Getting started with Dext AI Assist: a practical guide

Dext AI Assist is an intelligent bookkeeping agent for accountants built into the Dext platform. It uses AI to automate the repetitive checks, categorisations, verifications, and field updates you and your team make consistently across client accounts, so those tasks happen in the background rather than taking up time during document review.

Here's what it does, how it's structured, and how to get the most out of it.

What Dext AI Assist actually does

Think of Dext AI Assist as the next level up from supplier rules. Where supplier rules follow simple if-this-then-that logic tied to a vendor name, AI Assist can handle a much wider range of conditions: document types, expense types, keywords in an invoice, delivery addresses, tax calculations, and more.

It can flag documents for review, update categorisation, change amounts, adjust document types, populate description fields, and apply tracking categories or project codes. Anything you can currently do manually in Dext, AI Assist can be set up to do automatically, or to suggest and wait for your approval first.

Understanding the two levels of guidance

Dext AI Assist operates at two levels.

Practice-level guidance applies across all clients or a selected subset. If you have a rule that should be consistent regardless of which client a document belongs to (say, any food and drink receipt on a weekend should be flagged and coded as personal), this is where you set it. Practice admins create and manage this guidance from practice settings.

Client-level guidance is more specific. Each client account has its own AI section in business settings, where you can generate or write guidance that only applies to that client. This is where you handle the nuances: the specific tracking categories a multi-location client uses, how a particular client's CIS deductions should be processed, or a naming convention specific to their invoices.

Both levels work together. Practice guidance runs first across all applicable clients; client-level guidance handles the exceptions and specifics.

Generating guidance from your existing history

When you first turn on AI Assist for a client, one of the most useful starting points is the generate guidance feature. Rather than writing rules from scratch, you ask the system to look at the manual edits your team has historically made on that client's documents and surface them as suggested guidance.

This is how it spots patterns you might not have consciously articulated: perhaps your team consistently changes amounts to a negative value when a document type is switched to a credit note, or always assigns a particular tracking category to utility bills from a specific supplier. AI Assist can identify these recurring behaviours and propose automating them. You then review each suggestion and decide whether to keep, edit, or dismiss it.

Writing your own guidance

When you create guidance manually, you write a name and a description. The description works like a prompt, exactly the kind of instruction you'd give to a capable junior team member. Unlike a conversation with a general AI tool, the instruction is stored and applied automatically whenever a matching document comes through, with no back-and-forth required.

Dext provides writing tips within the interface: use clear, unambiguous language; specify conditions precisely; reference available actions like flagging, categorising, or updating amounts. The more specific you are about the conditions under which the rule should apply and the action it should take, the more reliably it will work.

A few examples of the kind of guidance you might write:

• Use case – Credit notes: "When a document type is changed from invoice to credit note, automatically change the total amount to a negative value."
• Use case – Utility bills: "For any utility bill, use the site address in the description field rather than the invoice description."
• Use case – Weekend personal expenses: "If a receipt is for food or drink and falls on a Saturday or Sunday, flag for review and categorise as personal."
• Use case – CIS deductions: "For invoices from construction clients with CIS deducted at 20%, categorise as CIS Labour 20% and set the total to the gross amount less fees."

Choosing between manual review and auto-apply

Every piece of guidance can be set to one of two modes.

Manual review means AI Assist surfaces suggestions in the document interface. You'll see a sparkle icon indicating a suggested change, which you can accept or dismiss. This is the right starting point for new guidance, as it lets you see how the rule is being interpreted before you commit to it running automatically. When you dismiss a suggestion, the system asks you why, and providing a reason refines how the guidance behaves in future.

Auto-apply means the change happens without requiring manual confirmation. Once you're confident a rule is working as expected, switching to auto-apply removes it from your review queue entirely. You can move between modes at any time, and everything AI Assist does is logged in the audit trail with a reason, giving you full visibility into what changed and why.

The practical approach is to start most rules on manual review, observe how they perform over a few weeks, and then switch the reliable ones to auto-apply. For rules you're less certain about, keep them in manual review until you've validated them across enough documents to be confident.

A note on access

Dext AI Assist guidance can only be created or edited by users with admin access. Clients and non-admin team members working in the cost or sales inbox will see the effects of guidance (documents already categorised, fields already populated) but they won't be able to view, modify, or delete the underlying rules.

Getting the most out of it

A few things make the difference between guidance that works well and guidance that doesn't:

Be specific about conditions. Vague rules produce inconsistent results. If you want a rule to apply only when certain conditions are met, such as a particular document type, a keyword, or a specific address, say so explicitly.

Don't replicate supplier rules as guidance. If a simple supplier rule already handles something, there's no need to recreate it in AI Assist. Guidance takes priority over supplier rules, so redundancy can cause unexpected behaviour. Use AI Assist for scenarios that supplier rules can't handle: context-dependent decisions, multi-condition logic, and nuanced categorisation.

Use the history view to track performance. The guidance management screen shows you how many times each rule has been triggered, applied, and dismissed. If a rule is being dismissed frequently, the description probably needs refining. If it's running cleanly, you can confidently move it to auto-apply.

Start with your highest-volume clients. AI Assist makes the biggest difference where manual editing time is highest. Use Time Spent analytics (available on Dext Advanced) to identify which clients are consuming the most time after initial document processing. Those are your best candidates for AI Assist configuration.

The upfront work of writing and refining guidance pays off quickly. The goal is to move the repetitive, rules-based decisions out of the review queue entirely, so when a document does land in front of your team, it's because it actually requires human judgement.