Introducing Briefcase Ledger

01The ecosystem era is over

We’ve got used to the fact that an average SME needs several apps on top of their ledger to run an efficient finance function. In the pre-AI era this made sense - building software was hard and best-of-breed solutions had enough of an edge to warrant the incremental spend.

But those economics are now changing. Not only has AI reduced the cost of building software, but AI has made it more important than ever for that software to be interoperable. AI is only as good as the context you can feed it, and API connections often omit valuable data points and contextual information needed in downstream workflows.

We’re making a bet that the next ledger will be full-stack.

Apps may still exist for niche workflows or specific verticals, but the idea of core functionality being outsourced to a third party app is a thing of the past. And where extendability is required, it will be provided through MCP servers.

02Rules don’t scale; AI learning does

Most accounting automation still relies on rules. They’re slow to set up, brittle when context changes and they expose the business to errors nobody is checking for. This is why most work in accounting - from invoice categorisation, to VAT coding and bank reconciliation - is still done manually for the majority of transactions.

Our first product, Briefcase Connect, proved a different approach works: AI proposes, verifies against historical precedent, and learns from every correction. Across our customers, 64% of published transactions now need zero edits, and that number rises the more the AI learns.

This frees up capacity and when applied across every workflow, makes finance more scalable than it’s ever been.

03Real-time close is the next frontier

Month-end doesn’t become a bottleneck because of the amount of work to do, but because that work isn’t done for the first 30 days.

This used to be the case for bookkeeping work as well: pre-cloud, paperwork would pile up until the end of the month when it would all get processed in one go. But bank feeds and cloud technology have now made bookkeeping a continuous workflow that can be done on a regular basis.

This hasn’t yet happened for month-end - and the limitation isn’t paperwork. It’s intelligence. Period-end tasks like detecting and adjusting prepayments and accruals require judgement. It’s left until the end of the month because giving that level of attention to every incoming transaction would take far too much effort.

This has now changed with AI, and Briefcase is the first platform to detect accounting adjustments on incoming transactions in real-time, and post the adjusting journals immediately.

01From invoice to payment, all-in-one platform

Briefcase was already the market-leading invoice capture solution - with line item extraction, categorisation and VAT compliance built-in.

With Briefcase Ledger, approvals and payments are added. Set an approval policy by amount and approver, and payments above the threshold route to the right person before money moves. Once authorised with the bank via open banking, the payment is recorded against the invoice and the bank account automatically.

Partial payments, bulk payments and payments on account are all handled, and the aged creditors report updates as you go.

Sales work the same way in reverse: raise invoices in Briefcase, email them to customers, and the receipt reconciles itself when the cash lands in the bank feed.

02Reimagining bank rec & paperwork requests

Owning the full bookkeeping workflow means you don’t lose efficiency between tools. When your data capture tool also does your bank reconciliation, publishing an invoice means matching it against the bank at the same time - rather than having to click another button in your ledger.

It also enables one of the biggest challenges in bookkeeping today to be solved: chasing paperwork. In Briefcase you can select the bank lines that need an invoice, or the months that need a bank statement, choose who owes it and a due date, and Briefcase sends the request via email. They reply to the email with the file attached, Briefcase reads the reply, matches each document to the right transaction, ticks off the item, and closes the task with a full audit trail.

03Automating the close in real-time

Briefcase Ledger detects accounting adjustments as they happen. An annual insurance invoice is recognised as a prepayment and its twelve-month schedule is drafted on the spot. A laptop becomes a fixed asset with depreciation already set. When a recurring supplier’s invoice doesn’t turn up, the accrual is proposed for you, and reversed when it does.

Every journal comes with the schedule behind it, so the balance is supported the moment it’s posted. Working papers open with half the balance sheet already reconciled, and agent-led P&L analysis is built in to provide commentary and detect issues. Excel isn’t opened once.

VAT and MTD returns are built from the same ledger and filed to HMRC in a click.