£290 a year, excluding VAT. That is what Dext’s UK business pricing page asks for, and it is the number every sole trader considering it should hold in their head before reading a single feature list.
Because here is the awkward bit. Xero, FreeAgent and QuickBooks all include receipt capture in the price you already pay. Dext is not selling you a capability you lack. It is selling you a better version of one you already own, and whether that upgrade is worth £290 depends almost entirely on how many bits of paper pass through your business each month.
For most solo freelancers, the answer is no. For a handful of others it is an easy yes. This review is about telling those two groups apart.
What Dext actually does
Dext — formerly Receipt Bank — takes documents in, reads them, and pushes structured data out into your accounting software. You photograph a receipt in the mobile app, email an invoice to a dedicated Dext address, or drag a PDF into the web interface. Dext extracts the supplier, date, total, VAT and (on the right plan) the individual line items, then publishes the transaction to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or another connected ledger with the image attached.
The pitch is accuracy and volume. Dext has been doing document extraction for a long time and it shows in the edge cases: crumpled thermal receipts, multi-page supplier invoices, statements listing thirty transactions on one sheet. It also handles supplier statement reconciliation and bank statement extraction, neither of which your accounting software will do for you.
None of that is in dispute. The question is whether you need it.
Dext pricing in the UK, August 2026
Dext’s UK business page quotes £24.17 a month excluding VAT, or £290 billed annually, for 250 documents a month across five users. Those are the same money — £290 divided by twelve is £24.17, and the same page advertises annual billing as “up to 19% cheaper” than paying monthly. So treat £290 as the annual-commitment price and expect the month-by-month rate to sit higher. Check the figure at checkout before you commit to anything.
Document and user allowances move on a slider, so the headline is a starting point rather than a fixed tier. There is a 14-day free trial and no card required to start it.
| Item | Price (excl VAT) | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Base plan | £24.17/mo or £290/yr | 250 documents a month, 5 users |
| Dext AI Assist | From £7.50/mo | Add-on automation layer |
| Commerce Lite | From £5/mo | E-commerce sales data |
| Payments | From 25p per transaction | Paying suppliers from Dext |
| Extraction add-ons | From £10 to £16.50/mo | Bank statements, line items, supplier statements |
The base plan ships with a small pot of free credits — ten sheets of bank statement extraction, five documents with line-item extraction, five supplier statement extractions. Once those run out, the extraction add-ons are how you keep going. Worth knowing, because line-item extraction is the feature people usually assume is included and usually is not.
What your accounting software already includes
This is the comparison Dext’s marketing does not make, so let’s make it.
Xero
Hubdoc is bundled with every Xero UK plan, including the cheapest one. Xero’s own Ignite plan page lists “Smart document capture, pull bills and receipts into Xero automatically with Hubdoc. Store all your documents online in one place.” Ignite currently costs £16 a month excluding VAT and rises to £18 on 1 September 2026, which we covered in detail in our piece on the Xero price increase. Note that Ignite caps you at 20 invoices and 10 bills a month, which is a real constraint if you are running high document volume, but if you are hitting that cap, the Grow plan is the answer, not Dext.
FreeAgent
Smart Capture is built into the FreeAgent mobile app at no extra cost. FreeAgent’s own expenses page describes snapping receipts or bills via Smart Capture, with the data extracted, categorised and matched to bank transactions automatically. The Sole Trader plan is £19 a month excluding VAT, and it is free outright if you bank with NatWest, RBS or Ulster Bank. Our guide to whether FreeAgent is really free sets out the conditions.
QuickBooks
Receipt capture appears on every QuickBooks UK plan from Sole Trader Plus upwards — “snap photos of your receipts and categorise them on the go”, in Intuit’s own words on the UK pricing page.
So the honest framing of a Dext subscription is not “receipt scanning costs £290 a year”. It is “better receipt scanning costs £290 a year on top of what I already pay”. Add that to a £19 FreeAgent subscription and your software bill is £518 a year before VAT. That is a meaningful line in a sole trader’s accounts.
The cost-per-receipt maths
Divide £290 by the number of documents you actually process and the picture gets uncomfortable fast for low-volume users.
| Documents per month | Per year | Cost per document |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 240 | £1.21 |
| 40 | 480 | 60p |
| 100 | 1,200 | 24p |
| 250 (plan cap) | 3,000 | 10p |
A copywriter with a laptop, a phone contract, a co-working membership and the occasional train ticket is generating maybe fifteen to twenty-five documents a month. At £1.21 a receipt, Dext is charging more than most of those receipts are worth in tax relief. A builder buying materials four times a week from three merchants, with supplier statements to reconcile at month end, is somewhere else entirely.
Where Dext genuinely earns its price
- Line-item detail matters to you. If you need to split a single trade-counter invoice across four different job codes, generic receipt capture will not help. Dext’s line-item extraction will, though it is a paid add-on once the free credits are gone.
