Minutes

Minutes in BoardPro...

The taking, distributing and confirming of minutes form an integral part of any board meeting. While a legal requirement for boards, this process eats up precious time. BoardPro offers easy minute taking which allows you to take minutes in a logical process. Minute taking is included in all plans in BoardPro.

The board meeting cycle in BoardPro guides you from drafting your agenda through to confirming your minutes. Once you’ve completed the steps up to publishing your agenda, you’ll then see the option to ‘take minutes’. This is this stage where you can write minutes directly in BoardPro during your meeting, and confirm the last minutes.

To maximise functionality and increase automation, BoardPro breaks down minute taking into three types: notes, decisions and actions. You follow the agenda and record each of these types of minutes against the agenda item they reference, allowing you to accurately capture what was discussed at the meeting.

Notes are used for flexibly recording discussion that takes place in your meeting. You can add multiple notes for an agenda item or use a single one to capture all relevant discussion. BoardPro’s options for formatting in the notes will allow you to add tables, bullet points, change text colour and more.

Decisions are entered during the meeting and the outcomes of these flow directly into your decision register. Enter a decision title, outcome and details, with the option to drop in a mover and seconder as required. Recording decisions this way is advantageous, as you can search past decisions from any meeting in your decision register.

Actions are captured by entering a title, action owner, due date and details. Once minutes have finished being written, you can send an action notice to the owners, and BoardPro will automatically send reminders to the owner, which saves administrator time and stress spent on following up the status of actions. Action owners are sent two reminders, one a week before the action’s due date, and the second on the due date, with the timing of the first being configurable in your settings. Owners can login and update the status of their action, but also have the option for administrators to do this on their behalf.

Confirming the minutes of the previous meeting is a key task that also occurs in the minute taking stage. The minutes that have been scheduled for confirmation at this meeting can be confirmed with just one click. Once this step has been done, the last set of minutes cannot be edited, and they will be a ‘read-only’ document on your account.

To complete the meeting administration, you can perform the three post-meeting tasks. Firstly, you can send the minutes out for review. Whether to your whole board or just your chair first, it’s within your control. Next, you can send out action notices, letting the assigned owners know that an action has been allocated to them. The final post-meeting task is scheduling the minutes you have just finished for confirmation at a future meeting. Reduce the amount of time you spend on writing, formatting and distributing your board meeting minutes with BoardPro.