Which invoice automation software should a business choose, and what distinguishes the leading options?

Which invoice problem are you automating?

"Invoice automation" covers two different jobs. AccountingTools' article on accounting for accounts payable starts with invoices coming in: the first step is to ensure that all incoming invoices from suppliers are valid, and once an invoice has been verified the amount owed is entered in the payables software. Its article on the billing process describes the other job, the steps required to ensure that invoices are issued to customers.

A tool for invoices you receive has to read documents other businesses designed, so capture and extraction are its core and its output is a transaction in your ledger. A tool for invoices you send builds them from your own data, so its core is templates, schedules, delivery and follow-up, and there is nothing to extract. Getting invoices you already produce elsewhere into your ledger is a capture job; Dext's help on ways to add documents, for example, includes sales documents. Keep the two off the same shortlist: scoring one kind against the other picks a product that cannot do your task.

If your need is sending invoices, start with the accounting software you already have. Intuit's help on invoice reminders says QuickBooks Online can send automatic reminders that go out a few days before or after the due date (on QuickBooks Online Advanced, through workflows). Judge invoicing tools on what they send, when, and how they chase payment, not on extraction. The rest of the comparison concerns invoices you receive.

What does a supplier-invoice tool do, and where does it stop?

A capture tool works in stages, and Dext's help documentation, as one example, shows each one:

• Accept. Dext's help on ways to add documents lists uploading from your computer, emailing documents to a dedicated address, submitting through the mobile app and setting up a Fetch connection with a supplier.
• Extract. The same page says Dext automatically extracts the relevant data once a document is in.
• Check. Dext's help on item statuses says "To review" means Dext has detected something missing or incorrect on the item, and "Ready" means its checks have passed and the item can be published, exported or archived.
• Code. Dext's help on supplier rules (page undated) says a rule sets default values and is automatically applied to every new document uploaded from that supplier.
• Route. Dext's QuickBooks Online publishing help (page undated) says if approval workflows are set up, items must complete the approval process before they can be published.
• Post. The same page says Dext attaches the original document image or PDF to every cost and sales item it publishes there.
• Archive. Dext's backup help describes connecting a cloud storage provider to back up documents automatically or on demand.

What the tool replaces is the keying between receiving an invoice and entering it. It does not replace the step AccountingTools' payables article puts first, confirming that each incoming invoice is valid. "Ready" in Dext's sense means its data checks passed, not that the supplier or the charge is genuine or that payment details on the invoice are right. Dext's help on managing suppliers says new suppliers created in Dext will also be created in your accounting software when the document is published, so a capture tool can add vendors to your ledger. The same page describes a setting, Warn me when creating a new supplier; turn such a warning on for the trial and check whether each candidate offers one. Limiting who may publish does not close that gap, because in a small office the person who publishes may also approve and pay. Checking that a supplier is genuine and that an invoice's payment details are right stays in your payables process. Paying suppliers, and platforms that carry approvals through to payment, are a separate choice.

How does the way invoices arrive change the comparison?

The arrival channel decides which dimensions matter most:

If most of yours are photographs or scans, weight extraction and layout handling above every other dimension, and draw the trial sample from your worst documents rather than your cleanest: faded paper, skewed or folded pages, phone photos taken at an angle, handwritten additions. A candidate that reads clean PDFs well can still fail on these.

Which dimensions separate the candidates?

The Dext and QuickBooks Online examples show only what a candidate's documentation can tell you; neither is recommended or ranked as leading. Whatever shortlist you start from, take each candidate's position from its own current help documentation rather than its sales pages, note the date each page shows, and confirm it covers your ledger and the United States. Compare candidates on these points:

