💼 Product Update — 30/12/2024

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.

Enhanced transaction detection from forwarded emails 📧

Previously, Briefcase processed any content in forwarded emails that resembled a transaction, including billing reports, direct debit confirmations, remittance advices, and payment confirmations. If auto email forwarding is set up, this often results in non-invoice documents appearing in your Cost inbox. With our latest update, we have tightened the criteria for what qualifies as a relevant transactional document.

• Forwarded emails are scanned for all attachments. If no transactional attachments are found, the email body is also scanned.

• Attachments identified as transactional but not recognised as valid invoices, receipts, or credit notes are automatically archived with justification provided. You can easily unarchive them if they were archived by mistake.

• Order confirmations and grant agreements are still treated as valid receipts.

We would love to hear your feedback about what would you consider a valid document to use for bookkeeping, and we’ll ensure Briefcase recognises them accordingly.

More reliable bulk publishing 📦

We’ve updated our bulk publish to be able to handle any number of published transactions.

• Previously, publishing more than 10 invoices at once could trigger Xero rate limits, causing some transactions to fail.

• Briefcase can now publish any number of transactions simultaneously, processing them all in the background.

• Please note that bulk publishing a large number of transactions (100+) may take 3-4 minutes.

What else we’ve shipped 🚢

• Improved Description Extraction: Briefcase now summarises transactions instead of listing each item purchased, particularly helpful for long grocery and restaurant receipts.

• Simplified Client Email: The generated Briefcase email address for invoice submissions no longer includes company suffixes like Limited, Ltd or Inc, making it shorter and easier to remember.

• Bug Fix: Fixed a bug to ensure that uploaded documents are always visible, even if Briefcase encounters processing issues.

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