Vinyl Is a Finalist for Emerging App of the Year at the ICB Luca Awards

We've just found out Vinyl is a finalist for Emerging App of the Year at the ICB Luca Awards. The ceremony is on Monday 16 November at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, as part of the ICB Bookkeepers Summit.

Here's the part we like about this particular shortlist: the ICB's software categories are voted on by ICB members. Not a judging panel working through a submission form. Bookkeepers looking at the tools they actually use each week and deciding which ones earned a place on the list.

The company we’re keeping

We're up against four other finalists in the Emerging App category: Briefcase, Hey Monica, Finio, Content Snare and Taxpad.

One of those names jumped out at us. Content Snare also turned up on Vinyl's shortlist for the Xero Global App Awards back in August, in the Practice App of the Year category. Different awards body, different voters, and the same tool sitting alongside us twice in three months. That's less a coincidence than a sign of which apps bookkeepers and accountants have actually reached for this year.

Why this shortlist lands a bit differently

The Xero awards and the Digital Disruptor Awards both judged us against the accounting software market broadly. The Luca Awards are the ICB's own, run for and by the bookkeeping profession specifically. It's a narrower audience asking a more specific question: does this actually work for how a bookkeeper's week runs, not just how an accountant's does?

That distinction is bigger than it sounds. A VAT query, a payroll run and a reconciliation call aren't the same conversation, and tools built for general business meetings don't always carry the vocabulary across. Paul at Talking Tax & Accounting in Brisbane described exactly this problem before he switched to Vinyl: generic transcription tools turned FBT into “FPT” and GST into “GPT”, and correcting the transcript by hand took longer than writing the notes from scratch would have. His clients all work with their own bookkeepers, so getting that terminology right on the first pass isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a note someone can act on and one that needs rewriting before anyone trusts it.

The third shortlist this year

This is the third time in 2026 that people outside our own team have put Vinyl on a shortlist. Revenue Opportunities was named a finalist for Release of the Year at the Digital Disruptor Awards, run by The Loop. Before that, Xero named us a finalist across four Global App Award categories, including Emerging App of the Year globally and Practice App of the Year in three regions.

Three awards bodies, three different audiences: the wider digital industry, the Xero ecosystem, and now bookkeeping specifically through ICB. We didn't build toward any of these. The pattern showed up on its own, and it keeps telling us the same thing: firms are finding Vinyl useful enough to say so, in public, to people who have no reason to be kind about it.

What we’re actually chasing

That's the kind of thing these awards are built to notice. Look down the ICB's list of software categories and none of them are chasing something flashy. They're built for whatever quietly gets a Friday afternoon back.

That's the bit we care about more than the trophy. We built Vinyl because a bookkeeper's meeting notes were sitting in a recordings folder, half-written-up and half-remembered, and the follow-up either happened from memory or didn't happen at all. Every integration we've shipped this year, from Ignition to Socket, has been aimed at the same target: less admin between the meeting and the work actually getting done.

Thank you to the ICB members who put us on this list, and to every firm that's made Vinyl part of how they run client meetings this year. We'll find out on 16 November whether we're bringing home a Luca statue. Either way, the Monday morning after looks like any other. A full diary, a coffee going cold, and clients who need their notes written up properly the first time.