The importance of good meeting minutes?

Minutes are a legal record of the business transacted at the meeting. The board secretary (sometimes the CEO in small companies) records the meeting’s proceedings and decisions as they occur and prepares the minutes at the conclusion of each meeting.

Minutes of board meetings are legally required in Australia (Corporations Act 2001) and New Zealand (Companies Act 1993). In practice, previous board minutes should be signed and confirmed at the next board meeting. Directors should thoroughly review the minutes before this, as once the minutes are confirmed, only clerical errors can be changed. For those not using board portal software such as BoardPro, a minutes template is a useful place to start. Click the image or link below to download our ‘Best Practise’ template.

Outside of commercial board meetings though, are minutes of general business meetings useful for committees and nonprofit organisations?

Well the answer to that is another question. Does your meeting deserve or demand a simple record of events, to capture key points, assign actions and record decisions made?

If the answer to that question is YES, then the next question might be, what templates are available to assist with that function?

In response to the above we have borrowed the format and structure of a BoardPro ‘Best Practise’ meeting template and created a simple word document template you may wish to use in your next meeting. Whilst it is focused on commercial board meetings, It can be used for any commercial, nonprofit or committee meeting format. Feel free to remove sections not required for your own meeting structure.

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