Meeting minutes are notes taken of the discussions that take place throughout the course of a meeting. They’re useful for documenting decisions and activities that take place so that they can be referred to in the future.

How to Take Minutes for a Meeting

1. Put a Date on It
2. Create an Agenda
3. Create List of Attendees
4. Amendments to Previous Meeting Minutes
5. Voting Decisions
6. Next Steps
7. New Business
8. Items to Be Carried Over
9. Schedule the Next Meeting

Minutes in this context has nothing to do with time, and everything to do with the abbreviation for a Latin phrase, minuta scriptura—small notes. In other words, meeting minutes are all about condensing the main points of a business meeting for future reference or legal record.

In some cases, the law requires that meeting minutes are recorded, such as a legal dispute brought to arbitration or a disciplinary meeting for an employee. Capturing what transpired in writing is a great way to avoid unmerited blame if an offended (or forgetful) party recalls what transpired differently.

But if you run a small business, why should you take down notes of what transpired during routine meetings? After all, your business may not be beholden to corporate shareholders, and you are not in a court of law. The answer lies in proactivity, especially as it relates making your enterprise look like a legitimate business on paper.

For instance, meeting minutes are important if you want to avoid having your corporate veil pierced. Such activity on paper solidifies your enterprise as a true business activity, and not just a casual meeting.

What is the Purpose of Meeting Minutes?

Many of the backend parts of your business can be passed off to a third party, such as marketing, supply and inventory, and even the legal filings served to a registered agent. But the executive functioning of the business cannot be passed off to anyone outside the executives and the board. These meeting minutes help keep all shareholders in the loop of what is going on so they can exercise their voting rights if they so choose by showing up to meetings or calling for a new meeting. Meeting minutes also give legal validity to your business operations, so that, for instance, if you are audited or taken to court, there is a paper trail of any contested matter.

There are also specific situations where meeting minutes come in handy. For example, you can actually use your home as a meeting place and write it off as a business expense—but you need to make it evident that a real meeting took place. You can do so by recording meeting minutes.

How to Take Minutes for a Meeting

Now that we’ve talked about why it’s important to take meeting minutes, let’s discuss the best practices for doing so:

1. Put a Date on It

What is the date and time of your meeting? And what about the location? While you don’t need to provide geographic coordinates, you should list the name of the place (e.g. a rented meeting room at the San Jose Marriott) and the date and time.

2. Create an Agenda

The agenda will lay out what is to be discussed at the meeting, no matter how it actually turns out. For example, an agenda could state that you are going to discuss pivoting your social media marketing strategy after an errant account manager got your business banned from Facebook for making rude replies to customer comments.

3. Create a List of Attendees

List the people who attended the meeting, first and last names, and if applicable, their position within the company. It is important that you capture in writing whether or not a quorum was present.

A quorum represents the minimum number of board members required to be present for voting on a decision. The reason a quorum is established is to prevent too much power from falling into the hands of a select portion of the corporate board. Whatever the quorum is at your company, make note of whether or not that number was present. In some cases, the lack of a quorum may mean that you cannot vote on certain issues.

4. Amendments to Previous Meeting Minutes

Take note if any minutes from previous meetings are going to be amended for accuracy. Mistakes do happen, so if they are caught, they should be fixed.

To return to our earlier example, let us say that the errant social media manager was previously cited as one person, when in actuality it was a different person. This should be amended.

In many cases, a company will establish a policy that states amendments to minutes from previous meetings requires a two-thirds vote of approval. One way to facilitate the transparency required for correcting erroneous corporate records is to allow for a process whereby a shareholder or employee can put in a request for meeting minutes.

5. Voting Decisions

Now it is time to take note of how the discussed agenda actually turns out. Items on the agenda will be put to a vote, and the vote must be tallied and noted in order to cement the policy moving forward.

During this time, it may not be necessary to hammer out all the fine details of a business decision if they can be passed on to third parties or the employee dedicated to handling those concerns.

