New in Vinyl: Custom Prompts, Glossary and Writing Style, So Vinyl Works the Way Your Firm Does

Every firm has its own way of doing things. There's the follow-up email format a partner spent years getting just right. There's the handover note the onboarding team expects after every new client meeting. And there's usually a prompt someone built in ChatGPT that half the team now pastes transcripts into, one meeting at a time.

Vinyl already does most of the meeting work out of the box, and it gets the vast majority of names and terms right first time. But the parts that are specific to your firm have meant either sticking with Vinyl's standard format or doing a bit of copying and pasting on the side.

Small extra steps on every meeting add up. Our research across 259 firms found the average accountant already loses 3.8 hours a week to post-meeting admin. Anything that adds to that pile is worth getting rid of.

So we've shipped three new features that let you set Vinyl up your firm's way, once, and have it stick.

Custom prompts: your templates, saved and shared across the firm

You can now write a prompt, save it in Vinyl and run it again whenever you need it. Saved prompts are shared across the firm, so everyone works from the same instructions and gets the same kind of output, whoever ran the meeting.

On a single meeting

Custom prompts sit alongside the standard post-meeting actions, like the client follow-up email, file note and detailed summary. Finish the meeting, pick your saved prompt, and Vinyl runs it on that conversation.

Across lots of meetings in Vinyl Studio

Vinyl Studio is where you put questions to your meetings, whether that's one meeting, one client or your whole meeting history. Your saved prompts are available there too. Run one across a week of new client calls, or every meeting you've had with one client this year, and get the results for all of them in one go.

What firms are using them for

A few ways to put them to work:

• Your own follow-up email template. If your firm has a set structure for client recaps, save it as a prompt and every follow-up comes out in that shape. It works with Vinyl's Gmail and Outlook integration, so the draft still lands in your own inbox for you to check before it goes anywhere.

• An onboarding handover document. Build one prompt for prospect and new client meetings that pulls out the services discussed, key deadlines, the software the client uses and anything the delivery team needs to know. Every new client gets handed over the same way, no matter who took the first call.

• A prompt or skill you already use elsewhere. Plenty of firms have a favourite prompt in ChatGPT or a skill in Claude that they run on meetings. Bring it into Vinyl and run it there instead. No downloading transcripts, no pasting them into another tab.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Every transcript copied into a separate AI tool is another copy of a client conversation sitting outside the system you chose for it. Keeping the work in Vinyl keeps it in one place.

You can still type a one-off question into Vinyl Studio whenever you need to. Saved prompts are for the jobs you do again and again.

Glossary: the names only your firm knows

Vinyl comes trained on a library of key accounting terms for each region we work in. Terms like MTD, BAS, Form 1099 and provisional tax come through properly without you lifting a finger.

The words that occasionally trip it up are the ones no general training could cover, because they're specific to your firm and your clients. Things like:

• client surnames with unusual spellings

• trading names that don't sound the way they're written

• your own service names, like a "Growth Pack" or "Quarterly Check-In"

• internal acronyms your team uses without thinking

Now you can add these to a glossary. Add a term once and Vinyl uses it to get the spelling right in your summaries, file notes, follow-up emails and other outputs. The glossary is firm-wide, so one person setting it up fixes it for everyone.

A misspelt name in an internal note is a minor irritation. A misspelt name in a recap email that goes to the client is the kind of thing they notice, even if they never mention it.

A good place to start is your most-met clients, plus any name that's ever made autocorrect panic. It takes a few minutes and you won't need to think about it again.

Writing style: choose how Vinyl sounds when it writes for you

Some accountants write to clients like it's a formal letter. Others are on first-name terms with everyone and want their emails to read that way. You can now pick a writing style in your settings, and Vinyl uses it for the emails, letters and other documents it drafts for you to send.

Writing style is set per user, so each person can match how they already write. A partner who writes formally and a bookkeeper who's on first-name terms with a dozen sole traders will both get drafts that sound like them.

It only changes what Vinyl writes for you to send. Summaries, minutes, file notes and Vinyl's own analysis keep their standard format, so your internal records stay consistent across the team. If you've already set your summary length preference, writing style works the same way. Set it once and get on with your day.

How they work together

Each feature handles a different part of the same job, and they're most useful side by side.

Picture a new client meeting. You run your firm's onboarding handover prompt on it, and the document comes out in the format your delivery team already knows, with the client's slightly tricky surname spelled correctly throughout. The follow-up email that goes to the client reads the way you'd normally write it, friendly or formal, and it's sitting in your drafts before you've made the next coffee.

None of that needed a separate tool, a template doc open in another window, or a quick proofread for names.

The conversation with your client is where the real work happens. Everything that comes after it should take as little of your time as possible and look like your firm produced it. Teach Vinyl how your firm works once, and it'll keep doing it that way.