How Connolly Replaced Dext and Outsourcing with AI Agents
About Connolly Accountants
Headquartered in Milton Keynes, Connolly Accountants and Business Advisors is an established practice serving 2,500+ UK clients with a 30+ person team. In addition to accounts prep, tax and business advisory, Connolly provides regular bookkeeping and VAT services to hundreds of clients a month.
“We've been using Briefcase for the past six months and the results have been really impressive. From ease of use to the automation and the security, it's a step above anything we've used before”
Since adopting Briefcase, Connolly has:
- Replaced Dext entirely
- Stopped outsourcing
- Increased client count without increasing headcount
All while providing a faster, higher quality and more compliant service to their clients.
Why did Connolly adopt Briefcase?
When we initially met the Connolly team, they were using Dext for all bookkeeping clients and relied on a combination of internal and outsourced staff to help deliver the service. The practice had ambitions to grow through client acquisition and higher value services, but their current set up was becoming a bottleneck.
Outsourcing came with challenges
Connolly worked with an external bookkeeping resource for a subset of clients to help process transactions, perform GL categorisation and manage VAT compliance within Dext. While this was intended to streamline delivery, the management oversight required created some challenges.
“Outsourcing is not a good service, it takes up too much admin time. One of our team members probably spends 25-40 hours a month going back and forth, dealing with queries and chasing.”
Moreover, the quality of data produced by Dext and the outsourced team was subpar, forcing senior in-house staff to spend hours daily correcting errors.
“Our in-house bookkeepers spend 1-3 hours a day fixing outsourcing errors”
Staff capacity was limited
In addition to the inefficiencies of outsourcing, when so much time was spent driving software tools, the team lacked capacity to offer higher value services to clients.
“I'd like our team to spend more time on management accounts, proper VAT queries, and other ways we can help clients”
Briefcase presented an intelligent solution
After our first demo, Connolly recognised that Briefcase isn't just another software tool. Instead, Briefcase deploys AI agents to deliver end-to-end automation of complex, context-dependent bookkeeping and financial close tasks. Key features that stood out to the team:
- AI learning and Autopilot: Briefcase learns from historical ledger data and refines its knowledge base for every client over time. AI Autopilot uses this data to safely autopublish transactions that don't need manual review.
- VAT compliance: Briefcase is trained on UK VAT law, verifies VAT numbers automatically and justifies line-item based VAT rate assignment with direct links to HMRC guidance.
- Close automation: Briefcase identifies if a transaction requires accounting adjustments - such as prepayments or deferred income - creates schedules, posts manual journals and reconciles the ledger balance automatically.
How did they transition their clients?
Connolly went from having never used Briefcase to being a Briefcase-only practice with hundreds of clients on the platform in under 6 months.
The timeline for full client migration
- Evaluation (May): Connolly started a 2-week free trial of Briefcase. We created a shared Teams chat for dedicated support and gave the team access to the platform. Connolly signed a contract the same month.
- Migrate internal bookkeeping clients (June-July): Connolly migrated all internal bookkeeping clients. This included all accounts where the client does not interact with or directly upload documents into the platform. All new clients were added directly to Briefcase from this point onwards.
- Migrate external bookkeeping clients (July-September): Connolly migrated all external bookkeeping clients. We shared client onboarding materials, a draft email which was sent to clients instructing them of the change, and created a video tutorial explaining how Briefcase works for their clients.
- Completion (October): Dext contract ended.
How Briefcase supported the transition
Briefcase is designed to be simple and easy to use. There is no manual set up or configuration required and the UI is intuitive, making onboarding and staff training requirements minimal. The team was able to start processing transactions immediately without formal training sessions.
“A new starter began using Briefcase yesterday without needing any training – they figured it out just by looking at the interface”
The platform's ease of use became evident when Connolly's team successfully adopted Briefcase after simply being given a sign up link. While we offer onboarding and training sessions, Briefcase's intuitiveness and self-onboarding capability eliminated the typical training bottlenecks that slow software transitions.
This is also facilitated by the dedicated support we provide through shared Slack or Teams chats with the users in the firm and our engineering team at Briefcase, so queries can be resolved efficiently and quickly.
“Your customer service has been absolutely fantastic. Whenever we've got any queries, you're really quick to answer them.”
Beyond supporting the internal team, we collaborated on comprehensive materials for the client-facing transition, including step-by-step tutorial videos, email templates, PDF guides and marketing materials showcasing the partnership.
This enabled Connolly to position Briefcase as an upgrade rather than a disruption to clients, enabling all accounts to be successfully migrated off Dext by the end of their contract. The joint marketing also helped position Connolly as a forward-thinking firm that's leveraging AI to meaningfully improve the client service.
What was the impact?
