How to merge documents in Dext

Merging suits paperwork that belongs to one transaction but reached Dext as separate items. Dext's own examples are a receipt uploaded in several parts, an invoice sent in apart from its supporting document, the same document submitted more than once, and several pages that together make up one transaction. Open each item first and confirm they really should become one.

Every item you select has to be in the same inbox. If one of them is in Costs and should be in Sales, or the other way round, merging isn't the fix: Dext points to its Actions and Move to menus for that instead.

Look at who owns each item. When the items belong to different users, the merged result goes to whoever uploaded first, and the other users may no longer be able to see it.

In Costs, Dext's duplicate detection may already have dealt with a second copy of a purchase. Once a new Cost item's data has been extracted, Dext compares it with the Cost items already processed in the account. Depending on the mode an Admin has chosen, it deletes a suspected duplicate at once (Automatic mode), keeps it with the status To review and an amber dot beside the row (Review mode), or makes no comparison at all. Sales items are never checked.

1. Go to Costs or Sales, whichever inbox holds the items.
2. Tick the checkbox beside each item to combine, at least two, in the order you want their pages to appear.
3. Select Actions, then choose Merge.
4. If a warning appears because the items have different total amounts or dates, or belong to different users, select Continue to go ahead or Cancel to stop.
5. On the merge screen, scroll through the document preview on the left. Every page of the selected items goes into the merged item, and the summary at the top shows how many items are being combined.
6. Check the combined details on the right, such as Type, Date, Supplier, Category and Total amount, and correct any that are wrong. If you're unsure which category applies, check with your accountant.
7. Select Merge to confirm, or Cancel to leave the items as they were.

Dext creates one new merged item in the inbox. The originals leave the active inbox and move to the Submission history, where each one shows the status Merged.

A merge can be undone. Open the merged item and select Unmerge, and the originals return to the inbox as separate items.

Restoring one of the originals from the Submission history is a different action. It returns that single item to the inbox, but the merged item stays exactly as it was and the merge itself isn't reversed. To undo a merge completely, use Unmerge on the merged item.

If a document you sent in never appeared, one of two checks may have stopped it. Sending the exact same file twice gets the second copy rejected at upload with a message that the item already exists, so no item is created and nothing shows in the Submission history. A different file for a purchase already in Costs, such as a photo of a receipt you'd emailed in earlier, goes through duplicate detection instead. In Automatic mode it lands in the Submission history with the status Confirmed duplicate, and it can be restored from there.

In Review mode, a flagged item waits in the Costs inbox until someone compares the two items side by side and decides what happens to each. Only Admin users can do that, and only they can change the mode, either for the whole account under Business settings, Extraction, or for one supplier from Costs, Suppliers, where a supplier's own setting overrides the account default. Standard users don't get the Review item option, so the item keeps its flag until an Admin looks at it.