How to write meeting minutes

The test of a set of minutes is not whether it is complete. It is whether somebody who missed the meeting can act on them without ringing anyone. Most minutes fail that test in the same way: pages of what was discussed, and the decision buried in the middle of a paragraph.

What minutes are for

Three jobs, in order of how often they matter.

They are a record of decisions. Six months later, somebody asks when the board agreed to the tender, and the minute is the answer. This is the job that has legal weight. In the UK, section 248 of the Companies Act 2006 requires every company to cause minutes of all proceedings at directors’ meetings to be recorded and to keep them for at least ten years, and non-compliance is an offence by every officer in default. Section 249 then gives those minutes evidential force: authenticated by the chair of that meeting or of the next one, they are evidence of the proceedings, and the meeting is deemed duly held and convened. In Australia, ASIC’s own guidance to officeholders is blunter and shorter: make sure your company keeps proper records.

They are a task list. Whatever else the meeting produced, somebody has to do something by a date.

They are a defence. Not a dramatic one. Mostly they prevent the slow argument where two people remember a conditional approval differently.

Notice what is not on that list. Minutes are not a summary of the discussion, and they are not a courtesy to people who like seeing their contributions written down.

The header: date, attendees, apologies, chair

Robert’s Rules of Order sets out what the first paragraph carries: the kind of meeting, the name of the society, the date, the presence of the chair and the secretary, and whether the previous minutes were approved. That list has not needed updating in a century.

The board minutes example on this site puts all of it in a labelled block of 41 words: date, time, location including the video conference, chair, minute taker, and a one line statement that a quorum was present. Attendance is another 22 words, six names each with a role, and apologies is five: one name.

Two details in that header earn their place. The quorum line matters because without a quorum the decisions below it are not decisions. And the roles beside the names matter because in a year nobody will remember whether Priya Singh was the treasurer.

Per item: discussion in one line, decision, action, owner, due

This is the part that separates a usable minute from a long one, and the table below is the evidence. I counted every word of the ten agenda items in the example.

Across the seven substantive items, discussion takes 254 words and the six resolutions take 99. The longest single discussion is 54 words, on the financial result, and it exists mainly to carry two figures: the unaudited surplus and the revenue. The whole document is 608 words over three pages, for a meeting with ten items.

The shape to copy is: one to three sentences of context, then a resolution set off as its own labelled line, starting with “That”. The label matters more than the wording. A reader scanning the page finds every decision by looking for the same word in the same position, without reading a syllable of the surrounding text.

Actions get their own treatment. The example carries them twice, which sounds redundant and is not. Item 2, “Matters arising”, is a table of four actions from the previous meeting with owner and status, and item 8 is a table of six new actions with owner and due date. Prior actions are checked at the start; new actions are collected at the end. Nobody has to read the minutes to build the list.

One deviation worth flagging: Robert’s Rules says to record the name of the member who makes a motion but not the seconder. The example records both, which is normal practice for company boards and is often required by an entity’s own constitution. Follow your rules, not a book.

What not to record

The list is short and worth being strict about.

Do not record who said what in debate, unless a member formally asks for their dissent to be noted. Do not record opinions, tone, or the fact that an item was contentious. Do not record numbers that are not final; write “the unaudited result” if it is unaudited. Do not paste the substance of a confidential paper into a general minute.

The example handles the confidential item well. Item 7 is a CEO succession discussion, and what appears is 37 words of framing plus the resolution. The framework was endorsed and the chair was tasked with a next step. What individual directors thought about the incumbent is nowhere, which is the correct amount of it.

Formal minutes vs team notes

A board, a committee, an incorporated association and an owners corporation are all in the formal category. There are rules about who signs, how long records are kept and what counts as approval, and the format above exists to satisfy them.

A weekly team meeting is not in that category, and applying board format to it is why nobody writes team notes. For those, drop the header block to a single line, drop resolutions entirely, and keep only the decisions and the action table. Two headings, ten lines. If the meeting produced a status that other people need, that is a project status report instead, which is a different document with a different life.

Circulating and approving

Draft the same day if you can, because the cost of a correction rises steeply with time. Send the draft to the chair first, then to attendees, and mark it clearly as a draft until the next meeting accepts it. Approval is a motion at the next meeting, which is exactly what item 1 of the example is.

Keep the approved version somewhere sequential, with the date in the file name, and do not edit an approved minute. A correction is made by a resolution at a later meeting, recorded as such.

The example

The board minutes example runs three pages for a ten item meeting, and the two things worth stealing are the labelled resolution lines and the two action tables at either end. If your minutes carry as many tables as this one does, the document maker with tables is the right place to start. And if the meeting you are minuting is the one that signs off an HR document, there is a companion post on what to include in an employee handbook.