6. Next Steps

What will the next steps be regarding decisions voted upon and made? While this section does not need to be very detailed, it should briefly outline the relevant points in regards to carrying the business strategy forward.

For example, if the decision is to reach out to Facebook to have an account ban overturned, that will need to be noted.

7. New Business

Meetings are a great place to bring up new items of business discussion. These can range from fixing a broken light in the restroom to discussing the assemblage of a sales team for a new selling territory. Whatever they are, these particulars should be noted, and if they are voted on or a point person with executive decision-making power in this area exercises their prerogative, that should be noted as well. Otherwise, these items need to be carried over to the next meeting.

8. Items to Be Carried Over

Sometimes you cannot discuss everything at a meeting. According to some surveys, around 41 percent of business meetings last between 30 and 60 minutes, while 39 percent last under 30 minutes, and just 13 percent last up to 90 minutes.

This means that not everything that everybody wants to discuss is going to get brought up, and some items, especially new items, will likely need to be put on the schedule for future discussion.

9. Schedule the Next Meeting

Now it’s time to end the meeting (note the time) and schedule the next one. Part of scheduling the meeting should involve a discussion of who is going to take the meeting minutes and formalize them into something more permanent.

For example, if they were written by hand, they should be typed up. You may choose to share the minutes internally with a select group or with everyone in the business. Alternatively, you may choose to use those minutes to spin out a blog post or email newsletter for your clients.

Do You Need to Share Your Meeting Minutes?

Not in all cases. For instance, an executive session is a safe space for the board to discuss matters privately. In the case of a publicly traded company, though, shareholder meetings must be open to the public, and anyone in the general public who holds shares of company stock can acutely exercise their voting rights.

The type of relationship your business has with the general public is a matter you should consult with an attorney for. Especially if someone outside your company requests to see meeting minutes—even if that someone is a government agency, like the IRS. You can also discuss this matter ahead of time when you engage an attorney or firm for business entity formation.

Who Should Record the Meeting Minutes?

At a large corporate board meeting, such as one for a Fortune500 organization, it’s likely there are a number of secretarial participants who are taking board meeting minutes, perhaps using a company-specific board meeting minute template for capturing the meeting agenda, action items, and other key points.

But board meeting minutes are not the only kind of formal meeting minutes that need to be documented. Official meeting minutes are an important way to keep a written record of even something as informal as a weekly sales team meeting or morning huddle. One of the best practices in regards to this area is to have a designated note taker.

Of course, writing minutes for a formal meeting is also important, so if a designated note taker can be a meeting attendee, this can free up any given board member, manager, or even employee needed for parsing out a key decision from having to take meeting minutes.

It can be especially helpful for a small business without a board meeting minutes template to outsource the meeting template to a third party corporate concierge, preferably one that is conversant in issues of corporate compliance. The experts at Anderson Advisors can help you go beyond the necessity of writing meeting minutes by checking over them to make sure they are drafted and formalized into paperwork that can help you avoid compliance issues. Effective minutes, whether they are about marketing strategies or human resources, can make sure every meeting is an effective meeting that generates concrete business guidance and creates referenceable points of company policy.

If you are the business owner, you don’t have time for such follow up work—which is why it’s beneficial to pass on the material collected by the minute taker to a corporate concierge service that can solidify them into a good meeting minute outline.

Meeting Minutes Create Solid Business Practices

As you can see, meeting minutes are formulaic and should adhere to a standard template in order to look legitimate. The same is true for many other aspects of running a business and capturing its validity on paper.

However, that process can prove to be cumbersome and time consuming to navigate. For this reason, it’s often beneficial to seek the assistance of legal entity management services, like those provided by Anderson Business Advisors. As previously mentioned, we can also provide corporate concierge services, which include providing a meeting minutes template, along with drafting, finalizing, and amending meeting minutes as necessary.

Remember that taking minutes is more than just a formality. Effective meeting minutes can guide your business operations and serve as legal paperwork in case an issue of compliance or corporate legality ever arises.

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