Every café and restaurant owner knows the feeling. It's Sunday evening, you've got a stack of supplier invoices from the week, and you're sat there manually typing line items into a spreadsheet or your accounting software. Butter, 4 x 250g, £6.80. Flour, 16kg, £12.40. Milk, 12 x 2L, £15.60. Over and over.

This is time you could spend on your menu, your team, or honestly just having an evening off.

Invoice processing software takes those paper and PDF invoices and extracts the data automatically - line items, quantities, prices, VAT. The good ones connect to your accounting software and your recipe costs. The best ones learn your suppliers' formats and get faster over time.

Here's what's available for UK hospitality businesses in 2026, and what each option actually costs.

What to Look For

Not all invoice processing is created equal. Before you compare tools, know what actually matters:

Accuracy on real invoices. Demo invoices always work. What matters is whether the system handles your local butcher's handwritten delivery note or the PDF your veg supplier emails at midnight.
Speed of processing. Does it take seconds, minutes, or does someone review every invoice manually before the data lands?
Connection to your costs. Extracting invoice data is useful. Automatically updating your ingredient prices across every recipe that uses them - that's where the real value is. (If you're not sure what your current recipe costs look like, our free Recipe Costing Calculator is a good place to start.)
Accounting integration. If the data doesn't flow into Xero, Sage, or QuickBooks without you re-keying it, you've just moved the bottleneck.
What it costs you vs what it saves you. A typical independent café or restaurant processes 30-60 invoices per month. At 10-15 minutes each manually, that's 5-15 hours. What's your time worth?

1. Manual Entry (The Baseline)

Cost: Your time Accuracy: Depends how tired you are

Let's be honest about what most independent operators are doing today. Invoices arrive by email, by hand on delivery, or stuffed in a bag with the order. You manually enter them into a spreadsheet, your accounting software, or both.

It works. People have run successful cafés and restaurants this way for decades. But it has real costs:

10-15 minutes per invoice for careful entry. 40 invoices a month is 7-10 hours.
Error rate of 2-5% on manual data entry. That doesn't sound like much until a decimal point error means you think butter costs £0.68 instead of £6.80.
No automatic connection to recipe costs. Your prices changed three weeks ago and your margin calculations still show January's numbers.
VAT mistakes. Mis-coding VAT on supplier invoices is one of the most common bookkeeping errors for small hospitality businesses.

2. Dext (formerly Receipt Bank)

Cost: From £30/month (Solo plan) What it does: General expense and invoice capture Website: dext.com

Dext is the tool most accountants recommend. It's solid for general expense capture - photograph a receipt, it extracts the data, it pushes to your accounting software. Many UK restaurants already use it for expense management.

What's good:

Broad accounting integrations (Xero, Sage, QuickBooks)
Your accountant probably already knows it
Good at extracting totals, dates, supplier names
Mobile app for photographing receipts on the go

What to consider:

Not built for food businesses. Dext captures invoice totals and basic line items, but it doesn't understand ingredients. It won't know that "6 x 2L Full Fat" is milk, or connect that price to your recipe costs.
No recipe cost updates. The data goes to your accounting software, not your kitchen. Your food costs and Dext live in completely separate worlds.
Line-item extraction is inconsistent. It's optimised for total amounts, not for the 15-30 individual line items on a typical food supplier invoice.
No price tracking. If your cheese supplier increases prices by 8%, Dext won't flag it.

Best for: General bookkeeping and expense capture. If your accountant wants it for the accounting side and you use something else for food cost management, that's a reasonable setup.

3. Jelly

Cost: £129/month per location (invoice processing is bundled with everything else) What it does: Invoice scanning + recipe costing + POS integration Website: getjelly.co.uk

Jelly's invoice processing is part of their all-in-one kitchen management platform. You email invoices to a dedicated address or photograph them, and their "human-AI" system extracts the line items.

What's good:

Invoices feed directly into recipe costs - prices update automatically
Price alerts flag supplier changes
Decent accuracy on standard PDF invoices
Connects to Xero for accounting

What to consider:

"Human-AI" means manual review. There's a human step in the processing loop. This is good for accuracy but means it's not instant.
£129/month for invoice processing alone is steep if that's your primary need. You're paying for recipe costing, stock counting, supplier ordering, and everything else whether you use it or not.
Xero only. No Sage, no QuickBooks.
No pattern learning. The system doesn't progressively learn your specific suppliers' formats to speed up future processing.

