Four Xero Global App Award Shortlists, and the Firms Who Put Us There

On 17 August, Xero published the finalist list for the 2026 Global App Awards. Vinyl is on it four times.

We read it twice, then sent it round the team, then read it again.

The four shortlists

• Emerging App of the Year, Global

• Practice App of the Year, Global

• Practice App of the Year, Australia

• Practice App of the Year, USA

The Practice App lists put us next to Ignition, Socket, Content Snare, Mayday and SuiteFiles. Some of those are apps we integrate with. All of them are apps we've watched closely while building ours. Turning up in that group a year after launch was not on the plan for 2026.

It also lands a few months after Xero named Vinyl a Growth App for 2026, one of four chosen globally. Two nods in one year from the ecosystem we build for is a lot to take in.

An award shortlist measures your work, not ours

Here's the uncomfortable truth about product awards: nobody wins one for having good ideas. Judges look at what happened after the ideas shipped. Who adopted it. What changed in their week. Whether it stuck once the novelty wore off.

So the shortlist is really a readout on what accounting and bookkeeping firms have done with Vinyl since August 2025.

That's now more than 102,000 hours of client meetings recorded, running at over 9,000 hours a month. Around 5,000 accountants and bookkeepers open Vinyl in a given month. Our Xero App Store rating sits at 5.0 across 38 verified reviews, which we find slightly terrifying, because it only takes one bad week to move it.

None of those numbers came from us. They came from firms deciding, meeting after meeting, that this was worth doing again.

What that looks like in a real practice

The stat we care most about is boring: how much of Monday you get back.

Shapes, a UK firm, grew turnover 140% in twelve months with the same six people. Jim and the team weren't chasing a tech story. They just stopped losing hours to write-ups and put those hours into client work.

At Box Advisory in Australia, follow-ups used to take five to ten business days. Now they take one or two. Davie handles roughly double the meeting volume he used to, and nobody sits in a call purely to take notes any more.

Haga Kommer cut post-meeting write-ups from about twenty minutes to five, across thirty to forty meetings a week. Do that maths on a Friday afternoon and it's most of a working day.

And at OnPoint, the owner found over £60,000 of opportunities sitting in client conversations they'd already had, inside a 48-hour window. The conversations weren't new. The ability to go back and read them properly was.

Four firms, four completely different problems, one shared habit of pressing record.

The people who told us we'd got it wrong

Plenty of what's good about Vinyl today started as someone telling us it wasn't good enough yet.

Karbon push-back came from firms who said filing notes by hand defeated the point. Meeting type tags came from practices drowning in recordings they couldn't sort. Pre-meeting briefs came from partners walking into calls cold. Uploading audio and transcripts from anywhere came from people who record on their phone in a client's kitchen and refuse to be told that's not a real meeting.

Some of those conversations happened over a stand at Xerocon. Some arrived as a two-line support message on a Tuesday night. A few were properly blunt. Those were the useful ones.

Thank you to everyone who took the time. Feature requests are a form of generosity and we don't take them lightly.

Thank you to Xero, for building an ecosystem where a small app can get in front of firms on merit, and for the App Store team who answer our questions with more patience than we deserve. Thanks to the partner teams at Karbon, FYI, Ignition and Socket, who've all made it easier for a practice to run one connected stack instead of six disconnected tools.

And thank you to the firms who took a chance on an app that was, at the time, about four months old.

Winners are announced next week

We'd love to win. We're not going to pretend otherwise.

But the shortlist doesn't change what happens on Monday. Somewhere a partner is walking into a client meeting with a coffee and a vague memory of what they promised last quarter. That's still the problem. It's the problem whether we come home with a trophy or a very nice photo.

What the shortlist does tell us is that enough firms have found this useful enough, for long enough, that people outside our own team noticed. That's a rare thing for a company barely twelve months old, and we know exactly who to thank for it.

Now, back to work.