Most bookkeepers I've talked to pay somewhere between $30 and $50 a month to extract data from PDF invoices. They use the tool maybe six or eight times a month. That works out to roughly $5 per extraction, and at the end you get a spreadsheet.
When I started doing the books for my own two companies, this bothered me. Not the cost exactly — $40 a month isn't a lot. It was the shape of the deal. I'm paying a recurring fee for software I open twice a week, which uploads my invoices to someone else's cloud, which could change its pricing any Tuesday, and which I'm locked into until I manually export everything and leave. That's a strange relationship with a tool.
So I started looking at what else exists. This post is the result of that research, then about eighteen months of building my own answer, plus ongoing conversations with other bookkeepers who've made different choices. I've tried to be fair to every option — especially the ones I don't sell.
Here's the short version, and then the details:
Quick summary
Dext and Hubdoc are the best full-feature options if you need automatic sync to QuickBooks or Xero. Receipt Bank is Dext now. Bill.com is overkill for most solo practices but genuinely good for AP-heavy workflows. If you just need to get invoice data into a spreadsheet without the subscription, JuSenseSheet (my tool) is probably what I'd pick. If you're fine spending 20 minutes manually, Excel alone still works.
Option 1 · Dext
Probably the most recognised name in this category. Used to be Receipt Bank, rebranded in 2021 after the merger with Xavier. It does exactly what it says on the tin: you email or upload invoices, it extracts the data, syncs to QuickBooks or Xero, you approve the transactions.
Pricing as of writing: starts around $26/month for the cheapest solo plan, typically $40-50/month for practices. Per user, per month. Forever.
Where Dext genuinely wins: the QuickBooks and Xero integration is the best in this category. If your workflow is "client emails invoice → tool extracts → data appears in the accounting system without me touching it," Dext does that better than anything I've used. For accountants managing 20+ client books where time saved compounds, that integration alone justifies the price.
Where it loses: pricing compounds in the wrong direction. At 5 years of use, you've spent $2,400-3,000 per user. If you stop subscribing, you lose the web access — your historical data is still technically recoverable via export, but practically, most bookkeepers I know don't bother and just start over somewhere else. Also: your invoices live on Dext's servers. For some client categories that's a non-issue. For others (regulated industries, firms handling personal data, anyone post-GDPR-audit) it's a conversation you'd rather not have.
Option 2 · Hubdoc (bundled with Xero)
Hubdoc was acquired by Xero in 2018 and is now included "free" with certain Xero subscriptions. The quotes are deliberate — you're paying for it, it's just rolled into your Xero bill.
Functionally very similar to Dext. Same upload-extract-sync loop. Slightly less polished interface, slightly weaker OCR accuracy on tricky formats in my testing, but the free-with-Xero bundling means most Xero-native practices default to it without shopping around.
Where Hubdoc wins: if you're already paying for Xero, using Hubdoc adds zero marginal cost. It's the path of least resistance, which counts for a lot.
Where it loses: the extraction quality is middle-of-the-pack. I've watched it misread totals on invoices that Dext got right, and neither deal well with multi-line tax breakdowns. Also, if you ever leave Xero, you lose Hubdoc. The "free" framing hides a lock-in cost.
Option 3 · Receipt Bank (technically Dext now)
Including this one mostly because the search term still has volume. If you're Googling "Receipt Bank alternative" in 2026, you're probably looking at Dext's product under a different name you remember from years ago. Dext kept the Receipt Bank customer base; the product is Dext.
If you're on an old Receipt Bank contract at grandfathered pricing, you might still be getting a better deal than the current Dext tiers. Most of those contracts have migrated over by now.
Option 4 · Bill.com
Different animal. Bill.com is primarily an accounts-payable automation platform — extract invoices, route for approval, schedule payments, sync to accounting system. The OCR is one component of a much bigger workflow.
Pricing starts around $45-79/month per user, and that's before you add payment processing fees.
Where Bill.com wins: if your actual workflow is "receive vendor bills, get approvals from multiple people, pay vendors, reconcile," Bill.com is built for exactly that end-to-end. For a growing SMB with an AP clerk and a controller, this pays for itself by replacing three separate tools.
Where it loses: if you just want invoice data extracted, Bill.com is massively over-scoped. You're paying for approval workflows, payment processing, and vendor portals that a solo bookkeeper with ten small clients doesn't need. Like hiring an accountant to do arithmetic.
