Businesses and their bookkeepers use Datamolino as the bookkeeping automation platform to effectively process their accounts payable without being up-sold on unnecessary bells and whistles.
With plenty of competing solutions in the Bills & Expenses category of the Xero App Store, it can be difficult to decide which one is right for you. If you’re using Xero or QuickBooks Online and weighing up tools like Dext Prepare, AutoEntry or Hubdoc, here are seven reasons businesses and accounting practices pick Datamolino instead.
1. Full line item extraction, not just header data
Datamolino captures line item details from your invoices, including description, quantity, unit price and tax — and pushes those individual lines straight into Xero or QuickBooks as a coded bill.
This matters more than it sounds. Header-only capture is fine if every invoice is one cost on one ledger account. But if you split costs across tracking categories, allocate billable expenses back to clients, or need item-level detail for inventory or job costing, header data alone forces you to retype every line by hand.
“Dext does not handle line item exports — that’s exactly why we moved to Datamolino.”
— Peter Walsh, Facilities Management (UK, ~1,500 invoices/week)
Line items have been a Datamolino feature for the past 10 years. Hubdoc captures header data only. Dext extracts line items as part of its top tier but at higher per-client cost. With Datamolino, line items are part of the standard plan structure and there’s no per-client fee on top.
2. Volume-based pricing instead of per-client pricing
Datamolino charges for the documents you process — not for each client folder you set up. You can add unlimited clients, unlimited folders and unlimited users on every plan. The bill is based on document volume.
For accounting practices with lots of small clients, this changes the maths. Dext Prepare’s pricing model charges per client, which gets expensive fast when you have 50 or 100 small clients each processing a handful of invoices a month.
“Roughly £8 per client [with Datamolino vs Dext’s per-client pricing].”
— Natasza Roots, Accounting Practice (UK, 71 clients)
You only pay for what you actually use. Quiet month, smaller bill. See the full breakdown on the accounting firm pricing page or the business pricing page.
3. Multi-layered capture with a human quality check
A lot of new entrants market themselves on raw AI accuracy numbers. The honest answer is that purely AI-driven capture works well on suppliers it has seen many times before, and gets brittle on weird formats, low-quality scans, or new suppliers.
Datamolino uses a multi-layered capture process: rule-based extraction, template recognition for repeat suppliers, and a human in the loop where automation falls short. The aim is consistent quality on real-world documents — not benchmark numbers on clean PDFs.
There are companies that advertise accuracy of over 99%, the highest in the market. Our advice: test any solution with your own documents before you commit. The trial is 14 days, no credit card required.
4. Multiple folders for one organisation, each with its own rules
Most competing tools tie one client to one set of automation rules. Datamolino lets you create unlimited folders under the same organisation, each with distinct users, default ledger accounts, tracking categories, supplier rules and document email addresses.
This is useful if you run a business with multiple branches, departments or projects, or if you’re an accountant managing a client with several entities. Documents from the warehouse don’t mix with documents from head office. Site managers see only their own folder. Coding rules can be tuned per location without affecting anyone else.
No more mixing of everything in one bucket. How folders work in Datamolino.
5. Automatic batch splitting for stacks of paper invoices
Most invoices arrive as PDFs by email. But there’s still a long tail of paper bills — a stack at the end of the month, a folder of receipts handed over at year end. Datamolino’s auto-split takes a multi-page scan and breaks it into individual transactions, even if you mix multi-page invoices with single-page receipts in the same scan.
You don’t insert separator pages. You don’t pre-sort. Drop everything into the document feeder, send the scan to your Datamolino folder email address, and the system does the rest. It can handle scans of up to 50 pages.
6. Duplicate detection on file and data level
Datamolino checks for duplicates twice. On upload, it flags exact file matches so you don’t accidentally process the same PDF twice. After processing, it compares supplier name and invoice number across your folder, so a digital invoice and a scanned paper copy of the same bill get caught even though the files look different.
You can tighten this further by adding total amount or invoice date to the match criteria. Useful when suppliers re-issue invoices with the same number, or when receipts have generic numbering you don’t want to over-match on.
7. Higher Xero App Store rating than Dext, AutoEntry or Hubdoc
User reviews are not the only thing to look at, but they’re a useful sense check. Among the larger apps in the Xero App Store Bills & Expenses category, here’s where the ratings sit:
- Datamolino — 4.9 stars (405 reviews)
- ApprovalMax — 4.9 stars
- Dext Prepare — 4.8 stars
- AutoEntry — 4.7 stars
- Hubdoc — 3.5 stars
The full breakdown of pricing and feature differences is in our 2025 comparison post, and we have dedicated alternative pages for Dext Prepare, AutoEntry and Hubdoc. For a side-by-side, see AutoEntry vs Hubdoc vs Dext vs Datamolino.
Frequently asked questions
How does Datamolino compare to Dext?
The main differences are pricing model and line item handling. Dext uses per-client pricing, which suits practices with high-volume clients. Datamolino uses volume-based pricing — you pay per document and add unlimited clients, users and folders. Both extract data from bills and receipts, but Datamolino includes line item extraction as part of its standard plan structure and supports multi-folder setups for one organisation.
Is Datamolino cheaper than Dext for accounting practices?
For practices with lots of smaller clients, usually yes. Per-client pricing scales with the number of clients regardless of how much each one processes. Volume-based pricing scales with actual usage. One UK practice we work with reported costs of around £8 per client on Datamolino vs significantly more on Dext’s per-client model. It depends on your client mix — if you have a small number of high-volume clients, the gap narrows.
Does Datamolino extract line items?
Yes. Datamolino captures line item description, quantity, unit price and tax from invoices where the data is available, and exports those lines directly into Xero, QuickBooks Online or FreeAgent. Line items have been a core feature for over 10 years. You can also code lines in bulk, set keyword rules, or use the Bill Split feature to allocate a single total across multiple ledger accounts or tracking categories.
What accounting software does Datamolino work with?
Datamolino integrates directly with Xero, QuickBooks Online and FreeAgent. It also exports to Acumatica and integrates with ApprovalMax for approval workflows. For other systems, you can export captured data to CSV or Excel.
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