The vision at Dext is that we have full end-to-end bookkeeping automation to support our accountants, our bookkeepers, but also our small business clients, and that’s everything from capturing to coding to reconciling through to paying those invoices and to doing payroll as one continuous, basically largely automated workflow.

– Paul Wittich, General Manager APAC at Dext.

The accounting technology landscape is moving at extraordinary speed. In this episode of the Accounting Apps Podcast, I sat down with Paul Wittich, General Manager APAC at Dext, to talk about where the platform is heading and what that means for accountants and bookkeepers on the ground. The conversation was grounded, practical and forward-looking. It highlighted how much has changed in just a short period of time.

Paul began his career as a management accountant before moving into enterprise technology leadership. That grounding in finance is important. It shapes how he views automation, not as a shiny object, but as a tool to deliver better data, stronger compliance and more meaningful insights. He shared that in January 2026 alone, Dext processed over 31 million documents globally, reducing an estimated 2 million hours of admin down to 200,000. That is a 90 percent reduction in processing time. When you think about the cumulative impact of that across firms and small businesses, it is significant.

What is clear is that Dext no longer sees itself as just an OCR or document capture solution. The vision is broader. The goal is end-to-end bookkeeping automation. From capturing and coding, through reconciliation, payments and even payroll, the ambition is to create a largely automated workflow that supports accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses alike. This evolution reflects the broader shift in the profession, where clients expect more insight, faster turnaround and greater accuracy.

One of the standout developments is AI Assist. Rather than being a static rules engine, AI Assist learns from user decisions, preferences and edits. It surfaces suggestions to automate repetitive tasks and evolves over time based on behaviour. This is an important distinction. It adapts to how you work. That learning layer is where the real efficiency gains begin to compound. It moves automation from basic extraction into contextual decision support.

We also discussed features that sophisticated users are simply not using enough. Dext Vault is one example. Many assume it is just a document repository. In reality, it can extract key data, flag important dates and even cross-check lease agreements against rental statements. Supplier statement reconciliation is another underutilised feature that can save significant accounts payable time by matching uploaded statements against transactions in Dext and connected ledgers like Xero or MYOB. Then there are supplier rules, which, when reviewed and refined regularly, can dramatically reduce manual coding. Practice Insights provides a firm-wide dashboard view, helping practices understand submission activity, inactive clients and where team time is really being spent.

For me, this links directly to the compliance versus advisory conversation. Clean, structured, accurate data is the foundation. When automation reduces the mechanical workload, it frees up time and cognitive bandwidth. That is when accountants can spot anomalies, question rising insurance premiums or identify savings opportunities. Automation is not the end goal. It is the enabler.

We also addressed the competitive landscape. AI startups offering OCR and document capture tools are emerging rapidly. Paul’s view was pragmatic. Competition is healthy. It pushes innovation. But Dext brings depth, history and over 2 billion processed transactions. Those data learnings matter. Deep integrations with platforms like Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks also create a level of embedded workflow that is not easily replicated overnight.

Pricing transparency was another topic raised. Paul was clear that Dext now operates with published, transparent pricing visible on its website. In a community that values openness and integrity, that clarity matters. The accounting ecosystem talks. Consistency builds trust.

The overarching theme of our conversation was momentum. The next six to twelve months will look very different from the last six. AI is accelerating development cycles. Payments and spend cards are on the roadmap for APAC. End-to-end workflow automation is no longer aspirational. It is actively being built.

For accountants and bookkeepers, the message is simple. Stay curious. Explore the tools you already use more deeply. Review your supplier rules. Investigate Vault. Understand practice insights. The technology is evolving quickly, but so is the opportunity. Those who lean in, experiment and engage with the product feedback loops will help shape what comes next.

This is an exciting time in the profession. The foundations of compliance remain critical, but the tools supporting them are becoming more intelligent and more adaptive. The firms that harness that intelligently will be well positioned not just to survive change, but to lead it.

