Basecone alternatives in 2026: when you need one and when you do not

Basecone was the first in the Netherlands and is still the best-known name at accounting firms. For what it was built to do, it is fine. When you outgrow it, and what fits then.

Basecone got there first. Founded in 2012, and already in 2013 with an app that let you photograph a receipt and approve an invoice from your phone. Acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2014, then rolled out to England, Belgium and Germany. In the Netherlands it is the name almost every accounting firm knows, and for a large share of those firms it is simply the standard way clients submit their documents.

That is not a small thing. Part of why software works is that everyone around it can work with it, and there Basecone has a head start that technology cannot close.

That app is still one of its strongest points, and it is underrated. Approving from your phone with Face ID or Touch ID, plus uploading and submitting expenses in the same place. For a director approving four invoices between two meetings, that is the difference between on time and not. An approval flow lives or dies by the willingness of the people who have to approve, and Basecone bet on that early.

What it is, is an intake layer: documents arrive, are recognised, pass an approver and are written to your accounting system in real time, with a complete booking proposal for invoices you have had before. Integrated with Twinfield, Exact Online, AccountView and Xero.

For the job it was built for, it is still fine. Anyone looking for an alternative has usually outgrown that job, and that happens in three ways.

It was built for cost invoices, not for purchasing

A cost invoice is one with no order behind it: the phone bill, the accountant, the rent, the cleaning. Someone looks at it, approves it, done. That is the process Basecone was built around, and it does it well.

The moment purchase orders enter the picture, the question changes. It is no longer about who approves it, but about whether it is right: was this ordered, at this price, and did it actually arrive?

Basecone itself does not match against purchase orders. What does exist, and what sits in their own help centre, is an integration with Planergy, formerly PurchaseControl: invoices you upload to Basecone are automatically linked to the order created in Planergy. Two things to know before taking that route. Planergy is a separate vendor with a separate subscription, and it is a match against the order, not against the receipt.

That last difference is larger than it sounds. A match against the order alone answers whether you ordered this at this price. It cannot see whether it was delivered. Order a hundred units, receive sixty and have the supplier invoice a hundred, and the invoice agrees with the order and passes straight through.

The intelligence sits in the reading, not in the processing

People often say there is no AI in Basecone. That is not true, and Basecone is clear about where it does sit. Their own page on document recognition says AI is applied to the total amount, the subtotal and the VAT percentage. Correct those fields and the recognition gets better for it. They report recognition rising by four percent in the Netherlands and six percent in Belgium, across roughly 2.4 million invoices.

That is real progress. It is also exactly where almost every vendor in this category has put its AI: in the reading step.

What does not learn is the processing. Which ledger, which cost centre, which project, what to do with this kind of difference: that runs on positions you captured per supplier. The system gets better at seeing where the VAT amount sits, not at deciding what should happen to this invoice.

The test we use at Claridy in every one of these conversations makes the difference visible immediately: when your team corrects something, does that same correction come back next month? If it concerns a field that was read wrong, the answer is probably no, because the recognition learns from it. If it concerns the booking itself, the cost centre or the project, the answer is yes.

And the second is where the hours sit.

It does not scale once things get complicated

This is the reason that gets mentioned least and decides it most often.

One invoice split across several purchase orders. Coding on three axes at once, general ledger, cost centre and cost carrier, across several locations. Four or five administrations with different charts of accounts. A supplier bill that your ERP has split across seven order lines. An email from the supplier explaining why less was delivered than ordered.

Those are not edge cases; that is what happens as soon as you take purchasing and logistics seriously. An intake layer was not built for it, and that is a design choice rather than a defect. It is just also the point where you find out you need something else.

So none of this is a verdict on Basecone. It is the boundary of a category we call the first generation: capture software automates the reading and the preparation, and what remains is the work that needs judgement.

Which one suits which size

This is usually the most useful question, and it is rarely asked this way.

Below roughly a hundred invoices a month there is too little repetition to learn from, and then any system that learns is a solution to a problem you do not have.

The best alternatives to Basecone

Claridy: the alternative from a different category

Claridy (generation 3: the intelligent action layer), measured by the same standard.

Claridy is an intelligent layer on top of your existing systems. It runs on Exact Online, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, reading from them and writing back to them. Your books stay where they are and no second set of records appears, which also means you can stop: switch it off and your administration is exactly as it was. That is the difference between a layer and a lock-in, and on a page about switching, that is the question you should put to every vendor here.

The difference from the rest is testable with one question: what happens to the invoice that does not match? With all the software above, a task is created for a human. With Claridy that task is created for the agent first, which works out why the difference is there and what should happen about it. Only if it cannot does it reach your team, with the preparation done.

And where the AI above sits in the reading step, here it sits in the processing too. Where Basecone has you capture per supplier how it should go, here you explain it once in plain language, including your exceptions, and a correction your team makes becomes a rule by itself. Beyond that: three-way matching at invoice-line level against both the order and the receipt, coding on your own booking history, and coding on several axes at once.

Price: € 499 per month flat, three-way matching € 250 per month extra, no price per invoice, per document or per user, cancellable monthly.¹ Where it stops: below roughly a hundred invoices a month there is too little repetition to learn from, and then Basecone or TriFact365 is cheaper for you.

Comparison table

One thing stands out reading the ERP column top to bottom: this market is built on Exact and the Dutch accounting packages. If you are on NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics 365, most of the category drops out before you get to features. Claridy runs on all three, and for some readers of this page that is the only thing that matters.

Features and prices checked against the vendors' own sites and help centres on 2026-08-13. Basecone and WhiteVision publish no price list.

More context on the three generations of technology and all vendors: the comparison guide to accounts payable software. On why "scan and capture" describes the step that is already solved: scan and capture. What Claridy does with the purchase invoice is on Procure to Pay, the price on the pricing page.

When you simply stay with Basecone

In most cases, frankly.

Do your books live at a Twinfield firm, is it cost invoices that need to pass an approver, and is your supplier base stable? Then Basecone does exactly what it should, and switching is mostly hassle.

There is another reason to stay that weighs more than people estimate. If your firm supplies, submits to and supports Basecone, you are not just buying software but a way of working that both sides already know. That is real value, and you lose it the moment you put something of your own beside it. Weigh that against the hours you think you will save.

An alternative pays off only when one of the three reasons above costs structural time, and usually that is only the case once purchase orders enter the picture or the number of administrations climbs.

Frequently asked questions

Features and prices checked against the vendors' own sites and help centres, 2026-08-13. Last checked: 2026-08.