Orla Fennelly, finance controller at a Dublin-based professional services firm, spent three years watching her team manually key expense data from scanned PDFs into their accounting system. The volume was manageable until headcount grew past 120 employees.
Rather than replacing their ERP, the team evaluated three OCR-based capture tools: Dext, AutoEntry, and Rydoo. The decision came down to how each handled Irish VAT codes and multi-currency submissions, not feature lists.
What the evaluation process revealed
Dext handled VAT categorisation with the least manual correction, averaging fewer than four errors per 200 receipts in a controlled two-week pilot. AutoEntry was faster on upload speed but required more post-processing corrections on non-euro currencies.
Approval routing was the harder problem
Receipt capture was straightforward to automate. Routing approvals through department heads with variable signing limits proved more complex. The team mapped existing approval chains before configuring any workflow tool, which saved significant reconfiguration time later.
- Documented all existing approval thresholds before configuration
- Ran a parallel process for six weeks before full cutover
- Kept a manual fallback for expenses above a defined threshold
The outcome was not a dramatic transformation. Processing time per expense report dropped from roughly 18 minutes to under 6 minutes. More importantly, month-end close moved two days earlier because the data was cleaner on arrival.