Time savings and increased staff capacity
Using Briefcase, Connolly cut down staff processing time from 60 seconds/invoice to 15 seconds/invoice, representing a 4x faster job completion rate.
“We used to estimate that jobs took up to one minute per invoice. Yesterday I processed 60 invoices in 15mins using Briefcase.”
This doesn't include the additional benefits of Briefcase's AI Autopilot. Over the past several months, Briefcase has built a unique knowledge base for each of Connolly's clients. Today, Briefcase safely autopublishes the majority of transactions for most of Connolly's high-volume clients, only requiring manual review for new suppliers or edge cases.
Higher quality and more compliant data
Briefcase achieves 99% accuracy across all fields, including context-dependent tasks (e.g. description extraction, GL categorisation and VAT rate assignment), while simultaneously splitting multi-invoice documents, triaging transactions, and detecting 3,028 duplicates. Duplicates are archived automatically helping to avoid potential duplicate payments.
“Briefcase automatically identifies nuances such as Reverse Charge, something we hadn't expected from software, replacing assumptions like Zero Rated with accurate VAT treatment”
Briefcase has also delivered significant improvements across VAT workflows. It has verified 20,577 VAT numbers and is trained on all 102 HMRC VAT notices, providing justification with direct legislative links for every VAT rate decision. By assigning VAT rates on a line-item basis and capturing legislative nuance like Reverse Charge, VAT returns are now prepared faster with fewer changes.
No more outsourcing, no more Dext
Connolly has brought all their bookkeeping back in-house and now delivers the service with the help of Briefcase's AI agents rather than an outsourced team.
“We've been using Briefcase for the past six months and the results have been really impressive. From ease of use to the automation and the security, it's a step above anything we've used before”
They've maintained a lean and consolidated tech stack by replacing Dext entirely and using Briefcase as the sole data capture and AI bookkeeping automation platform for all their clients.
What's next?
Connolly is now exploring Briefcase's close automation to deliver the same efficiency gains across the accounts team, for both management accounts and year-end. Briefcase has already detected 298 prepayments for Connolly's clients. For each prepayment, Briefcase automatically creates full journal schedules, publishes the journals after one-click approval and reconciles it all with the balance sheet.
Prepayments are just the start: real-time deferred income automation is live today, with additional financial close modules rolling out soon. Automating financial close in real-time will allow Connolly to deliver their objective of providing higher value services - such as management accounts - to more clients, at scale, and with greater affordability and timeliness.
Why did Connolly adopt Briefcase?
When we initially met the Connolly team, they were using Dext for all bookkeeping clients and relied on a combination of internal and outsourced staff to help deliver the service. The practice had ambitions to grow through client acquisition and higher value services, but their current set up was becoming a bottleneck.
Outsourcing came with challenges
Connolly worked with an external bookkeeping resource for a subset of clients to help process transactions, perform GL categorisation and manage VAT compliance within Dext. While this was intended to streamline delivery, the management oversight required created some challenges.
“Outsourcing is not a good service, it takes up too much admin time. One of our team members probably spends 25-40 hours a month going back and forth, dealing with queries and chasing.”
Moreover, the quality of data produced by Dext and the outsourced team was subpar, forcing senior in-house staff to spend hours daily correcting errors.
“Our in-house bookkeepers spend 1-3 hours a day fixing outsourcing errors”
Staff capacity was limited
In addition to the inefficiencies of outsourcing, when so much time was spent driving software tools, the team lacked capacity to offer higher value services to clients.
“I'd like our team to spend more time on management accounts, proper VAT queries, and other ways we can help clients”
Briefcase presented an intelligent solution
After our first demo, Connolly recognised that Briefcase isn't just another software tool. Instead, Briefcase deploys AI agents to deliver end-to-end automation of complex, context-dependent bookkeeping and financial close tasks. Key features that stood out to the team:
- AI learning and Autopilot: Briefcase learns from historical ledger data and refines its knowledge base for every client over time. AI Autopilot uses this data to safely autopublish transactions that don't need manual review.
- VAT compliance: Briefcase is trained on UK VAT law, verifies VAT numbers automatically and justifies line-item based VAT rate assignment with direct links to HMRC guidance.
- Close automation: Briefcase identifies if a transaction requires accounting adjustments - such as prepayments or deferred income - creates schedules, posts manual journals and reconciles the ledger balance automatically.
How did they transition their clients?
Connolly went from having never used Briefcase to being a Briefcase-only practice with hundreds of clients on the platform in under 6 months.
The timeline for full client migration
- Evaluation (May): Connolly started a 2-week free trial of Briefcase. We created a shared Teams chat for dedicated support and gave the team access to the platform. Connolly signed a contract the same month.
