There is a slightly different theme to our blog this month. Typically, we focus on an area of applications to assist your business, however Dext Prepare is worthy enough of mentioning on its own.
Dext Prepare (formerly Receiptbank) is an invoice automation tool, which aims to streamline and improve accuracy of your bookkeeping data. In simple terms, Dext Prepare takes an invoice or expense, reads and extracts the information, then links with your accounting software to publish the cost – a bit like facial recognition, but for your paperwork!
Dext offers a full integration with the major accounting packages (including Xero, Quickbooks, Sage and Freeagent), allowing you to begin using the app to its full capabilities instantly.
For many of our clients, this has meant that the days of collecting months and months of receipts and invoices are long gone. Every expense can be uploaded within seconds of receiving them, meaning no lost receipts, greater assurance that the tax and VAT has been calculated correctly and to top it off it all gets stored on the cloud meaning no longer do you need to store years of records.
So how can Dext Prepare help your business?
Saving Time and Reducing Data Entry
Once an invoice or cost has been received, this can then be uploaded to the Dext platform. The most common ways to do this are either via the App – where a picture can be taken and uploaded, or via email – simply forwarding the invoice to your dedicated Dext email.
This then allows Dext to begin reading the invoice and securely extracting the following data:
- An original document image
- Type of document – i.e. purchase invoice, sales invoice, credit note, etc.
- Invoice date
- Invoice number
- Supplier
- Currency
- Total amount
- VAT amount
The ultimate aim of this process is to minimise how much you are manually typing into the system, while also removing any potential typing errors.
The final step is to set an expense category for the cost to be posted to in your accounts, which can be made even easier by setting supplier defaults – meaning the category will be auto-populated whenever invoices from certain suppliers are received. For invoices which are to be allocated across multiple expenses, there is also the option to reconcile this using Line Items.
Once a category has been set, the invoice is published to your Purchase Ledger in your Accounting system along with a digital image as an attachment file, allowing you to reconcile with the bank once payment is made.
Further time savings can be made with a smart feature called Invoice Fetch. From within Dext you can log in to common expense online portals so that, whenever a bill is raised in their system, it will feed through to Dext immediately. Dext currently have thousands of suppliers available for this and a full list can be found here. This handy feature is particularly useful for suppliers where you need to log into their website/portal to get your invoices – such as mobile phones and utilities!
Recording Accurate Data
When reading your invoice, Dext will automatically detect the VAT amount applied to the invoice (including if it is only part vat applicable), giving you a simple and accurate calculation for your VAT compliance.
As mentioned above, once an invoice is published from Dext to your Accounts software, it also attaches an image of the initial invoice to the ledger transaction. This helps you maintain a digital database of all invoices and can be a huge time-saver when searching for historic invoices.
When processing through Dext, any invoice data is securely kept within their cloud servers for a minimum of 10 years, giving you confidence in your financial data in case of audit, natural disaster or fraud.
How can we help?
Our team has been awarded Dext Advisor status, recognising us as one of the very best accountancy practices in the world for Dext services.
Alongside our high levels of support, we are able, in some situations, to offer discounted license fees for businesses wishing to use Dext. Please contact our digital advisory team by emailing fintech@haroldsharp.co.uk or call 0161 905 1616 if you wish to explore this.