This guide covers how AI agent detects prepayments, drafts prepayment schedules, and posts recurring journal entries.

When you upload an invoice, after our bookkeeping AI agent codes transactions, our prepayment AI agent also reviews the transaction. If it recognises a prepaid expense, it drafts a prepayment schedule for you.

When you publish the schedule, Briefcase will post the recurring journal entries automatically.

Video walkthrough

How it works

1. Upload an invoice or receipt via email, web, or WhatsApp. Once the bookkeeping workflow finishes, the prepayment AI agent analyses the transaction and flags to you if it detects a prepayment.

   

2. 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.

   

3. Review and publish the schedule, Briefcase will then post the journals on each period end. Prepayments can then be viewed in the tracker.

   

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

Migrating existing prepayments to Briefcase

1. Click "Add prepayment" within the prepayments inbox to manually create a prepayment.

   

2. Enter the total Prepaid Amount (excluding VAT) in your ledger currency.

3. Add the Opening Balance – the remaining portion still to be recognised in future months.

4. Set the Start Date as the date in which the prepayment started amortising

5. Set the End Date as the date in which the prepayment will finish amortising

6. Set the Release From Date as the date that you want Briefcase to start posting amortisation. Briefcase will then calculate an estimate of the prepaid balance for each period between the Start Date and the Release From Date (i.e. the periods of amortisation that have already been posted):

   

7. Review the tracked periods and update the prepaid balance estimates if anything is wrong.

8. Choose the appropriate Account Code and hit Publish.

Adding prepayments that have already been fully amortised

Briefcase supports the ability to add existing prepayments which are already fully amortised for tracking purposes. This is useful if you are using Briefcase's prepayments tracker or Briefcase Working Papers. To do this:

1. Click "Add prepayment" within the prepayments inbox as normal.

2. In the top right, click the "Already amortised" switch:

   

3. Fill in the rest of the information as normal. You will notice that all the periods are shown as tracked periods. This means that Briefcase will not post any journals to your ledger.

4. Review the schedule and update any of the prepaid balance estimates for each period if they are wrong. This will ensure that the tracker reconciles correctly

5. Review and publish the schedule as normal

Managing your prepayments tracker

You can easily export the prepayments tracker in Briefcase into a CSV by selecting "Export CSV".

You can also filter the prepayments tracker by category, time period, and date range.

Manually marking a transaction as a prepayment

If our prepayment AI agent did not correctly detect and classify an invoice as a prepayment, you can do this manually within the invoice page by selecting "Mark As" and then "Prepayment".

Tracking categories for prepayments

Add a tracking category to a prepayment schedule and we’ll assign it automatically to every journal the schedule generates.

Choosing how prepayments is spread: monthly or daily proration

You can control how Briefcase releases prepayments across its periods. On the schedule, use the Proration toggle:

- Monthly (the default) recognises the total in equal amounts across each month of the schedule.

- Daily weights each period by the number of days in the month, so a 31-day month recognises slightly more than a 28-day February. This gives a more precise release, which is useful for larger balances or where revenue needs to match the exact days of service.

You can set this per schedule while it's still in Draft or Review (it locks once the prepayment is published). 

To set it once for a client, use the firm-wide default in Business Settings → Prepayment & deferred income proration, which applies to both prepayments and deferred income - you can still override an individual schedule before publishing.