Dext alternative UAE: capture and ledger in one with HelloBooks

You ask in plain English, the AI does the bookkeeping work, and you or your accountant approve the result.

• You ask: “Here are 85 receipts from the Abu Dhabi site team. Post them and flag anything odd.”
• The AI agent: The agent reads each receipt in Arabic or English, posts it to the right expense account with VAT recorded, links the image, and flags duplicates, missing TRNs and totals that do not add up.
• You review: The project accountant clears the flagged receipts and approves the batch, so the claims reach the ledger and the input VAT is ready for the return.

Dext’s product page describes turning invoices, receipts and bank statements into structured data, fetching invoices from over 1,200 supplier portals, splitting line items, matching documents to bank transactions and publishing to accounting software, with connections to more than 36 accounting platforms. It is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses and at accountants and bookkeepers.

Dext’s blog describes bank statement extraction that turns uploaded statements into a CSV for import into packages such as Xero, Sage and QuickBooks. Its help centre explains that a practice can add its logo, which then appears in the mobile app for clients it manages. Dext does not present itself as a ledger: the accounting system remains the books of record.

In HelloBooks there is no publish step between two products. A bill photographed on a phone becomes a posted entry once the agent has read it and you have approved it, with the UAE VAT treatment on each line and the document attached. Bank statements uploaded as PDF, CSV or Excel are matched against the same entries.

For UAE firms, Arabic matters. Many suppliers issue bilingual invoices, and the HelloBooks agent reads Arabic and English text, picks out the supplier TRN and checks the VAT amount. Example: a Dubai fit-out contractor receiving 300 supplier invoices a month, many in Arabic, gets them posted and coded, with only mismatched totals left for review.

Accounting firms can put the whole product under their own brand with the HelloBooks White-Label Licence, which goes further than adding a logo to a capture app. Firms can also have custom AI categorisation rules set up per client by booking at /book-a-demo.

If your clients already run Xero, QuickBooks or another ledger and you are not changing that, Dext adds capture without a migration, and its supplier-portal fetching is something HelloBooks does not offer. Many firms use it exactly that way.

If you are choosing the ledger too, or want one product for capture, posting, reconciliation and the VAT 201 draft, HelloBooks removes a tool and a sync step.