Briefi is now three editions: Meetings, Sign and Advisor

When I started Briefi, the problem was my own. I work across five workspaces, and every week ended with the same pile: meetings I had sat in, follow-ups I had promised, and notes that lived in three different places. The first version of Briefi did one job. It read my calendar, briefed me before each meeting, captured what was said, and drafted the recap and the follow-up email so they went out the same day.

That job is still at the centre of the product. What changed this year is what happened when advisers, brokers and accountants started using it. They did not stop at the recap. They kept asking what happens next, and the honest answer was that the next step lived in another tool.

This note explains how Briefi is organised now, why, and what it means if you already use it.

What we kept hearing

The meeting is the start of the work, not the end of it. A mortgage broker's first call leads to a fact-find, a document chase, a signed authority, a lodgement and, two or three years later, a fixed-rate expiry that should prompt another conversation. A financial adviser's annual review sits on top of a fee arrangement that has to be renewed on time. An accountant's engagement letter has to be signed before the work starts, and signed again when the scope changes.

Each of those steps had its own home. The meeting notes were in one product, the signed documents in another, the client's loans or policies in a spreadsheet, and the reminders in somebody's head. The client's name was typed four times, and the record of what was agreed in the meeting never quite reached the document the client signed.

Nobody asked us for a bigger product. They asked us to stop making them carry the same client from one tool to the next.

Three editions, one client record

Briefi is now a client-work platform in three editions. Each one covers a stage of the client relationship, and all three share the same record of the client.

Briefi Meetings is where most people start. Briefi prepares a brief before you meet, drawn from what Briefi already holds about that client. It captures the conversation with a bot that joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, or you can record in the browser, or record a meeting held in person. Briefi drafts the recap in the language the meeting was held in, drafts the follow-up for you to send from your own mailbox, and puts the actions agreed into a register with an owner and a date. On plans that include it, the meeting can be pushed to your CRM.

Briefi Sign covers forms, fact-finds and signatures. You can send engagement letters, authorities and fact-finds from templates, or import a Word or PDF document you already use. Clients sign by drawing or typing their signature, and every signed document carries a certificate page that records the time, IP address, device, location and a SHA-256 digest of the document. A fee schedule can sit inside the signed document, so the fee the client saw is the fee they signed. Document requests go out through a link to the client's own email address.

Briefi Advisor is for firms with ongoing obligations to their clients. It keeps registers of loans, policies, entities and claims, runs client journeys and reviews, handles document requests, and can open a client portal for firms that want one. It is built for Australian advice, broking and accounting practices first.

The point is not the three names. The point is that the meeting, the paperwork and the obligations attach to the same client. The action agreed in a review meeting is the same action on the client's record. The document requested after a first call shows against the same client the signed authority does.

Why editions instead of one large plan

Not every firm needs all three. A bookkeeping practice that only needs engagement letters signed and documents collected should not pay for meeting capture. A consultant who mainly needs good meeting records does not need a loan register. A broking practice probably needs all of it.

So each edition maps to its own plans, and Briefi is priced per plan rather than by counting heads. The current plans and what each one includes are on the pricing page, which is the only place we keep prices, so they are always current.

Why regulated professional services

In most work, a meeting note is a convenience. In advice, broking, accounting and law, it is evidence. A file note may be read years later by a reviewer, a licensee, a regulator or a court, and the question will be whether it shows what the client was told and why.

That is where the gap is. A general notetaker gives you a transcript and a summary, and stops there. A compliance product gives you a register to fill in by hand after the meeting is over. The work in between, turning the conversation into a record and the record into the next step, is still done by hand in most practices. That is the part Briefi is built to do.

We are building for Australian practices first because depth in one market is worth more than breadth across many. The app and the database are hosted in Sydney. Some processing uses providers overseas, and the security page lists who they are and what they do.

What Briefi is not

It helps to be plain about the edges. Briefi is not a practice management system or a general ledger, and it does not try to be. It does not replace your CRM either. On the plans that include it, Briefi pushes the meeting record into the CRM you already use, so your pipeline stays where your team expects it.

More integrations are on the way and are rolling out progressively. Today the meeting record can be pushed to GoHighLevel, HubSpot, Monday, Pipedrive, Close, Copper, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce, Zoho CRM or Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the plans that include CRM push, and there is a public API and an MCP server on the plans that include them, so a practice that wants to connect its own systems can. Briefi does not take payments from your clients today, and identity checks are not available yet.

We would rather you knew that before you start a trial than find it out halfway through one.

What this means if you already use Briefi

The naming does not change what your workspace does. Briefs, recaps, follow-ups, the action register and multi-workspace switching all work as they did. If you work across several workspaces, as I do, that still works the same way.

What you will notice is that the website now describes Briefi by edition, and the solution pages describe how each kind of practice uses it. If you are a broker, an adviser or an accountant, there is a page written for your work.

What comes next on this blog

From this week we are publishing twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The posts are written for people who do client work for a living, and they cover the practical side: how to write a file note that holds up, what a broker's best interests record should show, how to run the annual engagement letter round, how to collect documents without a month of email, and what Australian rules mean for the way you record and keep client information.

Some posts will mention Briefi, and some will not need to. A good file note is a good file note whatever you write it in.

If you want to see how the editions fit your practice, start with the page for your work, or start a trial and run your next client meeting through Briefi.

Chidi Okechukwu Founder, Briefi

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