Heather Smith

Heather Smith, and welcome to the Accounting Apps podcast, exploring the accounting and business apps community. Stay up to date with the curated content I’m sharing by signing up to the Accounting Apps newsletter at accounting apps.io and joining the Accounting Apps Mastermind Group. Today, joining me on the show is Paul Wittich, General Manager for the APAC region at Dext. Dext, formerly known as Receipt Bank, is an accounting automation tool that helps businesses collect, read, and process invoices, receipts, and other financial documents. Beginning his career in finance as a management accountant, Paul Wittich went on to develop a strong reputation in enterprise tech and APAC leadership. Over the course of a 20 year plus year career, he’s led teams across strategy, sales, and customer success. Paul has worked his way through roles at cable and wireless, Cisco, my IB, and now Dext, giving him a broad and practical view of how technology businesses grow and scale. Welcome to the show, Paul.

How has your day been?

Paul Wittich

Hey, Heather, pretty good so far. Yep, it’s 11 o’clock in the morning, but so far, so good.

Heather Smith

Fantastic, fantastic. So I would like to start with my first question, which is going back to the time when Prince was partying like it’s 1999, and you were working on the Cayman Islands on an international graduate secondment. That sounds like an amazing gig for a graduate accountant.

Can you tell us a bit about your time in the Cayman Islands?

Paul Wittich

Tough place to work, you know. Heather, I spent just under a year in the Cayman Islands. This was very early in my career as part of a graduate programme. We had an office located very close to the beach, and it’s where I really learned my skills back then. Very different environment. Yeah, great time. Learned how to scuba dive whilst I was there. Met some, I built my network out, but ultimately I had to get back to reality. So, headed back to London into my proper career.

Heather Smith

Well, it does sound like a fantastic way to start as a graduate accountant. So, you started in the accounting technology space in 2023 as VP of sales and customer success at MYB, and you joined Dext in May 2024 as a general manager. You’re responsible for sales and growth, financial stewardship, and regional corporate governments.

Tell us about your time with Dext.

Paul Wittich

Yeah, it’s been a.. it’s been just over two years now that I’ve been at Dex. At the point I joined, I’d say Dex was a company that had three core products, and it was heavily aligned around its core OCR tool, and the market when I joined in APAC was very challenging. There was a.. it was a period of transition, but I came in and saw there was a huge opportunity on the table. I guess, as two years has gone by, we’ve evolved a lot as a company, and the integration of those core products and what we call our single automated bookkeeping platform, I would say was probably the biggest transition, the biggest single transition we’ve seen, but as you probably know, Heather, the rate of development, both in terms of the enhancements to the core platform, but as well as all the new offerings that Dexter has brought in, has been astounding. I’m actually genuinely impressed with how fast our teams are advancing and what we offer to our customers and partners, and everything you know has been driven by requests and suggestions that have come from that community themselves. I think the when I look at it, the last six months has been the fastest rate of change right now with AI. You know, Dex, we’ve got a deep history of automation with AI at the core, and as well as the backing and support of our new parent, Iris. I see that we’re perfectly placed to lead this new wave of automation and efficiency that we’re seeing in the industry. So, two years in, I’ve learned a lot. We’ve come through a lot, a lot of evolution in Dext, and also for me, but I’m genuinely very excited about what’s happening at the moment, and that’s where we’re things are going, not just over the coming weeks and months, but even over the coming days, so exciting times ahead,

Heather Smith

Definitely exciting times ahead. And there is a passionate orange team behind you in the Dext world.

What is 2026 looking like?

You’re talking about rolling out a lot of features and functionality.

Heather Smith

Is there anything you can share with us about Dext’s new features?

