💼 Product Update — 22/4/2025

Welcome to our weekly product update. Each week, we highlight Briefcase’s latest features and AI improvements designed to make bookkeeping and accounting workflows simpler and more efficient. Here’s what’s new.

Automated prepayments

We’ve rolled out our first workflow that goes beyond core bookkeeping - automatic prepayment detection and recognition scheduling. When you upload an invoice (email, web upload, or WhatsApp), our bookkeeping AI agent still does extraction, categorisation and VAT compliance. On top of that our new prepayment AI agent also reviews the transaction, if it recognises a prepaid expense, it drafts a prepayment schedule for you. Publish the schedule, and Briefcase will post the recurring journal entries automatically.

How it works:

• Upload an invoice or receipt via email, web, or WhatsApp.

• Once the bookkeeping workflow finishes, the prepayment AI agent analyses the transaction.

• If it’s a prepaid expense, the agent creates a draft schedule which is visible in the new Prepayments tab and on the transaction details page.

• Review and publish the schedule, Briefcase will then post the journals on each period end.

• You are always in control, which means that you can always reverse journals, edit amounts, or archive the schedule whenever needed.

You can review all prepayments on the tracker where you will be able to compare closing balance in Briefcase against ledger balance sourced from Prepayments account in Xero.

Known limitations

Prepayment detection currently works for:

• Xero clients, we will be adding Quickbooks support soon

• Single-line transactions only (we won’t detect prepayments in multi-line invoices yet)

• Monthly recognition schedules, where the cost is spread over several months

We don’t yet support one-off future-dated recognition (e.g. conference tickets for a future event), but it’s on our radar.

That’s all for this week. Have any questions, ideas or feedback? Hit reply to this email and let us know.