AutoEntry vs Dext Pricing for Bookkeepers

Short answer: AutoEntry is cheaper for a practice with a few small, header-only clients, and Dext is cheaper once clients send real volume. AutoEntry sells credits per client company, from $13 a month for 50 credits, and charges 2 credits for an invoice with line items and 3 per bank statement page. Dext prices practices per client with a 10-client minimum on an annual plan, $207.99 a month for 10 clients on Essentials and $17.70 per client at 20, with heavier extraction such as line items drawn from a credit allowance.

So the cheaper tool depends on the shape of your client list, not on the headline price. Below are both rate cards in US dollars, read from autoentry.com, dext.com and sage.com in October 2026, three worked client lists, and the one case neither model handles cheaply: clients whose supplier bills need every line. You can test one of those bills in the tool at the top of this page while you read.

AutoEntry vs Dext pricing side by side

Two notes on the table. The AutoEntry per-credit price falls from about $0.26 on Bronze to about $0.19 on Sapphire, so an invoice with its lines costs between $0.52 and $0.38. And Sage's own US page for accountants shows a single AutoEntry plan at $17 a month and says firms always pay per client, so the credit ladder is what sits behind that entry price. Our AutoEntry pricing breakdown lists every tier and the cost of each document type.

Is AutoEntry cheaper than Dext?

At the entry level, yes. A client that sends 30 plain bills and receipts a month uses 30 credits and fits AutoEntry's Bronze plan at $13, while Dext costs $20.80 for that client at the 10-client minimum and needs at least 10 of them. AutoEntry gets more expensive per client as documents need line items or statements, because those cost 2 and 3 credits, while Dext's per-client price stays the same and draws the heavier work from credits.

Dext publishes its business-plan rates for that heavier work: line item extraction beyond the included allowance is $0.50 a document pay as you go, or a 50-document bundle from $20.50 a month. The practice pricing page says every plan has a credit allowance and top-ups but does not print its size, so ask for it in writing before you sign an annual contract.

What each costs for three real client lists

Here is the same math for three practices. AutoEntry is priced at the smallest plan that covers each client's credits. Dext is priced at the Essentials total its own price feed returns for that client count, before any credit top-ups, so treat the Dext column as a floor. The full per-client ladder is on our Dext pricing page.

The first list favors AutoEntry clearly. The second is close and depends on how far the Dext allowance stretches. The third shows the weak spot in both models. On AutoEntry, line items double the credit price of every bill, so a line-heavy contractor lands on Diamond. On Dext, 1,500 line item documents a month at the published business pay-as-you-go rate would add up to $750, and even at the bundle rate it is several hundred dollars. Either way, the firm is paying a premium per bill for the lines.

Which is better for accountants, Dext or AutoEntry?

Dext is the stronger platform for a growing practice; AutoEntry is the simpler, cheaper tool for a small one. Dext's practice plans add firm-wide dashboards, supplier statement reconciliation, bank match, duplicate screening, multi-stage approvals and auto fetch from supplier portals. Its own comparison page also says AutoEntry allows up to 24 hours for bank statement extraction, a claim from a competitor that you should test in the trial rather than take on faith.

AutoEntry's strengths are its low entry price, unlimited users, a client mobile app, and Sage, QuickBooks and Xero publishing that works client by client. Its Partner Programme also lets accountants offer clients 50% off for the first six months. For a sole practitioner with a dozen small clients, that is hard to beat.

Before you price either one, you need each client's real monthly volume by document type, which most firms only learn after onboarding. If your new-client process is still a manual call, it is worth starting to automate the client intake consultation so that document counts arrive with the engagement letter instead of three months later.

Does Dext or AutoEntry extract line items better?

Both extract line items, and both charge extra for them. AutoEntry captures description, unit price and quantity for each line at 2 credits per invoice. Dext includes line item extraction with grouping on its practice plans and draws it from the credit allowance, with paid bundles beyond it. Neither vendor publishes an independent accuracy benchmark for line items, so the honest test is to run the same ten multi-line supplier bills through both trials and count the corrections.

The client both pricing models overcharge

Every practice has a few clients whose bills are mostly lines: a builder buying materials for five jobs, a restaurant with 40-item food deliveries, a distributor restocking SKUs. Header capture is useless for them, and per-document line item pricing makes them the most expensive clients on the list.

For those clients a page-priced extractor is usually cheaper. InvoiceExtractor reads the header and every line of each bill and returns Excel, CSV, JSON or a QuickBooks import file. Starter is $49 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly, for 2,500 pages on the Base AI model or 500 on the Pro model, and line items do not cost extra. The five contractor clients above, 1,500 one-page bills a month, fit inside that one plan. The trade-off is real: there is no direct publish into the client's ledger and the plan is a single seat, so you import the file, for example to import bills into QuickBooks Online or as a Xero bill import.

How to choose for your practice

Count three numbers for each client from last month: plain bills and receipts, bills that need their lines, and bank statement pages. If most clients are small and header-only, AutoEntry's Bronze and Silver plans are the cheapest route. If you run more than about ten clients and want practice dashboards and approvals, Dext's per-client model gets cheaper as the list grows. Whichever you pick for the bulk of the list, move the line-heavy clients to a page-priced extractor and compare the import file against what you were typing.

The Xero-only option is covered in our Dext vs Hubdoc pricing comparison, and if Dext is already on your shortlist, see our Dext alternative for invoice line items. To see what a page-priced extractor returns, upload your heaviest supplier bill at the top of this page.

Sources

• AutoEntry pricing page, currency set to US dollars, and FAQ (autoentry.com/pricing), read October 2026.
• AutoEntry help center, "What are AutoEntry credits", read October 2026.
• Sage US, AutoEntry for accountants page (sage.com/en-us/accountants/products/autoentry), read October 2026.
• Dext US practice pricing (dext.com/us/partner/pricing) and business pricing (dext.com/us/business/pricing), read October 2026.
• Dext, "Dext vs AutoEntry" comparison page (dext.com/us/resources/compare/dext-vs-autoentry), read October 2026.