Best for: Operators who want invoice processing bundled with recipe costing and menu engineering, and are already committed to Jelly's full platform.

4. Lightyear

Cost: From £99/month What it does: Accounts payable automation Website: lightyear.cloud

Lightyear is a proper accounts payable platform - not hospitality-specific, but popular with UK businesses that process high volumes of invoices. It focuses on the approval workflow side: extracting data, routing invoices for approval, and pushing to accounting software.

What's good:

Strong OCR accuracy on structured PDF invoices
Good approval workflows for multi-site operations
Integrates with Xero and other accounting platforms
Handles purchase order matching

What to consider:

Not built for food businesses. Like Dext, it doesn't connect invoice data to your recipes or food costs.
£99/month starting price is a lot if you're just trying to avoid manual data entry on 40 invoices.
Overkill for most independents. The approval workflow features are designed for businesses with finance teams, not a café owner processing invoices on Sunday night.

Best for: Multi-site operations with dedicated finance staff who need formal approval workflows.

5. Brikly

Cost: From £39/month (invoice processing is part of CostingBrik) What it does: AI invoice processing with pattern learning, connected to recipe costing Website: brik.ly

I built Brikly because I was spending 8-10 hours a month typing invoices into spreadsheets, then another few hours updating recipe costs. The two jobs should be the same job.

Brikly's invoice processing works like this: forward your supplier invoices to your dedicated email address. The AI extracts every line item - ingredient, quantity, unit, price, VAT. It matches each item to ingredients in your system using fuzzy matching (so "Lurpak Slty 250g" and "Lurpak Salted Butter 250g" are recognised as the same thing). Your recipe costs update automatically.

What's good:

Pattern learning. The AI learns each supplier's invoice format. The first invoice takes a bit longer. The twentieth is near-instant.
Ingredient matching with canonical grouping. Three suppliers calling the same ingredient slightly different names? Brikly's fuzzy matching recognises them and keeps one accurate price.
Direct recipe cost updates. Invoice data doesn't just sit in a ledger - it flows through to every recipe that uses those ingredients.
Xero, Sage, and QuickBooks. Your accounting data goes where it needs to go, regardless of which platform you're on.
From £39/month. You're not paying for supplier ordering, stock counting, or features you don't need.
VAT extraction. Line-level VAT is captured and coded correctly, reducing bookkeeping errors.

What to consider:

Newer to market than Dext or Jelly. If you want a tool that's been processing millions of invoices for years, the established players have a longer track record.
Best results come after the learning period. The pattern learning system improves with volume. If you only process 5 invoices a month, the learning curve is slower.

Best for: Independent restaurants, cafés, and pubs who want invoice processing that directly feeds their food cost management.

Quick Comparison

	Manual	Dext	Jelly	Lightyear	Brikly
Monthly cost	Free	From £30	£129	From £99	From £39
Line-item extraction	You	Basic	Good	Good	Good
Pattern learning	N/A	No	No	No	Yes
Updates recipe costs	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Ingredient matching	No	No	Basic	No	Fuzzy + canonical
Price alerts	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Xero	N/A	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sage	N/A	Yes	No	No	Yes
QuickBooks	N/A	Yes	No	No	Yes
Hospitality-specific	N/A	No	Yes	No	Yes

The Bottom Line

If you just need invoices captured for bookkeeping, Dext does the job and your accountant will thank you.

If you want invoice processing that actually makes a difference to your food costs - that tells you when prices change, updates your recipes automatically, and doesn't cost more than the problem it's solving - that's a smaller field.

For an independent café or restaurant doing 30-60 invoices a month, the maths is simple. If a tool saves you 8 hours a month and catches one supplier price increase you would have missed, it's paid for itself before the first month is up.

The question isn't whether to stop typing invoices manually. It's how long you're willing to keep doing it. If you want to start with something lighter, our free tools let you explore recipe costing and menu profitability without signing up for anything.

Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafés in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent café owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.