Distil vs typing it in
What an hour of keying costs, written out.
The hours below are arithmetic from an estimate of two minutes a document, not a measurement. Put your own rate against them.
The two price shapes
Distil Solo
The practice entry plan. Every feature is on every tier.
£35a month, per practice
- 250 invoice documents a month
- 100 statement pages a month
- No per-client fee, and no minimum licence count
- Unlimited users
- MTD VAT and MTD for Income Tax filing to HMRC
- Every document is stored in UK data centres, encrypted at rest, and kept for seven years from upload, which covers the six-year HMRC rule.
14-day free trial. Cancel inside it and you pay nothing. No VAT added at checkout.
manual entry
Keying documents by hand
Your timean hour, every month
- Open the document, find the supplier, key the date and the amounts
- Work out the VAT and choose the nominal code
- Save it, attach the original, and start the next one
- Repeat for every document, every month
No subscription. The cost is the hours.
An estimate, not a measurement.
The same month, both ways
Two minutes a document is an estimate, not a measurement, and the hours are arithmetic from it. Put your own rate against the hours and compare that with the plan price beside them. The point is not that the estimate is exact, it is that the hours do not fall as volume rises, and the plan price does not rise with them.
| Volume | Typed by hand | Distil |
|---|---|---|
| 100 documentsat two minutes each, about 3 hours | 3 hours | £35Solo |
| 500 documentsat two minutes each, about 17 hours | 17 hours | £95Starter |
| 1,000 documentsat two minutes each, about 33 hours | 33 hours | £215Professional |
Where the two differ.
“Not part of it” means the step is not part of keying documents in by hand. It describes a process, not a product. Check with your own process for what is current.
| Capability | Distil | Typed by hand |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice and receipt extraction | Included | Read and keyed by a person |
| Bank statement extraction | Included | Read and keyed by a person |
| Bank reconciliation | Auto-match, at practice scale | Matched by hand |
| Categorisation that learns per client | Two-tier supplier rules | A person remembers, or writes a rule |
| Publishing to Xero and QuickBooks | Included | Typed in directly |
| Its own general ledger and seal | Included | Not part of it |
| MTD VAT filing to HMRC | Included | Not part of it |
| MTD for Income Tax | Yes | Not part of it |
| P&L, cash flow and balance sheet | Included | In whatever package holds the books |
| Sales invoicing | Included | In whatever package holds the books |
| Mileage at HMRC rates | Included | Not part of it |
| Client upload links, no client account | Included | Not part of it |
| Seven-year document storage (covers HMRC six-year rule) | Included | Not part of it |
What manual entry does well.
A comparison that only lists one side is not a comparison. These are real reasons to choose the other one.
A person reads the awkward ones
A handwritten note, a foreign supplier, a document that is really three documents. Distil flags those for review rather than guessing, which is the same judgement arriving in a shorter queue.
Nothing new to learn
The process already works and nobody has to be trained. Adopting Distil means a first month of checking its coding while the supplier rules fill in.
Which one to pick.
Distil
Choose Distil when the keying is the constraint. Documents arrive from clients on a link, get read and categorised, and the corrections teach the rules, so the queue gets shorter rather than staying the same size every month.
Manual entry
Keying by hand stays reasonable at low volume, where the time cost is small and the software is one more thing to run.
Try it against your own month.
A 14-day free trial, and cancelling inside it costs nothing. Pick the plan whose allowance covers the documents your practice already puts through.
Comparing something else?
Distil’s prices and allowances on this page are read live from its own plan configuration, so they are whatever Distil currently charges. Manual entry figures are arithmetic from an estimate of two minutes a document, not measurements and not an industry average; put your own hourly rate against the hours.