Dext: The proven Briefcase alternative for accountants & bookkeepers

Three reasons come up consistently: control (nothing publishes without the rules and sign-off your firm configures, and anomalies are flagged rather than silently adjusted), completeness (Dext runs from capture through approvals, payments and reconciliation, where Briefcase stops at categorisation), and proof (a decade of AI trained on 2B+ documents, 350M+ processed annually across 12,000+ firms).

No – AI has been the backbone of Dext for over a decade, powering extraction, categorisation and error detection at 99.9% accuracy. What's new is Dext AI Assist, a context-driven automation layer for complex documents that acts on instructions your firm writes. The distinction that matters isn't OCR vs AI – it's AI that assumes vs AI that's guided by your context.

Briefcase markets a high auto-publish rate. Dext focuses on automation you can trust: automate confidently where accuracy is proven, and keep human review where it protects your client's books. Many of Briefcase's comparative figures are self-reported, so we'd encourage testing both on your own documents before deciding.

Automation is only as valuable as it is accurate. A wrong VAT treatment or miscoding that auto-posts still becomes your firm's problem at review or year-end. Dext gives you configurable automation, duplicate and anomaly detection, and practice-wide data health so you scale volume without losing oversight.

Yes. Dext automatically codes and categorises transactions, extracts line items and applies your rules and supplier mappings, with AI recommendations to speed up review. You keep control over how much is automated versus checked.

Dext is an established platform with 12,000+ firms, 700,000+ users, a 10+ year track record, industry awards, UK-based support and 250+ tutorials plus Dext U certification. Briefcase launched more recently with a smaller customer base. If proven reliability and support matter to your practice, that gap is worth weighing.

Not hard. Connect your accounting software in minutes, invite clients via email, app or drag-and-drop, and lean on our UK support team and tutorials. Most practices are up and running in days.

Not necessarily. Briefcase advertises from £9 per client per month, but that tier is capped at 75 published documents per quarter, plans run to £49 per client per month, and there's a 25-licence minimum. The relevant figure is total cost at your real document volumes – including the review time auto-published items still require. We'd encourage you to run both numbers side by side.