Dext announced itself to the world with a global webinar on Tuesday (23 Feb) featuring world wide web founder Tim Berners-Lee, accountancy iconoclast Ron Baker, Futrli founder Hannah Dawson and half a dozen international accounting practitioners.
Welcoming delegates in an orange Dext T-shirt, chief executive officer Adrian Blair celebrated accountants as “the unsung heroes of the pandemic” and set the scene for the big unveiling.
“Dext is the new name for our company,” he announced. “We’re inviting you to be part of the next generation, that we’re calling the Dext generation.”
The new brand fuses “dexterity with next”, as in taking the profession to the next level, he continued.
“Dext exists to make accountants more productive, profitable and powerful. Together we’re going to give you the tools to get more done, make more money and have more impact. We’re here to partner you to take your practice to the next level.”
Product roadmap
The corporate makeover was accompanied by product enhancements and rebranding, plus hints of things to come as the developer strives to carve out a niche as a practice automation partner rather than just another data capture app.
Though it’s all change at Dext, the central piece of the portfolio remains Dext Prepare with Receipt Bank – the data extraction tool that now boasts 1m worldwide users. “Don’t worry, Receipt Bank is still there,” said Blair. “It’s the same product you know and love. The @receiptbank.me email address is still there and you’ll find Dext Prepare remains the ultimate bookkeeping solution.”
To celebrate its new look, Prepare has undergone some user interface changes and will now integrate with Sage 50cloud and QuickBooks Online in the UK and Canada, a UI change. Chief product officer Spiros Theodossiou, who joined the company last year, highlighted further improvements in the way it handles bank statements and bank feeds, customer invoices and client on-boarding.
Xavier Analytics, the data quality management app acquired last year, has been renamed Dext Precision with Xavier. As well as giving insights into discrepancies in accounting data and the health of the business, Precision with Xavier also provides “incredibly accurate calls to action – talking points to have conversations with clients about how they can improve their businesses,” Theodossiou said.
“This is how we’re evolving our product strategy to help you solve your clients’ problems.”
The look and feel of the Precision app also gained a Dext look and feel and features a revamped client dashboard. The developer also announced an integration with QuickBooks Online to be able to offer the company data quality and health score to a wider base of cloud accounting users.
Next up will be an app called Dext Pay, which is currently in the beta testing phase. According to the product director, when the full version is released in the next few months, Dext Pay will allow users to check and manage payments within the central dashboard.
Two further apps, teasingly shown as “Dext X” and “Dext Y” on the presentation slides, will follow during 2021 as the company digs more deeply into accounting and bookkeeping workflows. Some of these developments will be previewed at an online product roadmap session on 8 April, Theodossiou added.
Why Dext?
As the Dext executives were explaining the rationale for their rebrand during the online session, AccountingWEB members started to speculate what it was all about in an Any Answers thread.
The pressure on data capture apps like Receipt Bank from the big accounting platforms appropriating their core functionality has been a constant theme in the marketplace since Xero acquired Hubdoc and Sage snapped up AutoEntry a couple of years ago.
As Blair made clear to AccountingWEB last year after the Xavier acquisition, Receipt Bank was starting to chart a new course where it would build “the essential stack for accountants who are serious about advisory work”.
Against that backdrop, “receipts” doesn’t carry the same power for the way Blair and his colleagues want to grow the brand, so the underlying logic is pretty clear.
Whether it will cut through and communicate their “next generation” values effectively is another matter, judging from how AccountingWEB members responded to the new name.
Announcing himself as a fan of the “what it says on the tin” approach to branding, Stepurhan argued, “Receipt Bank was pretty close to that. Dext sounds like a pretentious video game.”