Dext vs Bill.com Cost for a Bookkeeping Firm With 10 Clients
Nov 11, 2026
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Short answer: for a 10-client bookkeeping firm, Dext has a published floor of $207.99 a month on Essentials (billed annually) plus a $0.50 meter per line-item document beyond a small free allowance. BILL has a $49 a month Accountant Console, but the per-client entity price is not published, and payments cost $0.59 per ACH on top. The two tools do different jobs. Dext captures bills for the books. BILL approves and pays them. Which is cheaper depends on whether your clients pay bills through you.
Most comparisons of Dext vs Bill.com stop at feature lists. This one prices a concrete firm using only published rates, marks every assumption, and shows where a flat-rate extractor such as the one at the top of this page changes the answer. Figures come from the Dext practice pricing page and the BILL pricing page as read in November 2026, and both vendors change prices, so check before you sign.
What each tool actually sells a bookkeeping firm
Dext (formerly Receipt Bank) is a capture and publishing platform. Clients email or upload bills and receipts, Dext reads them, and the firm publishes the result to Xero, QuickBooks Online or Sage. It does not pay the bill. For the full per-client ladder see our Dext pricing breakdown.
BILL is an accounts payable and receivable platform. It captures a bill, routes it for approval, then pays it by ACH, check or virtual card and syncs the ledger both ways. Our Bill.com pricing for accountants article covers the console and plan ladder. The point that matters here is that BILL's price includes the payment workflow, so it only makes sense if you or your clients will use it.
The published numbers, side by side
| Cost item | Dext | BILL |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price for a firm | $207.99 a month for 10 clients on Essentials, billed annually ($20.80 per client) | $49 a month Accountant Console |
| Per client | Included in the per-client rate, falling to $9.92 at 500 clients | Per entity, not published, quoted after sizing your book of business |
| Month-to-month billing | $239.19 for the same 10 clients | Not stated |
| Line items | Small free allowance, then $0.50 per document or bundles from $0.41 down to $0.28 | AI multi-line bill coding from the Team plan at $65 per user a month on direct plans |
| Bank statements | $0.32 per document, bundles down to $0.16 | Not an extraction product |
| Paying the bill | Not offered | ACH $0.59, mailed check $1.99, virtual card free |
| 1099 filing | Not offered | $2.99 per form, $1.99 through the Accountant Console |
A worked example: 10 clients, 40 vendor bills each
Assume a firm with 10 small-business clients, each sending 40 vendor bills a month, so 400 bills in total. These counts are an illustration, not a benchmark. Swap in your own.
Dext. Essentials for 10 clients is $207.99 a month. If half of those bills need line-item extraction (200 documents) and we ignore the free allowance to stay conservative, the meter at $0.50 comes to $100. The monthly total is about $308 at pay-as-you-go. Buying a bundle at the cheaper end of the published range would lower the meter, and the free allowance would lower it further. So the plausible band is roughly $208 to $308, depending on how many bills need lines.
BILL. The console is $49. The per-entity cost for 10 clients is the unknown, and BILL's own FAQ says firms receive a package after sizing. What we can price is the payment side. If the firm pays 200 of those bills a month by ACH, that is $118 in ACH fees. So the published floor is $167 a month before any per-entity subscription, and the real number is higher by whatever BILL quotes you. Ask for it in writing, per entity, before comparing.
Flat extraction. InvoiceExtractor Starter is $49 a month for 2,500 pages with every line item included. At 400 one-page bills that is about 16% of the allowance, and Plus at $149 covers 10,000 pages if your clients grow. The trade is real: there is no client portal, no approval flow and no native two-way sync. You download Excel or CSV and import it, as described in our guide to scanning invoices into QuickBooks.
| Scenario (400 bills a month) | Published monthly cost | What you still have to do |
|---|---|---|
| Dext Essentials, 200 line-item bills | About $308 at the $0.50 meter, less with bundles or the free allowance | Nothing, it publishes to your ledger |
| BILL console plus 200 ACH payments | $167 floor, plus the unpublished per-entity price | Get the per-entity quote |
| Flat extraction, Starter | $49 | Import the file, pay bills elsewhere |
When each one is the right call
Choose Dext when your work is bookkeeping, your clients send you paper and photos, and you want publishing into Xero or QuickBooks Online with client management around it. At 50 clients the Essentials rate drops to $14.04 per client, and the bulk publishing is what you are paying for.
Choose BILL when clients need approvals and payments in one place and you want to resell that service. If that is not the plan, you are paying for rails you will not use.
Choose flat extraction when the billable hours go to retyping vendor invoices, your clients already pay from their own bank or card, and your ledger imports a CSV. It is also the cheapest of the three on pure data entry volume, and it is the weakest on workflow. Our Dext alternative and Bill.com alternative pages set out those trade-offs in more detail, and the invoice line item extraction page shows exactly which fields come back on every line.
Questions to put to each vendor before you sign
- Dext: what is the free line-item allowance on my plan, and do unused bundle documents carry over (published terms say bundles reset monthly)?
- BILL: what is the per-entity subscription for my client count, in writing, and which plan do my clients need for AI line-item coding?
- Both: what happens to my price at renewal, and what is the month-to-month premium?
How to run your own version of this comparison
Pull last month's vendor bills across your clients and count three things: total bills, bills where line-level coding matters (restaurants, contractors, distributors), and how many bills your clients pay through you. Those three numbers decide the answer more than any feature list. Then upload your longest, messiest supplier bill to the extractor above and check the line table it returns before you decide that a flat plan covers those clients.
For official plan terms, read the BILL pricing page and the Dext pricing page directly.
Is Dext cheaper than Bill.com for accountants?
On published prices, Dext has a clear floor of $207.99 a month for 10 clients, while BILL's console is $49 but per-entity pricing is quote-only. They are not like for like. Dext captures bills, BILL also pays them, so compare the price of the whole workflow you will actually use.
Can Dext pay bills like Bill.com?
No. Dext reads documents and publishes them to your accounting software. Payment, approval routing and 1099 filing are BILL features. A firm that wants capture only can skip the payment layer entirely and avoid the per-payment fees.
Which is better for a small bookkeeping practice?
Dext fits practices whose work is capture and publishing for many clients. BILL fits practices that also run payables for clients. If the main cost is retyping bill lines, a flat extraction plan from $49 a month can cover that step with no per-client or per-payment fees.
If QuickBooks Online is your ledger, our Dext vs QuickBooks Online cost article prices the same 10-client firm.