- You reconcile supplier statements. Anyone running accounts with regular suppliers knows the monthly statement-versus-invoice check. Nothing in Xero, FreeAgent or QuickBooks does this natively.
- Volume is genuinely high. Past roughly a hundred documents a month, the per-document cost drops below the value of the time saved, and the accuracy gap starts to matter.
- Someone else does your bookkeeping. Dext is built for the accountant-client relationship. If a bookkeeper is processing your paperwork and asks for Dext, they are asking for a reason, and their time is billable.
- You run more than one business. The base plan covers up to five entities before you have to speak to sales.
Notice that four of those five are volume or complexity arguments. That is not an accident. Dext is a good product aimed at a problem most sole traders do not have.
Where it does not earn its price
Single-person service businesses. Consultants, designers, developers, coaches, therapists, writers. Your expense profile is thin and repetitive: the same software subscriptions every month, a phone bill, some travel, an accountant’s fee. Built-in capture handles all of it, and the categorisation rules in your accounting software will learn the recurring ones inside two months.
The other bad reason to buy Dext is guilt. Buying a subscription because you feel disorganised does not make you organised. It adds a monthly cost and a second place for receipts to sit unprocessed. We went through the wider category — including the free options — in our review of receipt scanning apps and HMRC digital records, and the ranking there has not changed.
Does Dext keep you compliant with HMRC?
Partly, and not in the way the marketing implies. HMRC’s Making Tax Digital for Income Tax guidance requires you to record the amount, the date income was received or the expense incurred, and the category, and to keep those digital records for at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for that tax year. Dext creates and stores those records well. So does the capture tool already inside your accounting software.
What matters for MTD is that the software submitting your quarterly updates is compatible with the service. Dext is a feeder, not a filer — it hands data to your ledger, and your ledger talks to HMRC. Check the compatibility question at the accounting-software end, which is what our guide to HMRC-recognised MTD software is for.
The verdict
Dext is a well-built tool with a clear buyer, and that buyer is usually a bookkeeping practice or a business with real paperwork volume. As a bolt-on to a one-person service business already paying for Xero or FreeAgent, it is an expensive way to slightly improve something that already works.
Run the free trial by all means. But run it against a real month of your own paperwork, not a demo. If built-in capture handled 90 per cent of it without complaint, that is your answer.
Common questions
Is Dext free for sole traders?
No. There is a 14-day free trial with no card required, but no permanently free tier. The UK business page starts at £24.17 a month excluding VAT, or £290 billed annually.
Do I need Dext if I already use Xero?
Almost certainly not. Hubdoc is included with every Xero UK plan, including Ignite, and covers straightforward receipt and bill capture. Consider Dext only if you need line-item extraction or supplier statement reconciliation, which Hubdoc does not do.
How many receipts can you upload to Dext?
The advertised base allowance is 250 documents a month across five users, adjustable on the pricing slider. Bank statement, line-item and supplier statement extraction come with a small free credit allowance and then cost extra.
Can I use Dext instead of accounting software?
No. Dext extracts data and pushes it somewhere else. It does not file your Self Assessment, submit quarterly MTD updates or produce your accounts. You still need a ledger underneath it.
Does Dext work with FreeAgent?
Dext’s integration list is built around Xero, QuickBooks and Sage. Check the current integrations page before subscribing if FreeAgent is your ledger, and remember FreeAgent’s own Smart Capture is included in the price you already pay.
Is receipt scanning worth paying extra for at all?
Only above roughly a hundred documents a month, or where you need something built-in capture genuinely cannot do. Below that, the built-in tool in your accounting software plus fifteen minutes a week is cheaper and just as compliant.
Picking software, or fixing the one you have?
Digital Bookkeeping System (MTD-ready) 2026/27. Seven modules and a seven-sheet toolkit, built around a category-to-tax-box mapping table that makes your quarterly updates fill themselves.
- A software decision sheet costed over three years, split by turnover, VAT status and phone-or-desktop
- The chart of categories mapped to the Self Assessment and MTD boxes, and the three categories never to auto-categorise
- Weekly and month-end cards, an MTD quarter-close checklist, and an export-and-archive index so their cloud is never your only copy
Software is priced monthly, excluding VAT, and you will hold the subscription for years. Pick on the wrong number and the difference over three years is more than every course on this site combined.
Buying more than one? All ten 2026/27 courses for £107, against £328 at full price.
Sources
- Dext — UK business pricing (checked 27 August 2026)
- Xero UK — Ignite plan detail (checked 27 August 2026)
- FreeAgent — expenses and Smart Capture (checked 27 August 2026)
- QuickBooks UK — pricing and plan features (checked 27 August 2026)
- HMRC — Create digital records for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (checked 27 August 2026)
This is general information about Dext, not financial or tax advice. Every price and limit above links to the provider’s own page, with the date it was checked; terms change, so confirm on the live page before you sign up. For your own circumstances, speak to an accountant.