bad, but because the documents that arrive late, in bulk, and from institutions with no feed are a different job with a different cost shape.

Where statement extraction strains

Statements are the hardest documents in this market, and it is worth being specific about why rather than gesturing at complexity.

They are long, so page breaks are frequent and rows near them are the ones that vanish. They mix debit and credit columns that must collapse into one signed amount. They carry a running balance that a naive exporter will happily post as the transaction amount, putting the wrong number on every row. Descriptions wrap, so a payment reference can be truncated. Summary boxes and marketing panels look like tables. And date formats vary by country, which quietly moves transactions between tax periods.

None of that is exotic — it is ordinary banking output. It is simply a different problem from reading a receipt, and it is why statements cost more in every credit model in this market.

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The completeness check

Here is the one capability difference that is not about price or workflow. When a statement is extracted with three rows missing, it looks perfect: every extracted field is right, nothing is flagged, and a reviewer scanning it sees a plausible statement. The error is invisible by construction, because a row that was never emitted was never uncertain.

A statement, however, carries its own proof. Opening balance, plus every transaction, must equal the closing balance the bank printed. FlowParse runs that check per account on every statement, names the rows where the arithmetic breaks, and returns a 0–100 score. Neither Dext nor AutoEntry advertises an equivalent — and for a practice signing off client accounts, the difference is between an error found now and an error found during a reconciliation in November.

Add Smart Merge for the catch-up case: up to a hundred statements from different banks consolidated into one workbook with unified columns, duplicate detection across overlapping periods and a source-file reference on every row. That is the shape of a year-end catch-up job, and no capture tool advertises it.

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When a converter is simply the cheaper answer

Four situations where the arithmetic favours per-page conversion over credits, plainly:

• A catch-up job: one client, three accounts, eighteen months of PDFs, hundreds of pages in a single month.
• Closed accounts and dead feeds, where the transactions exist only in a statement nobody can re-download.
• Institutions with no feed at all — small banks, foreign accounts, some credit cards and fintech products.
• Lending or verification work, where a complete transaction list matters more than a posted ledger entry.

In each case the work is bursty rather than steady, statement-shaped rather than receipt-shaped, and file-output-shaped rather than publish-shaped. Those are the three signals that you are looking at the wrong tool for that particular job — see the accountants' workflow for how practices arrange it.

Using a capture tool and a converter together

The arrangement that works in most practices is not a choice at all. Receipts and purchase invoices stay in Dext or AutoEntry, where publishing into the ledger is the value and clients are already trained. Bank and card statements — the historical ones, the catch-up ones, the ones from institutions with no feed — go through a converter that meters per page, proves each statement against its own balance and writes the file or the Excel the job needs.

Nothing about the client-facing process changes, so there is no retraining. The capture subscription stops being consumed by the document type that eats it fastest. And year-end catch-up work stops triggering a tier upgrade that then sits unused for the rest of the year.

It is worth being explicit about the boundary: we are not suggesting replacing a capture tool with a converter. The two do different jobs, and a practice that dropped Dext or AutoEntry to save money on receipts would be making an expensive mistake in the opposite direction.

Where Dext genuinely wins

Practice tooling. Teams, locations, workflows and insights are built for firms running many clients through one system, and that is a different product from "capture with a price list". If your bottleneck is coordinating staff and clients rather than reading documents, this is where the value is.

Client experience. Dext's mobile app has had a long time to become the thing clients tolerate using, and adoption is the single biggest determinant of whether any capture tool pays for itself.

Breadth of automation. Supplier rules, custom workflows and line-item extraction cover the awkward parts of purchase processing that otherwise land on a junior's desk.

Where AutoEntry genuinely wins

Transparent, low-entry pricing. Published tiers from around $13 a month, published credit costs per document type, six currencies, and 90-day credit carry-over: you can model the bill before you sign anything, which is rarer in this market than it should be.

Ledger breadth relative to price. Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, KashFlow, SortMyBooks and ClearBooks from an entry tier is a lot of coverage for a small practice with mixed clients.

Simplicity. One credit pool and no feature ladder to decode is a genuine feature for a two-person firm that wants capture to be a solved problem rather than a project.

Four practice scenarios

A two-person practice, forty clients, mostly receipts and invoices. AutoEntry. The credit model is cheap and predictable at that volume, and the practice-management features you would pay extra for elsewhere are not your bottleneck.

A twenty-person firm standardising every client onto one system. Dext. Workflows, teams and insights are the product you are actually buying, and the per-client packaging matches how you will price the work.

A firm doing regular year-end catch-up jobs with boxes of statements. Either, plus a converter. The catch-up work is where credits evaporate, and running it per page keeps the capture subscription sized for the steady monthly flow it was designed for.

A bookkeeper whose clients have no receipts, only bank activity. Neither, initially. If the work is statements into Excel or a ledger import, a converter does the whole job and a capture subscription would be paying for an inbox nobody uses.

How to choose

Then trial both with your two worst clients rather than your two best. Count the credits consumed, count the corrections needed after publishing, and multiply. Those two numbers decide more than any feature list — and they are the two numbers a demo will not show you.

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Verdict

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