Paul Wittich

Yeah, I can look, and if I think just to put it in perspective, if I go back to the beginning of 2026 January alone, Dext, we processed globally just over 31 million documents in a month, and from our calculations that cut 2 million hours of admin down to about 200,000 hours for those accountants, bookkeepers, and small businesses that were using the product, so a 90% reduction in processing time that they would have otherwise seen on those documents, so just to put that in perspective, that’s the core of what we’re doing, but everything is changing, and there’s three or four things this year index that are going to make a huge difference, and the things we’re really focusing on, the biggest of those right now is our AI Assist product, which we launched in March this year, and this is pretty cool, it’s I know everything out there at the moment is around AI agents and Dex product learns from each user’s decisions, their preferences, their edits, and what it basically does is it then is surfaces questions up on how you can automate those tasks that you do time and again, so that you make them a lot less repetitive and that also the AI learns from that and is continually evolving to give you more and more suggestions over time. So, rather than being another just another AI tool, this actually works with you index and it adapts to how you work rather than just giving you a fixed rule set. So, we’ve recently launched AI Assist. It is evolving and developing fast. There’s been a massive bars, and I think this is the one thing I would say about Dext in the first half of this year that’s caused a lot of excitement. One thing that’s coming later in the year in this region is payments. We’re currently in a beta, and this has been deployed and is live in the UK, soon to be followed by Canada. This is on Xero, and it will be coming to the Asia Pacific region later this year. So this is all part of the strategy text that we have an end to end accounts payable workflow, so we go all the way from capturing that document through to paying your suppliers and also your employees without leaving Dext, so this is something that we’re currently expecting to be roll out, rolled out in Australia around September, October time frame. Lots of work being done in the background. The beta is underway in this market, and with that also there is a development in, we will be launching spend cards aligned to that, which has been one of the features that’s been most demanded by our accountants and bookkeeping partners in the market, but overall, I think the other thing I would say is, and just, just to put this on the table for the rest of this year, Heather, the vision at Dext is that we have full end to end bookkeeping automation to support our accountants, our bookkeepers, but also our small business clients, and that’s everything from capturing to coding to reconciling through to paying those invoices and to doing payroll as one continuous, basically largely automated workflow. So that is the plan this year, and what I would say is our developers are working constantly in the background, taking all that feedback from our customers and our partners, and that is being translated at a phenomenal rate of pace into enhancements to our products that will lead to that full bookkeeping automation solution, so there is a lot going on this year. It definitely

Heather Smith

sounds like a lot going on, and I do see a lot of people in the forums talking about AI assist, so there is definitely some interest in that, and I guess people need to look out for the webinars that you’re rolling out to educate themselves about that, and as someone who started in this space, and I’ll use the old-fashioned term cloud accounting. Cloud accounting was there, but it was only really when a solution like Dex plugged into it that, as management accountants, we actually had that accurate data, we had the invoices sitting in there, and we’re able to drive accurate cash flows from the data that was sitting within our cloud accounting software. So it’s always been, and I’m sure you, as a man, well, I assume you, as a management accountant, you love that aspect of it, providing such robust, accurate data for people to drive fast, data-informed decisions.

Paul Wittich

Absolutely, and you know that information flexibility, having having that at your fingertips is what’s all important, and one of the things we’ve seen in the last two years, certainly one of my observations has been that clients and small businesses are demanding more accountants and bookkeepers had their, you know, they traditionally they were seen as providing a certain service, but nowadays more and more they’re being relied on to help those small businesses not just succeed, but also in many cases to stay afloat, and the pressure that puts on this industry is significant. But therefore, the more effective the tools, the more automation, the more information that’s available, but also can be interpreted for you, is critical, and that’s where tools like Dex, that’s everything we’re working towards, is to make their lives as easy as efficient as possible, but also to make sure that the information that’s given is as accurate as possible, and therefore making your role around compliance as easy as possible at the same time.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely, and look, I like to think of it as compliance, and beyond compliance, and into that advisory space, and I saw the other day someone say that they, they accidentally noticed the insurance had gone up 47% and mentioned it to the client, and the whole insurance bill was incorrect, and they’d been way overcharged, and they saved them 1000s of dollars, and it was kind of like that is a good thing to be pointing out whether those variances are in place, and bookkeepers are well placed to access the information, but beyond with all the time saving of getting that that data in there,

Paul Wittich

so

Heather Smith

Paul, we just spent time together in Noosa, beautiful Noosa, the bluest skies you can imagine, and we were discussing the product roadmap and the vision for Dex, and one of the things that did come up, come up is that people shared what are features that sophisticated users are not aware of that are indexed, because there is, as we said, as you said before, so many features coming out and people are missing them.