- Migrate internal bookkeeping clients (June-July): Connolly migrated all internal bookkeeping clients. This included all accounts where the client does not interact with or directly upload documents into the platform. All new clients were added directly to Briefcase from this point onwards.
- Migrate external bookkeeping clients (July-September): Connolly migrated all external bookkeeping clients. We shared client onboarding materials, a draft email which was sent to clients instructing them of the change, and created a video tutorial explaining how Briefcase works for their clients.
- Completion (October): Dext contract ended.
How Briefcase supported the transition
Briefcase is designed to be simple and easy to use. There is no manual set up or configuration required and the UI is intuitive, making onboarding and staff training requirements minimal. The team was able to start processing transactions immediately without formal training sessions.
“A new starter began using Briefcase yesterday without needing any training – they figured it out just by looking at the interface”
The platform's ease of use became evident when Connolly's team successfully adopted Briefcase after simply being given a sign up link. While we offer onboarding and training sessions, Briefcase's intuitiveness and self-onboarding capability eliminated the typical training bottlenecks that slow software transitions.
This is also facilitated by the dedicated support we provide through shared Slack or Teams chats with the users in the firm and our engineering team at Briefcase, so queries can be resolved efficiently and quickly.
“Your customer service has been absolutely fantastic. Whenever we've got any queries, you're really quick to answer them.”
Beyond supporting the internal team, we collaborated on comprehensive materials for the client-facing transition, including step-by-step tutorial videos, email templates, PDF guides and marketing materials showcasing the partnership.
This enabled Connolly to position Briefcase as an upgrade rather than a disruption to clients, enabling all accounts to be successfully migrated off Dext by the end of their contract. The joint marketing also helped position Connolly as a forward-thinking firm that's leveraging AI to meaningfully improve the client service.
What was the impact?
Time savings and increased staff capacity
What used to take a minute per invoice now takes just 15 seconds—a 4x improvement in processing speed. With Briefcase handling the bulk of transaction processing, staff now focus on higher value work like reviews, queries and client relationships.
“We used to estimate that jobs took up to one minute per invoice. Yesterday I processed 60 invoices in 15 minutes using Briefcase.”
Using Briefcase, Connolly cut down staff processing time from 60 seconds/invoice to 15 seconds/invoice, representing a 4x faster job completion rate.
This doesn't include the additional benefits of Briefcase's AI Autopilot. Over the past several months, Briefcase has built a unique knowledge base for each of Connolly's clients. Today, Briefcase safely autopublishes the majority of transactions for most of Connolly's high-volume clients, only requiring manual review for new suppliers or edge cases. For one client requiring daily bookkeeping, 65% of transactions are now autopublished automatically. Crucially, no supplier rules were set up and no manual configuration was required; autopublish scaled automatically through AI learning from everyday use.
Since using Briefcase, Connolly has been able to increase the number of clients they serve without increasing headcount in their bookkeeping team.
Higher quality and more compliant data
Briefcase achieves 99% accuracy across all fields, including context-dependent tasks (e.g. description extraction, GL categorisation and VAT rate assignment), while simultaneously splitting multi-invoice documents, triaging transactions, and detecting 3,028 duplicates. Duplicates are archived automatically helping to avoid potential duplicate payments.
“Briefcase automatically identifies nuances such as Reverse Charge, something we hadn't expected from software, replacing assumptions like Zero Rated with accurate VAT treatment”
Briefcase has also delivered significant improvements across VAT workflows. It has verified 20,577 VAT numbers and is trained on all 102 HMRC VAT notices, providing justification with direct legislative links for every VAT rate decision. By assigning VAT rates on a line-item basis and capturing legislative nuance like Reverse Charge, VAT returns are now prepared faster with fewer changes.
No more outsourcing, no more Dext
Connolly has brought all their bookkeeping back in-house and now delivers the service with the help of Briefcase's AI agents rather than an outsourced team.
“We've been using Briefcase for the past six months and the results have been really impressive. From ease of use to the automation and the security, it's a step above anything we've used before”
They've maintained a lean and consolidated tech stack by replacing Dext entirely and using Briefcase as the sole data capture and AI bookkeeping automation platform for all their clients.
What's next?
Connolly is now exploring Briefcase's close automation to deliver the same efficiency gains across the accounts team, for both management accounts and year-end. Briefcase has already detected 298 prepayments for Connolly's clients. For each prepayment, Briefcase automatically creates full journal schedules, publishes the journals after one-click approval and reconciles it all with the balance sheet.
Prepayments are just the start: real-time deferred income automation is live today, with additional financial close modules rolling out soon. Automating financial close in real-time will allow Connolly to deliver their objective of providing higher value services - such as management accounts - to more clients, at scale, and with greater affordability and timeliness.