Meeting Action Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-74 is an action tracker that runs across meetings rather than inside one. You record what was agreed, who agreed to do it and by when; it ages every open action, flags the overdue and the blocked, works out how long closures actually take, and shows the close rate meeting by meeting.

It exists because of a specific failure: a room agrees ten things, the minutes are circulated, and four weeks later six of them are read out again unchanged. A tracker that spans meetings makes that visible instead of comfortable.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so meeting content, names and commercial detail never leave the computer you are using.

What belongs in the tracker

Record one row per thing that was agreed. Not the discussion, not the attendance, not the paper that was tabled — those belong in the minutes. This is the list of what has to change as a result.

Write the action so that a person who was not in the room could do it. "Get three quotes for replacing the pallet wrapper and bring them back to the next review" can be done. "Look into the wrapper" cannot, and it is the shape of wording that ends up carried forward three times.

A useful test before you write the row down: can you say what will exist when it is finished? If the answer is a document, a quote, a booking, a signed record or a changed procedure, you have an action. If the answer is "we will have thought about it", you have a discussion.

Actions, decisions, information and risks

Four categories, because rooms produce four different things and mixing them ruins your figures:

• Action — somebody has to do something. This is the only category with real work behind it.
• Decision — agreed and recorded. There is nothing to do; the value is that it is written down and can be pointed at later. Mark it Complete on the day of the meeting.
• Information — noted for the record. Same treatment as a decision.
• Risk — raised and needs watching. It may have an owner and a review date even though nobody can "finish" it.

One owner, one date

An owner is one named person. A department is not an owner; "Operations" has never done an action in its life. If two people are genuinely doing different halves, that is two rows.

The tool deliberately lets you save an action with no owner, because unowned actions are real and pretending otherwise just moves the lie into the register. Every one of them is flagged No owner and grouped under "Unassigned" in the owner chart. An unowned action is not an action; it is a wish with a reference number.

The same applies to the due date. "As soon as possible" is not a date and cannot be overdue, so an open action with no due date is flagged No due date and can never appear in the overdue figures. If a large part of your register carries that flag, your overdue count is flattering you.

The statuses, and what each one means

• Status — Means — Counted as
• Open — Agreed, not started — Open
• In progress — Started, not finished — Open
• Blocked — Waiting on something outside the owner's control — Open, and always at risk
• Carried forward — Rolled to a later meeting without being done — Open
• Complete — Done, with a date and an outcome note — Closed
• Cancelled — No longer required — Neither — removed from the close rate

Two rules are enforced when you save. A Complete action must carry a date completed, because the average days to close is built from it and a completed action with no date silently disappears from that figure. And a Blocked action must say what is blocking it — "blocked" on its own is not a status update, it is a way of not giving one.

Carried forward: the number that matters

The times-carried-forward count is the most useful field in this tool, and the one most registers do not have. Every time an action rolls to the next meeting without progress, add one.

An action carried forward once is normal — people are busy. Twice is a warning. Beyond that it almost never means the owner is slow. It usually means the action was never really accepted: the owner disagreed with it and did not say so, or could not do it and did not want to say so in front of the room, or it belonged to somebody who was not there and was assigned to whoever was.

Rolling it over a fourth time will not fix any of those. The right move at the threshold is to stop updating the status and put the action itself back on the agenda: is it still wanted, is this the right owner, and is anything actually in the way? Then either re-scope it with a new owner and a new date, or cancel it and say so. A register that is honest about what has been abandoned is worth more than one that is complete.

The two dates and how ageing works

Every action carries the date of the meeting that raised it, and — once done — the date it was completed. Ageing runs from the meeting date, not the due date, so an action that was given a generous deadline still shows its true age.

Cancelled actions have no days open and show a dash: they were never going to close, so ageing them tells you nothing. The age band groups the same figure into 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and over 90 days.

An action closed after its due date shows zero days late — it is not late any more, it is done — but it is flagged Closed late so the history is not lost.

All days are calendar days. No weekend or public holiday calendar is applied anywhere in this tool, because those differ by country, by region and sometimes by site. An action due on a Friday is one day late on the Saturday.

Every figure, in full

The six headline tiles are calculated from whatever the current filter shows.

Three points of care, in the order they usually cause trouble:

• The average uses completed actions only. Open actions are not in it at any weight. That matters more than it sounds: if your worst actions never close, the average gets better the longer they sit there. Read it alongside the overdue count, never on its own.
• Cancelled actions leave the close rate entirely, top and bottom. Otherwise cancelling everything awkward would look identical to finishing it. They are still counted in "Actions raised", and the tile says how many were cancelled.
• The average is suppressed on thin data. Below the minimum you set in Settings, it shows a dash rather than a confident number built from two closures.

"Completed" counts actions from meetings inside the date filter that are now complete — the filter runs on the meeting date, not on the completion date. So it answers "how much of what this period raised has been done", not "how much was closed during this period". Those are different questions and it is worth knowing which one you are quoting.

Reading the charts

Open actions by owner counts only open actions. The bar turns red when any of that owner's actions are overdue, and the figure beside it splits the total into open and overdue. Someone carrying eight open actions with none overdue is coping; someone carrying two with both overdue is not.

Actions by status is the shape of the register. A large Open plus Carried forward segment against a small Complete one is the signature of a meeting that reads its actions out rather than working through them.

Actions raised each month groups by the month of the meeting and splits each bar by where those actions stand today — closed, still open, cancelled. It is not a chart of closures per month. A recent month with a large open segment is expected. A six-month-old one with the same shape is the finding.

Overdue actions by meeting attributes the overdue work to the room it came from. When one meeting owns most of it, the fix is usually in how that meeting assigns work — vague wording, absent owners, no dates — rather than in the individuals named.

Settings

Overdue warning days sets how far ahead an open action is flagged "Due soon". It has no effect on the overdue count, which is always strictly past the due date.

Carried-forward flag threshold is the point at which an open action is called stalled. The default of two flags anything carried a third time.

Minimum closed actions for an average guards the average days to close against being reported from a handful of closures.

Target close rate is only used as the comparison text in the meeting summary. It is your own standard — there is no industry figure here, and one would not survive being applied to a board meeting and a daily stand-up at the same time.

Running the meeting from this list

The list is most useful if it drives the meeting rather than following it. A workable order: overdue and blocked first, stalled next, then anything due before the following meeting. Closed actions get read as a single number, not one by one.

Update the status while you are in the room, not afterwards. An action closed with an outcome note written the same day is evidence; the same action closed from memory three weeks later is a guess.

Print the report before the meeting and take the at-risk table in with you. It is ordered worst first, and it carries the blocker text, so the awkward items are dealt with while people are still awake.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot tell whether an action was completed properly — only that somebody set the status to Complete and put a date against it. The outcome note is the only evidence in the register, which is why it is worth writing.

It does not know about dependencies between actions, it does not send reminders, and it has no concept of effort or cost. It cannot tell a genuine blocker from a convenient one. And it cannot make a meeting decide things: a tracker full of vague actions with no owners is an accurate record of a meeting that is not working.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, the six headline figures, all four charts, the at-risk table, the meeting summary, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it or attach it to the minutes.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the full register, and remember that the date filter works on the meeting date.

Saving your work

Actions, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. If the register is passed between a chair and a secretary, that file is the handover. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether a status is honest, whether a due date was ever agreed by the owner, or whether an action marked Complete was done to any standard — and every figure on the screen depends on all three.

It is an internal record-keeping and calculation aid. It is not minutes, not a governance record, not evidence of compliance with anything, and not a substitute for the meeting doing its job.