Data Health & Insights is an add-on for practices on the Practice Essentials and Practice Advanced plans. It connects to your clients' Xero or QuickBooks Online accounts and adds three capabilities to your practice:

Data Health — automated checks that analyse your clients' accounting data and flag issues for review
Insights — a suite of client-level analysis and reporting tools
Intelligent Workflows — data-driven checks that run automatically, so your team can see what's wrong rather than having to verify everything manually

On the Practice Advanced plan, the add-on also adds the Data Health practice-level Insight and enhances the Practice, Activity, and Workflows practice-level Insights with additional Data Health data columns.

Important: Data Health & Insights requires each client to be connected individually to Xero or QuickBooks Online.

Data Health checks

Data Health checks are accessed by selecting Data Health in the left navigation of a client's account. Each check connects to the client's Xero or QuickBooks Online data and automatically identifies a specific type of issue — so your team can focus on investigating and resolving problems rather than looking for them.

Checks are organised into three sections in the navigation: Cleanup, Activity, and Tax.

Health Score

Each check has a Health Score impact: unresolved issues contribute to the client's Health Score, and dismissing a suggestion removes it from the score. The score is expressed as a percentage with a colour-coded heart: teal (71–100%), amber (36–70%), or red (0–35%).

It's visible from the Clients list for any client with Data Health & Insights enabled, and Practice Admins can customise which checks are included and how they're weighted.

For more details, go to How to use the Health Score in Data Health & Insights.

Cleanup

Check	What it identifies	Accounting software
Fixed assets	Unmapped fixed asset accounts, draft assets, and discrepancies between the fixed assets register and the general ledger	Xero only
Duplicate contacts	Potential duplicate contacts in the client's accounting software	Xero, QBO
Duplicate transactions	Potential duplicate invoices and bank transactions	Xero, QBO
Contact defaults	Contacts consistently coded to the same account code or tax type — surfaced as suggested defaults that can be applied in Xero	Xero only
Dormant accounts	General ledger accounts with no transaction activity since a date you set	Xero only
Control accounts	PAYE, net wages, pension, directors loan account balance, and dividends activity	Xero, QBO
Multi-coded contacts	Contacts with inconsistent account code or tax code usage across their transactions	Xero, QBO
Transaction cleanup	Parent-coded transactions, uncategorised transactions, and transactions missing a contact	QBO only
Prepayments	Prepayment journal activity and unreleased balances for prepayments created by Dext	Xero only
Bank reconciliation	Unreconciled transactions, outstanding payments, and outstanding receipts across all bank accounts	Xero only
Unreconciled transactions	Outstanding payments and deposits using ledger data	QBO only

Activity

Check	What it identifies	Accounting software
Historical changes	Transactions posted or modified in a period that has already been filed with Companies House	Xero only — UK only
Lock date history	Changes to lock dates in a client's accounting software, and lock dates that are missing or out of sync with filing dates	Xero (full); QBO (End of Year Lock Date only)

Tax

Check	What it identifies	Accounting software
VAT return checks	VAT scheme thresholds, estimated VAT, HMRC filing status, bank reconciliation, account code review, tax code review, multi-coded contacts, and high-value transactions for a selected VAT period. Requires HMRC connection for full functionality.	Xero only — some checks UK only
Corporation tax	Estimated corporation tax for the current and previous financial years, using UK tax rates and financial year-end dates from Xero	Xero only — UK only
Entertainment accounts	Staff entertainment spend against the HMRC per-employee threshold, and irrecoverable VAT on business entertainment	Xero only — UK only
GST return checks	GST scheme thresholds, account code review, tax code review, multi-coded contacts, and high-value transactions for a selected GST period	Xero only — Australia only
ABN validation	Contacts with missing or invalid ABNs, and transactions with inconsistent GST treatment	Xero only — Australia only

Intelligent Workflows

On the Practice Advanced plan, the Data Health & Insights add-on makes Workflows intelligent. Without the add-on, Workflow checks are manual prompts — your team confirms each one themselves.

With the add-on, Dext connects to the client's Xero or QuickBooks Online account and runs checks automatically, so your team can see what's wrong before they start investigating.

For a full explanation of how this works, go to What are Workflows in Dext?.

Client-level Insights

The add-on unlocks seven client-level Insights, available from Insights in the left navigation of each connected client account. They cover financial analysis, including transaction activity, revenue and cost breakdown, aged balances, benchmarking, key KPIs, and a flexible general ledger report builder.

For a full list and details of each Insight, go to What are Insights in Dext?.

Syncing and recalculating data

Dext stores a local copy of each client's data from Xero or QuickBooks Online and syncs it automatically every 48 hours. Every Data Health check and client-level Insight has Sync and Recalculate buttons at the top of the page:

Sync — pulls the latest data from Xero or QuickBooks Online into Dext
Recalculate — reruns the check or Insight against the data already in Dext

Always run Sync before Recalculate if you've made changes in your client's accounting software. You can recalculate at any time without syncing if you've only changed a date range or reporting date.

For more details, go to How to sync and recalculate data in Data Health & Insights.

Integrations

Data Health & Insights supports 4 integrations that extend its data beyond Dext.

Integration	What it does
HMRC (UK only)	Connects your HMRC Agent Account to unlock MTD VAT data across the MTD for VAT Insight, Deadlines Insight, and VAT return checks
GoProposal	Pulls Health Scores and activity metrics into GoProposal for use in client pricing and proposals
Senta	Sends Health Scores to each matched client's record in Senta Practice Management Software nightly
API	RESTful API for extracting client data — Health Scores, alert levels, and activity stats — programmatically

HMRC, GoProposal, and Senta are set up from Practice settings > Integrations. The API uses tokens generated from Practice settings > Data Health > API tokens.

Who can use Data Health & Insights

Data Health & Insights is available on the Practice Essentials and Practice Advanced plans with the add-on.

Practice Admins and Client Admins have access to all connected client accounts by default. Standard users need both Bookkeeping access and Data Health & Insights access enabled per client. Go to Managing a colleague's access to clients for instructions.