How do I record, approve, and publish minutes?

How do I take minutes?

Open a meeting's Minutes tab. You'll find one section per agenda item, each with a Notes field (what was discussed) and a Decision field (what was decided). Type straight into them — your changes save automatically a moment after you stop typing (a small "Saving…" then "Saved" note appears under each field), so navigating to another meeting tab, choosing ← All meetings, or reloading the page never loses what you typed. Prefer to be sure right away? Save item still saves immediately on demand. If a save ever fails, an error appears under the field so you always know whether your text made it — it's never silently dropped. If an item has a motion attached, its decision fills in for you from the recorded vote — choose auto-populate to pull in every decided motion's result at once, it never overwrites anything you've typed by hand.

These are the very same Notes/Decision fields you'd capture live in Run mode while the meeting is happening — one record, two places to write it, and both autosave the same way.

Below the agenda items sits a General notes card for anything that isn't about one specific item — a guest introduced, a late start, quorum reached at a particular time. It's there from the very first time you open a brand-new meeting's Minutes tab, with no need to import anything first: type into it and choose Save general notes. This is the same card the Import summary flow's "General notes" assignment lands in — however the text gets there, it's one record, so it's never duplicated.

Two views build themselves from your minutes as you go:

• The decision register — every decision the meeting made, including the vote breakdown for anything decided by a formal motion (and a plain "decided by consensus" note for anything that wasn't).
• The action register — follow-up items the meeting assigned. Each item can become a real, tracked task (see below).

Looking for a decision from a past meeting rather than the one you're taking minutes for right now? See How do I find a past decision? for the board-wide, searchable version of this same record.

The Notes/Decision fields, auto-populate, and Import summary only appear for a role that can edit minutes; everyone else sees the same notes and decisions read-only rather than a form they can't submit.

How do I turn follow-ups into tasks?

The action register lists what the meeting agreed to do next — but a line in the minutes isn't something anyone can be held to. Turn each one into a real task that shows up on the Tasks page and is tracked to completion.

• Choose Owner and Due date on an action-register item — both are optional — then choose Create task to convert just that one. Assigning an owner is what lets the task appear on that person's Your tasks on their Overview, and setting a due date is what lets it go overdue or show up as due soon, exactly like a task created directly on the Tasks page.
• Choose Create all as tasks at the top of the register to convert every remaining item at once. Any owner or due date you've already picked on a row is applied to the task created for it; a row you left blank still converts unassigned and undated, exactly like before — you can always pick an owner and due date for those afterward on the Tasks page, the same way you'd adjust any task.

Each new task is pre-filled with the action's text as its title and is linked back to this meeting, so on the Tasks page you can see which meeting it came from — and from the action register you can jump straight to the task it became.

Anyone you assign an action item to is told about it — a notice in their bell and, unless they've muted task email, a branded email with a button to the task and a second one back to these minutes. Create all as tasks sends one message per person, not one per task: a director who picked up six action items gets a single notice naming them. You're never notified about the items you kept for yourself, and a task with no due date still announces itself — see Does the person I assign a task to get told?.

Converting is safe to repeat: an item you've already turned into a task shows its Linked task, its current status, and its captured Owner/Due date instead of the picker — an item with neither reads "Unassigned" / "No due date", the same wording the minutes PDF prints, so what you see on screen and what you download always agree. An overdue item is called out with an Overdue label next to its due date, not just a color change. Create all as tasks skips anything already converted — so you never end up with duplicates, and re-converting never changes an owner or due date you (or someone else) already set on the task.

Can I import a summary from Zoom, Teams, or an AI notetaker?

Yes — choose Import summary on the Minutes page. It's a paste-and-assign flow, not AI generation: nothing is auto-written or auto-sorted, and no model runs on your meeting.

That's a different feature from Draft with AI, which appears on the same page when your administrator has configured AI drafting and writes a first draft from the record you already captured — see How does AI minutes drafting handle our board's information?.

1. Paste your external summary, or upload a small .txt, .md, or .vtt file. A .vtt transcript (from Zoom, Teams, Otter, Fireflies, and the like) is cleaned to plain text for you — timestamps and cue data are removed, while the spoken text and any speaker labels are kept.
2. Select a passage and choose Add selection. Assigning it to an agenda item is optional — the picker starts on General notes (no agenda item), which keeps the text with the meeting as a whole; choose an agenda item instead only when a passage belongs to one. Repeat for each part — you decide where everything goes.
3. Choose Import. Each assigned block lands in that item's draft notes, marked with an Imported chip so you can see what came from the summary. The chip clears as soon as you edit that item by hand.

Importing never changes the approval state, and approved (locked) minutes refuse an import — reopen them for correction first.

Anything in General notes also shows up on the meeting's Details tab as a Meeting summary card, rendered from its Markdown (headings, lists, bold, links) — so a summary you import from Fireflies or a similar notetaker is the first thing a member who missed the meeting sees, not something buried at the bottom of the Minutes tab. The card is read-only; editing stays here on Minutes.

How do I approve minutes?

A compact Approval status bar sits at the top of the page, above the minute-item sections, so you always know where the record stands without scrolling: the current stage, whether it's locked, and (once approved) the version, when it was approved, and who approved it. The approval time reads in the meeting's own time zone with the zone named, so it matches the date stamped on the downloaded PDF. Choose Quorum details to expand the underlying quorum arithmetic — it's tucked out of the way until you want it.

Minutes move through three stages:

1. Draft — still being written; edit freely.
2. Circulated — sent out for the board to review. You can send it back to draft if it needs more work.
3. Approved — the board has adopted it as the official record.