• Extraction approach. Ask how it reads a layout it has never seen, whether it learns from your corrections, and what documents any accuracy figure it quotes was measured on.
• Arrival channels. It must accept every channel in your real mix, not only the one in the demonstration.
• Document types and detail. Check which of your types it handles, such as bills, receipts, credit notes and multi-page invoices, and whether it extracts line items. Dext's line-item help says Line Item Extraction splits supported documents into individual lines and that only Admin users can manage it, so trial the configuration you would actually run. The same page says each line's tax amount is captured but not its tax code or rate.
• Ledger integration. Check which ledgers and editions it connects to and what it writes, covered in the section on integration below.
• Exceptions and corrections. Check how it flags doubtful items, how quickly a person can fix one, and whether a wrong value can pass without a flag.
• Volume and limits. Dext's extraction-usage help says its business plan includes a monthly document extraction allowance, and that documents over it are extracted at the start of the next billing period or immediately if you upgrade, so compare any such limit with your busiest month. Dext's line-item help says Line Item Extraction uses credits from your subscription allowance, so count those documents too.
• Permissions. Check who can submit, edit, publish and create suppliers. Dext's QuickBooks Online publishing help (page undated) says Admin users, and accountants or bookkeepers accessing a client account, can publish by default, while standard users must have publishing permissions enabled; under Dext's help on managing suppliers, publishing is also what adds new suppliers to your ledger.
• Archive and export. Check what you can retrieve and take away, covered in the section on processed documents below.
• Security and support. Ask for the candidate's SOC 2 report, which under the AICPA's SOC 2 guide reports on an examination of controls at a service organization, and ask which support channels and hours cover your working day.

Why won't a marketed accuracy figure predict your result?

An extraction accuracy figure compares a tool's output with known-correct values on a particular set of documents. The ICDAR 2019 competition report on scanned receipt extraction (SROIE) shows how: its 1000 scanned receipt images are split into a training/validation set of 600 and a separate test set; on each test image the extracted text is compared to the ground truth, and a value is marked as correct only if both its content and its category, meaning the field it was assigned to, match. A stated figure describes its test set and that way of counting.

It does not carry over to your documents. The VRDU benchmark study (2023) found that the strong baseline models it tested still found new document templates very challenging and struggled with hierarchical fields such as invoice line items. Your suppliers' layouts, your scan quality and the fields you need make a different test. Before giving a vendor's figure any weight, ask what documents it was measured on and how many; whether the tool was trained or set up on those documents or their layouts; which fields were scored; whether it counts fields or whole documents, and whether unextracted fields count as errors; and whether anyone corrected the output first.

Measure your own with three numbers:

• Field accuracy. This is correct fields divided by fields checked.
• Clean-document rate. This is documents needing no correction divided by documents submitted.
• Unflagged errors. These are wrong values the tool did not mark for review.

Suppose you submit 40 invoices and score 6 fields on each, 240 fields in all. The tool gets 222 right, a field accuracy of 92.5%. Only 29 of the 40 invoices needed no correction, a clean-document rate of 72.5%, so more than a quarter still need a person. Of the 18 wrong fields, 5 carried no flag and would have reached your ledger unseen. The clean-document rate sets your remaining workload; unflagged errors set your risk. The trial sample over-represents hard documents, so use it to compare candidates; to estimate your workload, weight each type's clean-document rate by its share of a normal month's invoices.

What should the integration write to your ledger?

A tool that extracts perfectly but posts at the wrong level of detail moves the work into your ledger, and one that posts without the document leaves the entry unsupported. Confirm that your exact ledger and edition appear in the candidate's current connection documentation, then open the transactions your trial posted and check that:

• The transaction type is the one you need, such as a bill to pay later rather than a record of a purchase already paid. Check whether that is a setting: Dext's QuickBooks Online publishing help (page undated) says a default 'Publish to' destination decides where cost items appear and whether they are marked paid.
• The detail matches how you account, whether one line per invoice or separate lines with their own accounts and tax.
• The supplier, invoice number, dates and total match the document.
• The original document is attached to the transaction and opens from it.
• No supplier record was created or changed that you did not expect.
• Nothing duplicated a transaction already in your books, such as a hand-keyed bill or a bank-feed payment; where the tool can match a document to an existing transaction, it matched rather than creating a second one.

Score line items separately if you need them.

How do you run a trial on your own invoices?