What are they?

Oh, look, I can tell you one that I missed. You changed the name from Dex precision to Dex health, is that right,

Paul Wittich

that Dex data health, data health, data health. Sorry, but you highlight a point here, Heather, and this is it’s one of my frustrations, I would say, is that we probably could do a far better job at communicating all the new features and capabilities that we’re bringing to market, but even more importantly than that is some of the use cases, and it always surprises me when I speak to a bookkeeper and I sit down in their offices and they’ll show me how they’re using our products and it’s not how I expected them to, so some of the features can be incredibly powerful, but in ways you didn’t expect. But I guess I mean, to get to your point, there’s there were some things we discussed in Newsome. There was a phenomenal couple of days, and I loved getting together with the community and listening and finding out what’s really going on, and listening to some of the conversations, and three or four things I think work that I’ve taken away or features that our sophisticated users don’t know about. The first of these, and a product that we launched last year was Dexter Vault, and Vault is, I think, people look at Vault and they think this is it’s like a filing cabinet, it’s a repository for your documents, and everyone, you know they have a repository somewhere else that they’re using right now, but Vault’s a bit more sophisticated than that. And Vault will automatically organise your documents, it can extract any key details from those documents, it flags important dates, and it can also do cross checks for you. So, to give you a simple example, if you have lease documents, so let’s say you’ve got a client that has lease documents, and you get a rental statement that comes through monthly or quarterly. What Vault can do is do an automatic reconciliation cross check, and it will look back to your original lease contract, and it will verify that the amounts are right, the dates are correct, that you’re still in contract. It will cross check the references on those contracts. It’s very, very powerful as a way of not just storing those documents in one place, but also being able to do those validations for you to ensure that everything is correct when it comes through. So, obviously, that’s a feature that can be pretty powerful, but so far, so many people just don’t know that that exists, even some of our more sophisticated regular users. So, I think Vault is one key one. Another feature we launched last year: supplier statements, and being able to reconcile supplier statements. This is something that a lot of people are still not using, so you know, in essence, you upload a supply statement. What Dex will then do, it can reconcile it against documents that are either already indexed and also in the connected accounting software, such as Xero or NYOB. Obviously, this was a huge accounts payable time saver, and it, you know, it flies under the radar with a lot of our, a lot of our partners, and also our end users. Completely supplier rules, this is one as well. We’ve spent quite a bit of time internally looking at how we could, you know, make a better job of communicating on this, because this is something that is still, you know, when I look across our, our partner base, it’s still, it’s still rarely touched, so to speak. And this is where you have rules that trigger, you know, on every document from a specific supplier, so it can do everything from auto for auto coding and also auto publish. What are we finding most users are doing is they set up a handful of these rules early on, but they never really go back to it. The powerful users, though, are the ones that are doing this. They’re setting up those rules, they review them, and they continue to keep changing them and building new ones. And those are the users that are finding they’re getting massive time savings. So, a little bit of work up front to get supplier rules working effectively for you, but over time it can lead to huge time savings and efficiencies for the practice, and then the final one I’ve mentioned, Heather, is, and again, still quite low levels of utilisation, particularly here in the Asia Pacific market, is our practice level insights, and this is for any firms that are on our advanced product, and what practice level insights is, it’s a firm-wide dashboard, and it covers any submission activity. It can also highlight for you inactive clients, it can look at your supplier rules that I mentioned just now, and look at the performance of those rules, but the other thing that practices that are using this are finding it’s hugely valuable for is looking at how time is distributed across your team and your client base, so you can check and use this as a cross check, you can then look at your, your, your billing of those clients, it can tell you where you, your team, and the practice as a whole are spending the time across them, across that the client base, and you don’t have to open up each individual client individually to find that out. Most about, you know, practices, when I speak to them, they didn’t know this exists as a feature, so a whole lot more we’ve got to do to get that out there. But I hope that gives you a flavour, I think, of some of the things that we discussed some of this last week, but they’re four of the key ones that I see that the sophisticated users don’t really know about right now.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely. Look, one of my favourite ones in there, and the supplier rules is to go in and define the currency, which is one of the things that I’d requested for quite some time, but that saves you so much time, because if it comes through with the dollar into your general ledger, you have to change it in there, and then back change it, so that that just that one little thing can save you so much time. And one of the things I’ve been requesting from Dext for years and years and years is an activated RSS feed on the blog, so all of this news can feed into my newsletter, and everyone who subscribes can read about it.

