Is there an ever-growing pile of paperwork that you need to attend to? Lost receipts that never show up and upcoming tax deadlines that make you want to scream? 

Your time is valuable and it's frustrating to waste time on activities that could be automated, especially when it puts unnecessary pressure on you and your colleagues. One of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of an accountant’s job is collecting, sorting, and extracting data from your client's paperwork. Thankfully, it can be automated. 

Dext Prepare is a fantastic solution for organising all of your documents into a standardised, digital format. It can remove the stress associated with tax deadlines and ease the last-minute chaos. In fact, it is used by 9 of the Top 10 accounting firms in the UK for this reason. 

Take a look at why Dext Prepare is an accounting tool you should adopt: 

1. Data extraction accuracy of over 99% 

Receipts, invoices or bank statements – it doesn’t matter, Dext Prepare captures and extracts all the information you need with over 99% accuracy, which is the highest in the market. Once the data is extracted, the information can be easily sent directly to your accounting software (e.g., BrightBooks) eliminating the need to waste time entering it manually. This reduces errors in your financial data and lets you rest assured that your paperwork is extracted to the highest quality. 

2. Quick processing time 

On average, Dext Prepare saves accountancy practices up to 5.5 hours per client, per month on manual data processing. Prepare’s processing time is market leading, despite producing over 20 million items a month.  

Dext Prepare processes a document in under 30 seconds, which is a lot quicker than manually completing this process (2 minutes on average). With Dext Prepare, 65% of submissions takes only 8 seconds and over 85% of bank statement extractions are completed within two hours. 

3. Powerful and reliable 

All Dext products hold over 99.99% uptime, meaning Prepare is unlikely to ever go unexpectedly offline. By using Prepare, you will have access to the most stable, reliable and accurate data capture tool in the market. Using OCR technology to recognise text within the captured images, you can gain peace of mind that your data is captured with ease. 

4. Flexibility of submission methods 

Completing your work for your year-end clients can be chaotic. One of the best ways to avoid the chaos is to continuously update documents throughout the year. Prepare makes this easy by offering 9 simple ways for you and your clients to upload receipts. These methods are: 

• Dext mobile app 
• Drag and drop 
• Email 
• PayPal 
• Dropbox 
• Qonto 
• Mileage 

Once paperwork has been submitted, Prepare automatically processes, extracts and stores digital copies via a secure cloud system. This ensures that all documents are available come year end, and you don’t have to waste time chasing clients. 

5. Auto-publish into your accounting software 

With powerful features in place to automate paperwork processing, such as auto-publishing tools, Prepare can improve your efficiency. Use ‘Auto-Publish’ to publish documents from specific suppliers, customers or payment methods to your integrated accounting software automatically as soon as they’ve been submitted. 

6. Numerous accounting software integrations 

Integrating Dext Prepare with your accounting software creates an end-to-end solution, from receiving paperwork to delivering final year financial statements. Prepare has 34 integrations available, which is the most in the industry.  

Two integrations available are with our cloud bookkeeping software, BrightBooks, and our accounts production software, BrightAccountsProduction. It is also good to note that users of both BrightBooks and BrightAccountsProduction only need to send the data to one software package as there is an integration between BrightBooks and BrightAccountsProduction. 

Prepare also supports over 11,500 banks and institutions, meaning you can rest assured that the banks and institutions you use are compatible. 

7. Secure data storage of 7 years 

As a cloud system, Dext Prepare eliminates the need for physical storage space at no additional cost. Dext Prepare stores data for 7 years using encryption and is fully GDPR compliant. Use Prepare to ensure that no documents are lost, and that they are easily accessible when required. 

8. Continuous reinvestment and improvement 

With Dext, you don’t need to worry about their products going out of date. Dext considers product development a priority and their products are always at the front of industry advancements. For example, in the last 5 years: 

• Their R&D team increased from 30 to 200+ people 
• Over 300 new features have been released 
• Data extraction is now 16 times faster (while maintaining 99%+ accuracy) 

9. Onboarding training and customer support 

BrightBooks, a member of Bright, are the exclusive distributor of Dext Prepare in Ireland. We have partnered with Dext to offer Irish customers the full onboarding and training experience of Dext Prepare. Our team of dedicated experts will help you get set-up and ready to go. 

If you join Dext Prepare, you will be given a dedicated account manager and a detailed launch plan which includes tailored one-to-one onboarding. With full training available, it is easy to get the best out of Dext Prepare to achieve your business goals. 

Your account manager remains your point of contact as long as you remain a customer, while you also have access to our technical customer support team. This ensures you can be certain of support even in your busiest periods. 

Our team can be accessed from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, on +353 1 494 0580. 

10. A real, active community 

Dext members get exclusive access to ‘Orange Select’ – Dext’s online community of over 13,000 accountants and bookkeepers. There, you can share insights, take part in discussions and connect with peers. You can also earn points by engaging in this community, which can be traded in for rewards (such as Amazon vouchers and Apple products). 

Dext also actively seeks feedback on its UserVoice platform to ensure all features released are truly of value to its users. Here you can vote for features you would like to see, and be part of the beta testing to ensure it is fit for purpose. 

How can you get the best out of Dext Prepare as a user of Bright's accounting solution? 

From Dext Prepare, you can send your clients’ information straight to BrightBooks, the bookkeeping software. An integration between the two systems ensures all data extraction will be completed in a format that matches your existing financial records. This can help to significantly reduce the risk of transactions being coded incorrectly. 

Once the integration is set up, you can send every expense directly to BrightBooks in just a few clicks, meaning line entries are automatically created, so you don’t need to manually enter the information.  

How exactly does this work?  

Phase 1  

Use Dext Prepare at the pre-accounting stage for data capture and line entry creation. 

Phase 2 

All items are then pulled into BrightBooks. Here, you can review these transactions and if necessary, you can make edits. Once satisfied, complete the import. The import will include all information, such as the supplier, nominal codes, invoice number and description. In BrightBooks, you can link live bank feeds to complete bank reconciliation and run VAT returns for your VAT clients. 

Phase 3 

Thanks to BrightBooks' integration with BrightAccountsProduction, this data is then present within the accounts production software, available for year-end work. And, as already mentioned, if you do not use BrightBooks, you can send your extracted data directly into BrightAccountsProduction, so it is available to you when producing financial statements. However, to get the most out of the end-to-end solution, we recommend using it in conjunction with the bookkeeping extension. 

Want to learn more about Bright's accounting solution and Dext Prepare? If so, book a free, live demo with one of our product experts or register for our upcoming webinar on the 30th of November at 2.00 pm where we will discuss the benefits of Prepare and show the software in action.