Vinyl reaches 500 accounting firms in its first 12 months

Vinyl, the AI meeting intelligence platform built for accounting and bookkeeping firms, has onboarded its 500th firm. The milestone lands 12 months after launch, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in the accounting industry. The news was first reported by XU Magazine.

Five hundred firms now use Vinyl to record client meetings, turn them into notes and action items, and keep a searchable history of every client conversation. Those firms sit across Australia, the UK, the US, New Zealand and Canada.

“Accountants don’t adopt Vinyl because it’s AI. They adopt it because the client call ended at 4pm and they don’t want to be typing up notes at 6pm on a Friday,” said Trent McLaren, co-founder of Vinyl. “Five hundred firms have now decided they’d rather spend that time on their clients and their own lives. We’re grateful to every firm that backed us early.”

What shipped on the way to 500

• Client Brief. A live AI summary on each client record that pulls together recurring themes from past meetings and every open action item.
• Studio. A rebuilt search layer for quicker answers, with team glossaries so Vinyl picks up the terms each firm actually uses.
• Scheduler. Client booking pages carrying the firm’s own branding.
• Wider availability. Eight features that had been in staged rollout are now open to every firm, including the integrations with Ignition, Socket and Anchor.

The team is now shipping three to four releases a week.

Who Vinyl is

Vinyl was built for accounting and bookkeeping firms rather than adapted from a general meeting tool. It records Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls, and in-person meetings through its mobile app. It writes summaries organised the way accountants work: decisions, actions and deadlines, grouped by client entity. Each client gets a record that holds every past conversation, and the team can ask questions of that history in plain English.

It connects to the practice management and engagement tools firms already run, including Karbon, FYI, Xero Practice Manager, Ignition and Anchor, along with Outlook and Gmail. That matters more than it sounds. A meeting note that stays inside the notetaker is one more place to look; a note that lands against the client in the system the team already opens every morning gets read.

What is next

Vinyl’s focus for the year ahead is the UK and US, alongside its home market of Australia. The company describes the goal as a single place where a firm keeps everything it knows about a client: starting with meetings, then extending to the other conversations a firm has with its clients, from email to the quick call that never made it into the file.

Five hundred firms in a year says something about the profession as much as about one product. Meeting notes were among the first jobs accountants handed to AI, because the pain is concrete: the advice given on a call is only useful if someone writes it down, and that someone is usually the partner at the end of a long day. Our look at which AI meeting agents firms are actually using found the same pattern across tools.

It also says something about who is buying. Five hundred firms across five countries is not a handful of early adopters in one city. The firms adopting meeting tools now are ordinary practices of a few partners and a small team, the same firms that were slower onto cloud ledgers a decade ago. Adoption has moved faster this time because the setup is light and the time saved shows up in the first week.

The direction of Vinyl’s releases is the more interesting signal. Client Brief and Studio move the product from “notes for one meeting” towards a running record of everything a firm knows about a client. If that holds, the question for firms shifts from which notetaker to buy to where client knowledge should live, and who in the team is responsible for keeping it accurate.

• Check where your meeting notes go today. If they sit in personal inboxes or notebooks, they are invisible to the rest of the team and to whoever picks up the client next.
• Set a rule for client consent. Whatever tool you use, decide how clients are told a meeting is recorded, and write it into your engagement letter.
• Read the guide before you trial anything. Our guide to AI meeting assistants for accounting firms sets out what to test, from data residency to practice management integrations.
• Meet the team in person. Vinyl will be at the Digital Accountancy Show in the UK and at Intuit Connect in Las Vegas this month.