New in Vinyl: Choose Between Concise and Detailed Meeting Summaries

Most client meetings write up fine in three sections. A summary, the key discussion points, the actions. You skim it, you send the follow-up, you move on.

Then you run the annual planning session. Ninety minutes, four topics, two decisions the client will hold you to, and one comment about cash tightening in Q3 that you really don't want to lose. The summary comes back accurate and tidy and about a third of the size the conversation deserved. Everything that mattered is technically in there, compressed into bullets you'll be re-reading in six months trying to work out what was actually agreed.

That's the meeting Detailed Summaries were built for.

One format was never going to cover every meeting

A quick bookkeeping catch-up and a board meeting are different jobs. The catch-up needs a summary someone can read on their phone between calls. The board meeting needs a record you can point at when somebody asks in March what was decided in September.

Until now Vinyl gave you one answer to both. The concise summary works well, which is why it stays exactly as it is and remains the default. Nothing changes for firms who are happy with it.

What's new is the option to ask for more when the meeting warrants it.

What's in each format

Both formats come from the same recording. The difference is how much Vinyl unpacks.

The concise version is the one you already know. The detailed version keeps everything that was there and adds four sections that pull out what tends to get flattened.

Decisions made

The single most useful heading in a long meeting. Not what was talked about, what was landed on. Whether you're moving the year-end date. Whether the client is going ahead with the second hire this quarter. It sits in its own section so nobody has to reconstruct it from a paragraph of context.

Risks and issues identified

A client mentions the director's loan account is creeping up, or that a key customer has gone quiet on payment. In a concise summary that lands as a discussion point, sandwiched between two other things, easy to skim past. Here it gets flagged as what it is.

Key discussion areas, broken down by topic

A meeting that covered payroll, a VAT registration question and a possible acquisition comes back as three clearly separated topics rather than one block of prose. If you only need the payroll section, you can find the payroll section.

Additional notes

The context that doesn't belong anywhere else and would otherwise vanish. A change in who's handling accounts payable. A mention that the client's accountant of fifteen years has just retired. Small things that turn out to matter later.

Set it once, override it whenever

Your summary preference lives in Settings > My Information. It's a per-user setting, so your tax manager can run detailed summaries while the rest of the team stays on concise. Nobody has to agree on one house style.

Once it's set, every meeting you record comes through in that format. No extra clicks, no remembering.

You can also switch a single meeting. There's a toggle at the top of every meeting that flips between Concise and Detailed. If concise is your default and you've just come out of a two-hour advisory session, flick the toggle on that one meeting and read it the other way. Your default stays exactly where it is.

Choosing between them

Rough guide, and you'll find your own line quickly enough:

Reach for concise on weekly catch-ups, routine reviews, quick check-ins, and anything you're forwarding to a partner who has four minutes.

Reach for detailed on board meetings, year-end and tax planning sessions, discovery calls where you're defining scope, complex advisory conversations, and any meeting you can imagine someone questioning your recollection of later.

If that instinct feels familiar, it's the same one behind meeting type tags. Different conversations need different handling, and the tools should reflect that rather than flattening everything into one shape.

The summary feeds everything that comes after

Worth remembering that the summary isn't the end of the process in Vinyl. It's the input for everything downstream.

The follow-up email Vinyl drafts is built from it. So is the file note that syncs into your practice management system, and the post-meeting actions that flex depending on whether the meeting was internal or client-facing. A richer summary gives all of that more to work with, which shows up most in the meetings where a follow-up needs to reference something specific rather than gesture at the general shape of the conversation.

It's the same reason firms bother with good notes in the first place. Our research with 259 accounting firms found the average accountant loses 3.8 hours a week to post-meeting admin, and a large chunk of that isn't writing the notes. It's going back to find something the notes didn't capture.

Match the write-up to the meeting

Detailed Summaries aren't about producing more words. Longer notes nobody reads are just a different kind of waste.

The point is that the depth of the record should match the weight of the conversation, and that call belongs to the person who was in the room. Some meetings need three sections. Some need seven. Now you decide which, meeting by meeting, without anyone having to write anything up by hand either way.

Head to Settings > My Information to pick your default, and use the toggle on any meeting where you want the other view. More on how Vinyl handles the whole meeting lifecycle is on the product page.