Dext bundles are far cheaper than buying direct, but most firms never decide who benefits. Pick a model, fill your slots and stop the leaks.
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Playbook when you buy Dext in bulk
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Dext sells bundles to accounting firms at a price well below what a client pays direct. A client buying Dext on its own pays $42 a month ex GST in Australia. One firm on a 65 client pack paid $1,200 a month, about $18.46 a client. Depending on volume, firms often get 50% off retail, and sometimes more. What most firms don't have is a process for what happens next. Which clients go on the bundle? Who pays? Who notices when the slots stop being used?
Why are you buying Dext in bulk?
Most firms buy Dext because it makes their own bookkeeping faster. The clients don't need to know. They never see a Dext invoice, and the firm absorbs the cost as part of running the practice. This is the most common reason, and a good one.
Some firms use the bundle as an incentive. A client who already pays Dext direct can move onto the firm's account for about half the price, whatever the volume. The client saves money, the firm gets another client on a tool it already uses, and the bundle fills up.
A few firms resell Dext at the retail price and keep the difference. It works, but most firms are hesitant to on-charge Dext at all.
Any of these is fine. Not deciding is the problem, because the slots still get used and somebody still pays for them.
How does Dext bulk pricing work?
A bulk Dext plan has a few parts. The practice plan covers a set number of clients, or an unlimited number on Enterprise. Add-ons sit on top: Data Health is sold in blocks of five clients, and line item, supplier statement and bank statement extraction are sold as bundles of documents or sheets. Go over a bundle and Dext bills overage per item.
You pay for the plan whether or not every slot is in use. That is why Dext discounts bundles so heavily: it wants firms to buy more than they need. The discount is permanent, and plans are billed either monthly or annual paid monthly, with better pricing on annual.
Discounts show up as separate negative lines under each item on your invoice, and they differ from firm to firm. One firm we have seen gets 40% off the platform and 100% off the add-ons. Another has no discount lines at all. Check your own invoice before you pick a model, because what you pay per client decides how much room you have.
Where does the bulk discount leak?
Money leaks out of a Dext bundle in four places:
- Slots nobody uses. The firm buys a pack bigger than it needs and pays for the empty slots every month. On a 65 client pack at $1,200 a month, 45 clients means $26.67 a client, not $18.46.
- Bundles bigger than the usage. One firm paid for a 500 document Line Item bundle and used 76 documents. It paid for 50 supplier statements and used 11. It pays for Data Health blocks covering 100 clients, with the module on for 8.
- Overage that never gets discounted. On one invoice every Data Health block was discounted to $0, and the supplier statement overage was still billed at the full $0.70 each. Small amounts, but they repeat every month.
- The client leaves and the slot stays. Dext keeps billing the plan until someone removes the client or shrinks the pack, and nobody notices until someone reads the invoice line by line. In one usage export, 10 of 34 clients had no activity in the month. Some of them may have left or never started.
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