Revenue Opportunities: Release of the Year Shortlist

Vinyl has been shortlisted for Release of the Year at the Digital Disruptor Awards, run by The Loop.

The part that landed for us is how these awards work. The Loop don't pick the shortlist. Practitioners nominate, and an independent panel takes it from there. So this isn't a panel deciding we're interesting. It's people in firms saying that something we built was worth putting forward. Vinyl is twelve months old this month.

The release in question is Revenue Opportunities.

What the feature actually does

Revenue Opportunities reads your meeting transcripts and flags the moments where a client has voiced a need your firm could serve but currently isn't serving. A pain point. A risk. A life event. A change in the business.

You choose the scope. One meeting, every meeting with a single client, a group of clients, or every conversation the firm has had this week.

Each opportunity comes back with the exact quote from the transcript, a confidence score based on how clearly the client expressed the need, an urgency rating, and a suggested talk track written in the client's own language.

Why we think it got nominated

Most AI features in this space compress something a human already did. A summary of a call you sat through. A tidier version of your own notes. Useful, and we build plenty of it.

Revenue Opportunities does something the person in the meeting structurally couldn't. It reads across the meetings nobody senior attended.

A firm's commercial radar has always been capped by how many client conversations a partner can physically sit in. Everything under that line is invisible. A manager runs a quarterly review, the client mentions they can never quite work out how much cash they've got to pay the bills each month, and the manager carries on with the compliance work they came to discuss. Fair enough. That's the job they turned up to do, and nobody trains you to listen commercially while you're mid-way through a VAT conversation.

That Tuesday afternoon call is now visible, in commercial terms, to the person who can act on it.

£24,000 in a call somebody had already sat through

Within two days of switching it on, one firm found a £24,000 opportunity in a transcript from one of their own team members. The client had mentioned, almost as an aside, that they'd let go of their internal bookkeeper. The person on the call didn't register it as significant. The partner, reading it back through Revenue Opportunities, spotted it in about four seconds. And the partner was never going to be in that meeting.

The same firm surfaced a second opportunity worth several tens of thousands shortly afterwards. A client was thinking about selling part of their business, which points straight at succession planning, tax advisory and possibly some restructuring.

Two days, two transcripts, tens of thousands in fees. None of it from new clients. All of it from conversations that had already happened.

OnPoint has seen the same pattern at scale. Johann Goree runs two brands and around 1,000 clients with a team of 30 spread across the UK, Sri Lanka and South Africa, so he was never going to sit in on every meeting. Six to eight weeks after rolling Vinyl out to the whole team, the group had surfaced tens of thousands of pounds in opportunities it had previously walked past.

As Johann put it: “It's one of those things where, if you don't know better, you don't know it's a problem. It's only since someone shone the light on it that we started to look at it.”

We find the signal. The firm does the advising.

Worth being clear about this one, because a lot of accounting software has been fairly relaxed this year about what its AI can actually do.

Vinyl is a meeting capture and intelligence layer. It isn't an advisory product and we'd rather nobody inferred that the AI does the advising. Every opportunity is anchored to something the client actually said and shown with the quote, so you can judge it yourself. The confidence score exists so you can bin the weak signals quickly instead of trusting a black box. Whether the opportunity is real, what it's worth, and whether to raise it at all is the firm's call.

Holding that line has probably cost us a few headlines. We think it's the more disruptive position.

Where the path does keep going is into the paperwork. Vinyl connects to Ignition and Socket, so an opportunity spotted in a transcript can become a draft proposal without anyone rekeying a thing.

The other half of the same problem

We surveyed 259 accounting firms about what happens after the meeting. 57% spend 30 minutes or more on post-meeting admin for every single meeting, and 30% spend an hour or more. Averaged out, that's 3.8 hours a week per accountant. 182 hours a year. Twenty-three working days.

That's the tax Vinyl was built to remove. Revenue Opportunities goes after the other side of the same coin, which is the money lost inside the meeting rather than the time lost after it.

Thank you to whoever put us forward

It's been an odd sort of month. Xero named Vinyl a finalist in four Global App Award categories a fortnight ago, and now this.

We'd love to win, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But a nomination from people who run practices for a living means considerably more to us than the trophy does. That's the bit we'll still be thinking about in six months. The rest is a very nice evening out.

Your clients are already telling you what they need. Most of it is sitting in transcripts nobody reads.