Paul Wittich

It’s a great idea, Heather, and hopefully that’s something we will be able to see later this year. Fingers crossed, but as with everything, and this is just a message I would give Dex, all of our product enhancements and developments come from our accounting, our bookkeeping practices, and from our individual users. So, we have a my one tip to everyone: if you don’t know about user voice, if you go into your Dex portal and you put your ideas into User Voice, our development teams use those ideas and suggestions, and the votes that are against each of those ideas that becomes the basis of all of our developments, so if there’s something that you think is a good idea, I can tell you it will get active on if it gets the support of the community, that’s everything for us.

Heather Smith

Do you think I need to go and ask them to activate their RSS feed?

Paul Wittich

I will take that one personally for you, Heather, because I’ve been

Heather Smith

asking a lot of people, but if you have that power, we will be impressed. Paul, I will

Paul Wittich

definitely put that forward for you.

Heather Smith

So, there has been a rise of AI startups offering OCR and document capture tools.

How is Dext responding to these tiny startups popping up everywhere?

Paul Wittich

Yeah, and look, I think it’s – I actually think it’s great. This market has changed. If we go back two years, this was this was core to everything that Dex did. You’ll see, and what I talked about earlier, Heather, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve expanded, we’ve broadened, we’ve moved more towards this, you know, an AI-based end to end bookkeeping platform, but at the same time, there are some very smart startups coming out there in the market constantly. Some of them are well backed financially, others maybe not so. But this market is growing phenomenally fast. We’re not there to defend our original OCR solution. We’re everything indexed is about moving beyond it, and that’s probably something you’ve seen, and certainly since I’ve started. We’re not about just defending the base, the core of what Dex previously was. It’s about how and what this has done, and these market movements have done, which I think is a massive positive, is it’s helped us and others in this field broaden their horizons and focus their product development to move much more rapidly during this time, and AI has been an enabler of that, so even you know developments like AI assist payments, supplier statements that I’ve talked about this shows that it’s all about building a workflow platform, not just a what was a, I guess, a scan and extract tool. So that’s how Dexter’s been. You’re moving, I think. The other thing I would say, and this is where Dex power is, is we have so much history. We have more than 2 billion transactions that have been through Dext. The machines have learned fast. Our AI is very, very advanced, so therefore, and whilst we’ve always, we’ve been very, very proud of our record of compliance and accuracy indexed. It’s moving beyond that right now. Some of the new providers, though, that coming in, it’s going to take them time to build that, but that probably accelerate, you know, at a faster pace. But what’s all important is we’re here, we keep learning, we have that experience, and we have that background behind us. And the other thing I would say new providers are going to find a real challenge is that to get those deep integrations with the likes of Xero, NYOB, QuickBooks. It’s not going to be easy to replicate that quickly, and whilst AI does make integration simplified, there’s a lot of history there that they’ve got to overcome. So, I don’t see it as a threat as such. And this is something I talk to my team about. We’ve got to look at the opportunity moving forward, and we’ve got to make sure that we keep listening to this community, to our practice partners, and also to our end customers, and making sure that we continue to develop and evolve our solutions to align to what they want to see and what’s going to make their lives ultimately as easy as possible using the latest technology.