Choose Circulate for review, then Approve minutes once the board signs off. Both confirmations state exactly what's about to happen before you commit. Circulate for review tells you who is about to be notified; Approve minutes states that approving locks the minutes (no more silent edits), stamps a version number and who approved it, and freezes a snapshot of that meeting's quorum exactly as it stood at approval time.

Circulate for review and Approve minutes are separate permissions, so you may see one without the other depending on your role — for example, a chair who signs off on minutes but doesn't draft them sees Approve minutes without the drafting controls above.

Circulating notifies the board it's their turn to read a draft

Choosing Circulate for review does more than flip the status chip: every member entitled to review the minutes — the whole board, or just the committee for a committee meeting — is told a draft is ready, with a link straight to it. The notice is explicit that this is a draft open for correction, not the adopted record, so nobody mistakes "please review this" for "this is now official". Each member is reached the way they've asked to be — in their notifications bell, by email, or both, per their own notification preferences — and the circulation is recorded in the audit log with the number of members it reached.

Sending it back to draft and circulating it again notifies the board a second time — reviewers need to know there's a new draft to look at. Re-circulating the same draft (for example, from a repeated click) never double-notifies.

Beyond the notice itself, circulated minutes also show up on every reviewer's own Overview page, under Minutes awaiting your review, until they're approved or sent back to draft — so a director doesn't have to remember to check the meeting page to know a draft is waiting on them.

In the rare case the status changes but the notice itself couldn't be sent, BoardTools says so plainly instead of claiming everyone was told — the confirmation you see warns that members were not notified and suggests sending the minutes back to draft and circulating again. The same honesty applies if, at the moment you circulate, no one is currently entitled to review it (for example, an empty committee): the status still moves to Circulated, but you're told plainly that there was no one to notify, rather than being told everyone was.

Approving publishes the minutes to the board

Approving is also publishing: every member of the board — including someone who's been invited but hasn't signed in yet — is told the minutes are available, with a link straight to them — this is the adopted record notice, distinct from the draft-review one above. The notice reaches each member the way they've asked to be reached — in their notifications bell, by email, or both, per their own notification preferences. Each approval is recorded in the audit log with the number of members it reached.

It's sent once per approved version, so approving the same version again notifies no one twice.

Need to fix something after the fact? Reopen for correction unlocks an approved record back to draft — its confirmation is a reminder to use it deliberately, since you're amending an adopted record, not editing a work-in-progress. Reopening on its own tells the board nothing — no notification goes out — but it IS recorded in the audit log, so there's always a trace of when an adopted record was reopened and by whom; the board is notified again when you approve the corrected minutes, which is a new version (and again, separately, if you choose to circulate the correction for review first).

Good governance tip: circulate minutes for review before your next meeting, not at it — most boards' bylaws expect prior minutes to be approved (or at least reviewed) early in the following meeting's agenda.

Did the minutes actually reach everyone?

Both notices — the draft you circulate for review and the adopted record you publish — get their own Did the draft reach everyone? and Did the adopted minutes reach everyone? sections at the foot of the Minutes page. Each shows one row per email: the recipient's name, the exact address it went to, what happened to it, and when.

The headline says whether anything went wrong — No delivery problems reported, or for example 1 of 8 emails did not arrive — so you can tell at a glance whether every director actually received the draft you're expecting them to review, or the record you've just adopted. A row that didn't arrive also carries an explicit Did not arrive line and, where the mail provider gave one, the reason.

The statuses read the same way they do for a board packet: Queued (not yet sent), Sent (handed to the mail provider), Delivered (confirmed arrival), and then the ones to act on — Bounced, Blocked, Marked as spam, Quarantined, Failed. Only Delivered means it landed.

The two notices are reported separately, and the published one names its version, so a bounce on the circulated draft is never mistaken for a bounce on the adopted record — and version 2's delivery is never read as version 1's. A member who has switched this topic's email off in their own notification preferences has no row here: they were told in the app, and the section says how many members that accounts for.

Why it matters: most bylaws let a board rely on minutes having been circulated before they're adopted. If a director's address bounced, they never got the draft — and this is where you find that out, rather than at the meeting.

Who can see this? Delivery outcomes are organizer-only, gated on the same permission as editing the meeting itself (administrators, chairs, staff liaisons). One member's bounced address is not something the rest of the board sees.

Can I download the minutes as a PDF?

Yes — choose Download PDF at the top of the Minutes page. It compiles a branded, paginated PDF with the meeting header, the attendance and quorum picture, the notes and recorded decision for every agenda item (in the same order shown on screen), the decision register with each motion's vote breakdown, the action register with every follow-up's owner and due date (an unclaimed action reads "Unassigned" and "No due date" rather than a blank), and the approval trail (when the record was drafted and, once adopted, when and by whom).

You can download at any stage:

• Draft or circulated minutes download with a DRAFT watermark on every page — a working copy, not the record of adoption.
• Approved minutes download as the clean, adopted record; downloading it is recorded as an audited event.

The PDF always reflects exactly what the Minutes page currently shows — it's compiled fresh each time you choose Download PDF, so it never goes stale between edits.

Every date in the export is written in the meeting's own time zone — the one printed on the cover page under Time zone — so the Drafted and Approved dates in the approval trail name the same calendar day the board was sitting on, not the day it happened to be somewhere else in the world. The cover's Generated stamp names its zone too. The approval time also appears on the Approval bar on screen, so you can check a downloaded record against the app at a glance.

If the meeting was run in the live cockpit, the cover also prints a Called to order line — the actual instant a manager chose Start meeting, beside (never instead of) the scheduled When above it. It's the standard "the meeting was called to order at …" line most boards' minutes expect, filled in for you rather than retyped by hand, and it's read in the same meeting-zone rule as everything else on the cover. A meeting the chair never actually started through Run mode — an off-platform sitting, for instance — simply has no such line; the export never guesses or falls back to the scheduled time.