Introducing Briefcase Ledger

From 6 April 2026, the first 864,000 sole traders and landlords earning over £50,000 must file quarterly digital updates with HMRC, rising to nearly 3 million taxpayers by April 2028 as the threshold drops to £20,000. For accounting firms, that means going from one annual touchpoint per client to five mandatory submissions.

Today, we're launching Briefcase Ledger: a standalone MTD platform purpose-built for this shift. A full ledger with automated reconciliation, document capture and direct HMRC submission, powered by the same AI Autopilot that already processes millions of documents for accounting firms across the UK.

We built it from first principles, based on market demand: automate the low-risk work, learn from every transaction, and make quarterly filing a scalable service line.

Briefcase Ledger covers the full cycle from client onboarding to HMRC submission. Here's the end-to-end workflow.

Register a client

Set up a new client in under a minute. Enter their name and National Insurance number, then add their income sources: sole trade, UK property, foreign property, or any combination. Multiple businesses per client, single licence.

The platform automatically generates a chart of accounts mapped to HMRC submission categories for each business. Every account in the ledger knows exactly which box it feeds into at filing time.

Connect the bank

Link your client's bank account via open banking for a real-time transaction feed. Briefcase Ledger pulls in transactions automatically, no chasing clients for statements.

Firms can also create bank accounts manually and upload statements directly. The platform extracts every transaction and assigns it to the right account.

Capture documents

Clients can send documents in the way that suits them:

For clients with multiple businesses, each document is routed to the right income source. Good data arrives without the firm having to ask for it.

One workflow

Traditionally, bank reconciliation and cash coding are two separate workflows. You go through the bank feed, match what you can against invoices, then cash code the rest.

Briefcase Ledger combines this into a single workflow.

One inbox, direct from the bank. Every bank transaction flows into one place. As transactions arrive, Autopilot simultaneously does two things: it looks for matching invoices and it suggests coding. There is no separate reconciliation step and no separate cash coding step. The firm sees every bank transaction with either a suggested match or a suggested category, ready to review. Briefcase learns what you usually cash code, and what would be reconciled to a document.

Teams can now check for consistency and completeness of coding, alongside the bank reconciliation.

Intelligent automation

The workflow for teams at a document level is simple. When documents arrive, Autopilot reads them and extracts the supplier, line items, amounts, tax rates and account codes. It detects whether it's an invoice, receipt or credit note. It handles multi-page PDFs, foreign currencies and VAT validation against HMRC records.

Before anything touches the ledger, Autopilot runs four verification checks on every transaction.

The first three, legibility, completeness and consistency, are the same checks that power AI Autopilot across all Briefcase integrations. Introduced here.

The fourth is new to Briefcase Ledger: match pairs the invoice against the corresponding bank transaction, so reconciliation happens automatically as part of the same workflow.

If all four pass, the transaction is autopublished to the ledger. If the first three pass but no bank match is found, it publishes to accounts payable. If any of the first three fail, it stays in your inbox for review.

The platform learns

Every transaction the firm approves or corrects makes the next one more accurate. Briefcase Ledger builds a model of each client's suppliers, spending patterns and coding preferences, so quarter two is faster than quarter one.

If you edit a transaction, similar ones are less likely to be autopublished in future. If you consistently approve them without changes, confidence grows. No manual training, no supplier rules. It adapts to your workflow over time.

When the quarter closes, Briefcase Ledger calculates submission totals directly from the general ledger. No re-keying, no export, no bridging spreadsheet.

• Quarterly updates: direct submission to HMRC for self-employment, UK property and foreign property income.
• Year-end final declarations: one platform from Q1 through to final submission.
• VAT returns: calculations built in, with direct submission coming soon.

One platform, one client record, from first quarterly update to final declaration.

Briefcase Ledger isn't bridging software. It's a full double-entry digital ledger, meaning firms build a genuine asset with every client they onboard. Transaction history, supplier relationships and coding patterns accumulate over time.

Because it's a real ledger, firms get real reporting:

• Profit and loss: with comparison periods, expense breakdowns and trend analysis.
• Balance sheet: point-in-time or year-over-year, with monthly trends.
• General ledger journals: full drill-through from any report line to the underlying entries.

Briefcase Ledger is available in beta now, with pricing starting at £9 per client per month.

Accounting firms can book a demo or start a 14-day free trial here. Individual sole traders and landlords can also sign up directly.