Heather Smith

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with us. And I think it’s good for everyone to hear how the ecosystem is evolving, and there’s a lot of shiny, shiny objects out there. So I’d like to take this opportunity to address an historical issue, which I actually think was before your time, but these historical issues stay around within the community, so I think it’s good to take the opportunity to address it. Here, there was rent, there was a point in time where there was random pricing coming out of Dex across everyone, and we were all talking in the forums, going, I’m being charged this, I’m being charged this, I’m being charged this. Can I don’t need you to take, I don’t need you to technically tell us what the pricing is, but can you tell clarify what the Dex pricing philosophy is? Now,

Paul Wittich

yeah, it’s difficult for me, as you say, Heather, to talk to history, and this day I’ve heard a lot of feedback and a lot of commentary about the past. I can tell you where I stand on this and where we stand here. In Dex, we have a single pricing model, and we’re very transparent about that, and the pricing will change based on the volume of licences that you hold, but what we’re not doing is going out there giving random pricing to different people. I think one big change on that is you as a small business owner or as an accountant or a bookkeeper can go on to Dex website and you will see you can plug in your details, and you’ll see localised pricing, so you can see our pricing on there. It’s available, it’s transparent. That’s something that’s really important to us, and you can see that in different markets as well. But that is the base of our pricing model. I don’t want to be doing bits and pieces here, there, and everywhere. This community, they talk, and also they, it’s a big piece, a big thing about this community is about transparency, and it’s about integrity, and we need to understand that, and then I think if there’s some lessons from the past, it is just that we have to listen to this community and respect the way this community operates, and that integrity that they have, and that’s something that feeds through now to our pricing, so it is all published. It’s there when new products come out, or we have new releases. We’re very quick to explain what that means from a pricing perspective. It’s really, really important.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely. So, for our listeners, I have been a long-term user of Dex, I think it was like 2012 that I started using it, and but I am agnostic. I’m sitting here from an agnostic position. I know that was an issue, and it’s good for us to hear that, and I did go and check, so it’s not just Paul telling us there is transparent pricing, I on the website. Sorry, bit of a cough there.

Paul Wittich

Okay,

Heather Smith

there is transparent pricing on the website, which you can go and see, as Paul said. Oh, as it starts, all keeps coming back.

Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners?

Paul Wittich

Look, I think the one thing I would say, Heather, is this is this market is moving. You cannot fail to see it. It’s moving like crazy at the moment, the way things were six months ago to where they are now, but also in the next six months going to be very different again. I would just leave it with this: watch this space, things are very exciting here. It’s heating up. We’re going to be very fast in our developments. We’ll continue to listen to our community, the most important feedback we get, events like we’ve just done in Noosa, that you are one of our guests at, just highlight that we’re going to be doing more and more of that in this market, and that gets translated into changes in our products and our roadmap and new developments, and all I’ll say is there’s some pretty exciting stuff coming in the next 12 months, so watch this space, and hopefully, if I get an opportunity to come back on later in the year, and to talk a bit further about some of that, that will be excellent.

Heather Smith

Excellent, Paul. Well, as you said, things are heating up. I’m going to showcase my Dex candle, which again was probably before your time, as everyone knows, I have an ecosystem swag wall behind me, and there’s always something off that I can pull, pull into an interview, so I haven’t even used that yet, but it’s a very nice can candle, in case you can’t work out what that is, Paul. So, thank you, Paul, for joining me on the Accounting Apps podcast, and I encourage everyone to go and check out Dext, and see what’s new happening in there, and check into your own, your own version, if you are using Dex, and I encourage you to keep up to date with modern accounting technology landscape. Subscribing to this podcast, just click subscribe right now, subscribe to the newsletter and join the conversations happening in the Accounting Apps Mastermind Group. I’m your host, Heather Smith, and I’m pretty easy to find on all social media platforms, and I look forward to connecting with you.