Run every candidate, including your accounting software's built-in capture, through the same steps:

1. Draw a sample from your real mix: your highest-volume suppliers, your worst photographs and scans, multi-page invoices, PDFs holding several invoices, invoices with many lines, credit notes and a few one-off suppliers, with each type appearing more than once.
2. Before submitting anything, write down the correct value of every field you will score, so you have your own ground truth.
3. Where you can, connect the candidate to a test company rather than your live books, and leave any automatic posting off until you have scored the results.
4. Submit the documents through the channels you will use in practice.
5. Record for each document whether each scored field was right, whether the tool flagged it, the minutes spent correcting it, what posted (transaction type, lines, accounts, tax and attachment), any supplier record created or changed and any duplicate of an existing transaction.
6. Calculate field accuracy, clean-document rate and unflagged errors, split by document type and channel.
7. Export everything the trial processed, and confirm you get the original files and the extracted data and can reach each posted transaction's document from your ledger.

Reject any candidate that trips a gate listed below; among the rest, weigh correction time and unflagged errors on your worst documents above anything a demonstration showed.

When is no separate tool needed?

Your accounting software may already do enough. Intuit's help on uploading receipts says you can upload receipts to QuickBooks Online from your computer or mobile device, that QuickBooks will extract info and create a transaction for you to review, and that you can email receipts directly to QuickBooks Online. That page notes the feature is limited on QuickBooks Online Free and Lite, and that each file should include only one receipt, so score PDFs holding several invoices as unsupported by that route. Intuit's help on entering bills, which lists QuickBooks Online Simple Start, Essentials, Plus and Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite but not Solopreneur, Lite or Free, says you can upload existing bill files directly from your computer. It does not say QuickBooks reads details from an uploaded bill, and Intuit's receipt help says captured images are linked to expenses, so check whether the built-in route gives you a bill to pay later with its details filled in, or only an attached file or an expense record. Put your trial sample through the built-in capture first and score it the same way. If its clean-document rate, unflagged errors and correction time are acceptable at your volume, you do not need a separate tool.

What happens to the processed documents?

The IRS lists invoices among the supporting documents a business keeps, and says all requirements that apply to hard copy books and records also apply to electronic records. Once a tool holds your only copy, those records sit in another company's system on its terms. Dext's cancellation help (page undated), for example, says that after a subscription expires you can still access your account and download your data, that Dext reserves the right to delete accounts after a subscription has expired, and that it recommends exporting your data before cancelling.

Settle these points before you commit:

• Bulk export of the original files, not only the extracted data
• Extracted data in a format you can use, linked to each file
• Access after cancellation, and for how long
• Retrieval from the ledger transaction and by supplier, date and amount
• A continuing copy in storage you control

Choosing software to store accounting documents generally is a separate decision.

What rules a candidate out, whatever it scores elsewhere?

Treat each of these as a gate that no strength elsewhere can offset:

• It cannot accept a channel your invoices regularly arrive through.
• It has no current integration with your ledger and edition, or cannot post the transaction type and detail you need.
• It cannot export the original documents and extracted data in bulk, or you lose access when the subscription ends.
• Its postings do not carry the source document, where your ledger can hold one.
• On your worst documents, it posts wrong suppliers, dates or totals without flagging them.
• It creates or changes supplier records in your ledger without warning you first, and you cannot switch that off; a limit on who can publish does not pass this gate.
• For a firm, it cannot keep each client's documents, rules and staff access separate.

What changes for a bookkeeping firm handling many clients?

For a firm processing for many entities, client separation, per-client rules and the effort of adding a client outweigh single-entity throughput. Dext's help on colleague access says you control which clients a colleague can work on, and its client-defaults help says you can set up common client account settings once, so every new client you add starts with your preferred setup. In the trial, add a second client and time the setup, confirm that a supplier rule for one client does not reach another, and confirm that a colleague limited to one client cannot open another's documents. Dext's colleague-access help also says Practice Admins and Client Admins have Bookkeeping access to every client by default, so run that check with a colleague in neither role, and count how many staff would need an admin role.