How does Briefcase handle Deferred Income?

Last updated: December 16, 2025

This guide covers how AI agent detects deferred income from your sales invoices, drafts deferred income schedules, and posts recurring journal entries.

When you upload an invoice, after our bookkeeping AI agent codes transactions, our deferred income AI agent also reviews the transaction, if it recognises a deferred income, it drafts a deferred income schedule for you.

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

How it works

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

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  2. If it’s a deferred income, the agent creates a draft schedule which is visible in the new Deferred income tab and on the transaction details page.

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

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

Migrating existing Deferred income to Briefcase

  1. Select "Add deferred income" within the deferred income inbox to manually create a deferred income.

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  2. Enter the total Deferred income 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 and End Date for the remaining recognition period (i.e. only for future months not yet recognised).

  5. Choose the appropriate Liability account and Sales Account Codes and hit Publish.

Don’t forget to remove any recurring journals for this deferred income in your ledger to avoid double posting.

Managing your deferred income tracker

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

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

Manually marking a transaction as a deferred income

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

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Xero Tracking categories

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

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Quickbooks class

Select class to a deferred income schedule and we'll assign it automatically to every journal the schedule generates

Multi-line deferred income

Briefcase can currently only deferred income detection on single-line invoices. Invoices with multiple line items will not be processed as deferred income and you will have to create schedules manually.