Building the future of accounting
Thoughts on AI, automation, and bookkeeping from the Briefcase team.
MTD is a labour problem, not a software problem
Less than one third of the sole traders and landlords required to comply with MTD have signed up so far. The problem is not a lack of software. We believe it is something much more foundational: who is going to do the work?
Briefcase
Ledger
Introducing Briefcase Ledger
From 6 April 2026, 864,000 sole traders must file quarterly digital updates with HMRC. Today we're launching Briefcase Ledger: a standalone MTD platform with automated reconciliation, document capture and direct HMRC submission.
Building autonomous evaluation pipelines for retrieval
Hand-labelling retrieval datasets doesn't scale. We built an LLM-powered labelling agent to evaluate retrieval quality automatically.
Build for verification, not review
How reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is reshaping AI, and why building for verifiability is the key to becoming a truly AI native company.
Our culture
A company is just a group of people. Briefcase is a group of people that are naive enough to think we will change the world.
Building Tax-Aware AI
When an AI agent classifies a transaction's VAT treatment, it shouldn't be guessing—it should cite the exact HMRC guidance it relied on.
Why build what you can buy?
Most startups avoid spending engineering cycles on internal tools. Meanwhile, we built an internal LLM Observability platform. Here's why.
Building autopilot
Probabilistic AI agents paired with deterministic formal verification create the perfect combination for high trust domains like finance and accounting.
Introducing AI Autopilot
Today, we're releasing our biggest feature yet: AI Autopilot. Autopilot evaluates uploaded transactions and determines whether they're safe to publish directly to ledgers.
OCR vs AI Bookkeeping: What Actually Changes When You Switch
OCR reads text from invoices. AI does the bookkeeping. Real examples of how AI handles VAT, categorisation, and prepayments that OCR tools miss entirely.
Everyone codes
At Briefcase, we are product-obsessed. Every team member provides customer support, everyone contributes to our product roadmap, and everyone, including our commercial people, codes.
Building a Vertical AI Agent
How Briefcase constructs AI agents for the accounting industry, emphasizing predictability, consistency and accuracy.
Introducing 'Contextual Learning' in the world of AI Accounting
Generative AI offers substantial efficiency improvements, yet foundational models lack specific business knowledge. Contextual Learning provides the solution.
How can you trust an AI to do your accounting?
LLMs are inherently probabilistic, so how can you trust them with deterministic accounting workflows? We cover self-reflection, explainability and auditability in AI.
What is an 'AI Agent' and what does it mean for accountants?
AI agents are advanced AI systems designed to interact with their environment autonomously. Unlike conversational AI, these systems operate through integrated infrastructure.
How will multimodal AI transform the accounting industry?
Recent AI advancements have introduced Gemini 1.5 and GPT-4o, highlighting multimodal capabilities as the new standard in AI.