MONDAY 30TH MARCH - Dext, the trusted leader in bookkeeping automation, today announces the launch of Time Spent, a new feature giving accounting and bookkeeping firms clear visibility into how their teams spend time across clients. 

Globally, firms are under increasing pressure to deliver more work, faster, without a corresponding increase in resources. Ongoing talent shortages and rising client expectations are making it harder for firms to scale through hiring alone. While automation has reduced time spent on manual data entry, many firms still lack visibility into how time is spent across the rest of their workflows. This makes it difficult to manage workloads, track efficiency and identify clients that require more support than expected.

Built into the Insights section of the Dext platform, Time Spent gives a clear, data-driven view of how time is distributed across clients and teams, enabling firms to better manage, plan and optimise how work is delivered.

Turning visibility into action 

Time Spent brings together multiple layers of insight into a single dashboard, allowing firms to move quickly from high-level trends to detailed analysis.

The feature includes four key views:

• Practice Overview: a snapshot of how time is spent across the firm
• Monthly Heat Map: a visual view of activity trends, highlighting busy and quiet periods
• Client Activity: visibility into which clients require the most and least time
• User Activity: insight into individual team member workloads

Each view includes drill-downs into more detailed data, making it easy to move from identifying a pattern to taking action.

Closing the productivity gap 

Dext’s platform data highlights how much time can be saved through automation alone. In January 2026, Dext processed 31.4 million receipts and invoices globally. Based on an estimated three to four minutes to manually process each document, this represents more than two million hours of administrative work.

Using Dext, users completed this work in approximately 206,000 hours, reducing processing time by more than 90%.

However, while automation removes a significant portion of manual effort, many firms still lack visibility into how time is spent across clients and teams. Following the launch of Dext AI Assist, which helps automate everyday bookkeeping decisions, Time Spent provides the insight firms need to understand and optimise how that work is delivered.

Time Spent addresses this by showing exactly how time is distributed across clients and teams, meaning accountants and bookkeepers can: 

• Identify where time is being lost or concentrated
• Rebalance workloads across teams
• Spot clients that could benefit from further automation
• Support pricing and scope conversations with real data
• Plan ahead for peak periods and reduce last-minute pressure

Sabby Gill, CEO of Dext, says, “Dext has already helped automate large parts of the bookkeeping workflow, from document capture through to data extraction. With Time Spent, we’re solving a different but equally important problem: visibility.

“Firms have made huge strides in automating data processing, but many still don’t have a clear picture of how time is spent across their practice. Time Spent brings that insight into Dext, helping accountants and bookkeepers make better decisions about workloads, efficiency and client relationships.”

Time Spent is available now for accountants and bookkeepers on the Dext Advanced plan at no additional cost. 

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NOTES TO EDITORS

About Dext

Dext, part of the IRIS Software Group, is the world’s leading provider of AI-powered bookkeeping automation. Since 2010, Dext has empowered accountants, bookkeepers, and businesses to thrive by eliminating the manual work that slows them down. Its advanced AI, trained on more than 1 billion receipts and invoices with 99.5% accuracy, streamlines the capture, coding, publishing, and reconciliation of financial data, giving professionals more time to add value and grow.

Trusted by over 12,000 accounting and bookkeeping firms and 700,000 businesses worldwide, Dext integrates seamlessly with all major accounting software and connects to more than 11,500 banks, suppliers, and marketplaces. As part of IRIS Software Group since 2024, Dext continues to innovate with its clients to deliver a more seamless, end-to-end accountancy workflow that enables smarter, more timely financial decisions.

For more information, visit www.dext.com.