Option 5 · JuSenseSheet (my tool, being honest)
I built JuSenseSheet to do one specific thing: take a PDF invoice, give you clean extracted data, and get out of the way. It runs as a Progressive Web App entirely in your browser. Your invoices aren't uploaded anywhere — the extraction happens on your device using PDF.js and a custom layout parser. Storage is AES-256 encrypted IndexedDB, local to your machine.
Pricing: free for up to 50 invoices a month with no time limit. $39 one-time for unlimited, lifetime license, every device you install it on.
Where it wins: price, privacy, and longevity. You pay once, it works forever. Multi-currency auto-detection (USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, INR) and a 6-language interface (English, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese) come standard — not upsells. Note: extraction works on text-based PDFs only; image-based or scanned PDFs aren't supported in this version (OCR is on the roadmap). Because the app never phones home, your license keeps working even if JupiterSense closes tomorrow.
Where it loses: there's no automatic sync to QuickBooks or Xero. You export CSV or Excel and import it manually. For a solo bookkeeper running a few dozen invoices a month per client, manual import adds less than a minute per batch. For a practice pushing thousands of transactions daily, this is a dealbreaker and you should go with Dext or Bill.com. There's also no team collaboration, no approval workflows, no phone receipt scanning (yet), and no bank feed reconciliation. It's deliberately scoped smaller than the full-feature tools.
I'll admit: the fact that I'm recommending my own tool in a "compare the alternatives" post looks self-serving, and partly it is. But I'm trying to be accurate about who each tool is right for, including the cases where JuSenseSheet is wrong.
The honest comparison matrix
| Dext | Hubdoc | Bill.com | JuSenseSheet | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Subscription | Bundled with Xero | Subscription | One-time |
| Starting cost | ~$26/mo | Included | ~$45/mo | $39 once |
| 5-yr total | ~$1,500-3,000 | Xero cost | ~$2,700+ | $39 |
| Auto-sync to QBO/Xero | Yes ✓ | Yes ✓ | Yes ✓ | No (manual CSV) |
| Approval workflows | Limited | Limited | Yes ✓ | No |
| Data stays local | No (their cloud) | No (their cloud) | No (their cloud) | Yes ✓ |
| Works offline | No | No | No | Yes ✓ |
| Multi-currency / language | Yes | Limited | Limited | Yes (6 each) |
| Bank feed reconciliation | No | No | Yes ✓ | No |
| Phone receipt scanning | Yes ✓ | Yes ✓ | Yes ✓ | Not yet |
Which one is right for you
After all of that, the answer comes down to what your workflow actually looks like, not which tool has the shiniest landing page.
Go with Dext if: you run a practice with 10+ client books, automatic QBO/Xero sync is the critical path, and the $40/month per user fits your client billing. Dext is genuinely the best pick for this scenario.
Stay with Hubdoc if: you're deep in the Xero ecosystem, don't process complex invoice formats often, and the bundled-for-free framing works for you. Inertia is a legitimate reason to pick software.
Go with Bill.com if: your workflow is end-to-end AP automation with approval routing, not just data extraction. Everything below that use-case is overkill.
Go with JuSenseSheet if: you're a solo bookkeeper, very small practice, or SMB owner doing your own books; you don't need automatic sync; and paying $40/month forever for something you use occasionally doesn't make sense to you. Also if you have client data that genuinely shouldn't be uploaded to a third-party cloud — which is more categories than most vendors admit.
Skip all of these and type invoices manually if: you process fewer than three invoices a month. Seriously. Any of these tools has a setup cost that won't pay off at that volume.
One last thing
The subscription-SaaS economy trained all of us to assume that software is a monthly charge, forever. For tools that genuinely run on someone else's infrastructure and need ongoing maintenance, that model makes sense. For tools that run entirely on your own device and just do OCR on a file you dragged in, it's much less obvious why the subscription exists.
None of these tools are bad. They solve real problems. The question I'd invite you to sit with is whether the shape of each deal — recurring versus one-time, cloud versus local, account-required versus anonymous — matches the shape of what you actually use the tool for. For most solo bookkeepers I talk to, the answer has been quietly no for a while, but there hasn't been a good one-time option. That's what I was trying to fix.
Try whichever one seems like the closest fit. If you go with JuSenseSheet, the free tier covers 50 invoices a month indefinitely — no card, no signup. If you end up somewhere else, that's fine too. I just wanted there to be a real choice.