Can Small Businesses Cut the Time Spent on Bookkeeping?

Entering receipts and invoices into the books is not complicated work, but it can eat into a small business owner's day. The question is whether software can take enough of that work off their hands to make a difference. A supplier sends an invoice. Someone buys fuel for a delivery. Another employee pays for materials and promises to bring the receipt back later. By the time the owner sits down to do the books, some documents are in an email inbox, others are on WhatsApp, and a few are nowhere to be found.

For a small business, this is familiar territory. The owner may be able to remember what was bought and who was paid, but the bookkeeper needs the actual documents. Until those are collected and the figures entered, the accounts remain unfinished. One option is to use software that reads receipts and invoices and captures the information for bookkeeping. Dext is one example. It can extract details such as supplier names, dates and amounts, organise documents and connect with supported accounting software, depending on the plan and setup. Whether it is worth paying for comes down to a practical question: how much time does the business spend on this work now, and how much could it realistically save?

Where the hours go

Imagine a small building contractor buying cement, plumbing supplies, tools and fuel throughout the month. Each purchase may come with a different receipt or invoice. The person handling the books has to collect the paperwork, enter the details and check that the amounts match. The work becomes more frustrating when a receipt is faded, an invoice is missing its VAT details or an employee has not submitted proof of a purchase. Someone has to stop what they are doing and sort it out.

Before looking at software, the business should spend a week tracking how much time goes into capturing documents and following up on missing ones. It may find that manual data entry is the biggest problem. Or it may discover that employees are simply not submitting their receipts on time. That distinction matters. Software that reads invoices can reduce typing, but it cannot recover a receipt that nobody has submitted.

Put the time saving to the test

Consider a business that processes 100 receipts and invoices each month. At four minutes per document, manual capture takes 400 minutes six hours and 40 minutes a month.

That is a useful starting point for testing a tool such as Dext. It is not, however, a guarantee that all those hours will be saved. The software may capture a clear supplier invoice quickly but struggle with a faded till slip. Someone still needs to check the supplier name, date, total and VAT information where applicable. Any mistakes must be corrected before the information is relied on. The business should take a sample of its actual documents and time two processes: entering them manually and processing them through Dext. Include the time spent checking entries, correcting errors and dealing with missing information.

Suppose the manual process takes six hours and 40 minutes, while the software-assisted process takes four hours from start to finish. The saving is two hours and 40 minutes a month. The owner can then decide whether those hours justify the subscription fee. If the software takes nearly as long because the documents need extensive corrections, the case for paying becomes weaker.

What will it cost the business?

Dext is a paid service, and its pricing varies by plan, features, document allowance and billing arrangement. Businesses should check the current prices for their country and confirm exactly what is included before signing up. The accounting software connection also needs attention. Check whether the existing system is supported and whether the selected plan includes the integration required. A business should not pay for a package based on features it does not need, or discover later that a key feature costs extra. 

The subscription should be weighed against the actual time saved, not an estimate taken from a product demonstration. For a business processing only a few documents, a spreadsheet and a regular filing routine may be enough. For one dealing with supplier invoices and staff expenses every day, reducing manual entry may be more worthwhile. There is another cost to consider: the time spent fixing mistakes. If staff have to correct a large share of the extracted information, that work must be included in the calculation.

Someone still has to take responsibility

A business can buy the software and still end up with a pile of unprocessed receipts if nobody is responsible for submitting and reviewing them. Staff need to know where receipts should go and when they must submit them. Supplier invoices should be sent to an agreed place, and someone should check the documents regularly rather than leaving everything until the accounts are due.

The owner or bookkeeper also needs to review the extracted figures. A wrong amount can slip into the accounts if everyone assumes the software has read the document correctly. Dext helps capture and organise information. It does not replace a bookkeeper's judgement about how a transaction should be recorded, nor does it provide a substitute for professional tax advice. That distinction is important. The business is paying to reduce part of the administrative workload, not to hand over responsibility for its financial records.

Did the process improve?

After a month, compare the new process with the old one. How much time did staff spend processing documents? How many errors needed correction? How many receipts were missing? And how many transactions were still waiting for review at month-end? If the time has come down but missing documents remain a problem, the business needs to improve its collection process. If the documents are arriving on time but the extracted figures need constant correction, the owner should reconsider whether the tool is suitable for the paperwork involved.

There is no need to make the decision more complicated than it is. Start with 100 receipts and invoices, measure the work and compare the result with the cost. For some small businesses, the saving will justify the monthly fee. For others, getting employees to submit receipts promptly and keeping invoices in one place may solve most of the problem without adding another subscription.