Two from Xero. The bills page gets the same full-page treatment invoices and quotes already had, with contact editing and planned payment dates moving into the bill itself, and Lara makes the point that the people who will feel the change hardest are the ones who use it most. Then the builder story: Xero has released a Lovable connector, so an accountant can describe an app in plain English and have it running on live Xero data. Xero says one in five connections into its ecosystem is now a custom app built outside the App Store. Billie is not convinced, and reckons meaningful builds will come from the 1% of the 1%.
Vinyl has moved from recording meetings to preparing for them. Pre-meeting briefs pull context from previous calls, open items in your practice management system and the calendar invite itself, which as Billie points out makes better preparation a data hygiene problem in disguise.
Sodium has connected its practice management platform to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, giving them a line into tasks, billing, AML checks, document requests and client workflows. Indi's read is that Duane Jackson has built this shape before in payroll and in bookkeeping, and that boring businesses are the ones worth watching.
The admin round. TaxCalc and Engager keep stitching themselves together, with tax figures dropping into bulk client emails and filed returns ticking themselves off. Otto Capture launches from With Otto at £9 a client, with Emma James running her own practice behind it, and goes to Xero and FreeAgent together rather than Xero alone. Sage is on the roadmap. Billie's line on all of it is how much manual glue accountants create day to day without noticing.
Briefcase gets the longest argument. Sales invoicing and aged reports land in Briefcase Ledger, and Working Papers takes the month end out of spreadsheets with an immutable balance sheet snapshot. Billie wants to know where it falls short before she trusts it, and makes the case that the big AI companies are not using AI to do their own accounts. Lara asks whether it matters that this is an accounting app with AI rather than an AI app that does accounting.
Also covered: MyDocSafe removing portal chat on purpose, adding a signature dashboard and making form consents compulsory.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:40 Xero bills refresh
06:36 One in five is custom
12:50 Vinyl pre-meeting briefs
17:50 Sodium talks to the LLMs
23:10 TaxCalc into Engager
27:05 Sponsor: Joiin
28:13 Otto Capture
31:11 MyDocSafe removes chat
34:20 Briefcase Ledger invoicing
35:52 Briefcase and the close
42:20 Outro