How do I connect Claude or ChatGPT to Briefcase?

You can connect an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT to Briefcase and ask it to work on your clients for you: find bills awaiting review, explain why Autopilot coded something, upload documents, run month-end schedules, or read a client's profit and loss. The assistant acts as you. It can only see and change what you can, and only on the clients you choose when you connect it.

What a connected assistant can do

• Look up your clients, contacts, bills and receipts awaiting review, published documents, expense claims, bank statements and archived items.
• Explain a transaction: its extracted values, why Autopilot made its decision, review warnings and the actions available.
• Upload a document for a client, or give you an upload link or the client's forwarding email address.
• Save edits to a transaction, publish it to Xero, QuickBooks or Briefcase Ledger, archive it, or restore an archived document.
• Create, add to and publish expense claims.
• Show and manage prepayments, deferred income, accruals and fixed assets, including the period trackers.
• For Briefcase Ledger clients: read the profit and loss, balance sheet, aged creditors and aged debtors, journals and sales invoices, and raise sales invoices, add customers and post manual journals.
• Search Briefcase help articles.

The assistant never moves money. It cannot make payments, transfer funds or send invoices to your clients' customers.

Before you start

• Your Briefcase workspace needs assistant connections enabled. If the connect page says they are not enabled, ask your Briefcase contact.
• The assistant uses your permissions. For example, it can only publish if you can publish, and it can only read reports or post journals on Briefcase Ledger clients if you have the Ledger View or Post permission.

Connecting Claude

1. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors. Find Briefcase under Browse connectors, or choose Add custom connector and enter https://api.briefcase.so/mcp.
2. Press Connect. Briefcase opens in your browser; sign in if asked.
3. Check the application name. Briefcase shows Verified provider for assistants it has verified. If you see Unverified application, only continue if you started the connection yourself.
4. Choose All clients, including ones added later or Only the clients I choose.
5. Press Connect. You return to Claude, which is now connected.

To check the connection at any time, ask the assistant to "Check my Briefcase connection". It reports which clients it can see and whether changes are allowed.

In Claude Code, run /plugin marketplace add Briefcase-AI/briefcase-plugin, then /plugin install briefcase@briefcase, and choose Briefcase under /mcp to sign in.

Connecting ChatGPT

In ChatGPT, add Briefcase from the plugin directory, or in developer mode add a plugin with the server address https://api.briefcase.so/mcp. The Briefcase sign-in and client choice are the same as for Claude.

How changes work

Publishing, archiving, raising invoices and posting journals are two-step actions. The assistant first shows a preview of what would change and anything that blocks it, such as a missing supplier, a locked period or an unbalanced journal. It only goes ahead when you agree, and Briefcase re-checks your permissions and the current state before anything is posted. If the connection drops during an action, asking the assistant to retry is safe: Briefcase recognises the retry and does not repeat the change.

Staying in control

• Activity: Settings → AI assistants lists every connected assistant and when it was last used. Press Activity to see every change it made and every request Briefcase refused, with links to the affected transactions, claims and statements.
• Disconnect: press Disconnect next to an assistant to revoke its access immediately. You can reconnect at any time.
• Workspace controls: workspace administrators can turn off Allow assistant connections for everyone, or keep reads on and turn off Allow assistants to make changes.