Meeting Minutes Manager

What this tool does

CM8-234 is a full minutes manager. Each row is one minute item — an agenda discussion, a decision, an action or a note for the record — belonging to one meeting, identified by its title and date. One file comfortably holds a whole meeting series ("Ops weekly", month after month) or several different meetings side by side, and because it is all one register, it is all searchable: every decision ever made, every action ever assigned, in one place, forever.

The tool tracks the actions to completion across meetings, shows whether the meetings are actually producing decisions, and prints the latest meeting's items in order — which is the set of minutes you circulate. Everything runs inside this single file: no account, no upload, no network request of any kind, so what was said in the room stays on the computer you are using.

Why minutes exist

Minutes are not a transcript. Nobody re-reads a transcript, and writing one turns the note-taker into a stenographer instead of a participant. Minutes exist to preserve exactly two things: what was decided and who will do what, by when. Everything else — the discussion, the context, the numbers presented — is recorded only as far as it explains those two.

The test of a good minute is six months later: someone asks "why do we do the stock count on a Monday?" and the register answers in one search — decided on such a date, proposed by whom, for what reason, with what alternative rejected. If your minutes cannot do that, they are decoration.

The four item types, and the discipline of separating them

Every item is one of four types, and keeping them separate is most of the craft:

• Agenda item — something was discussed. The minute summarises the discussion in a few sentences: what the situation is, what the numbers were, where the disagreement sat. It is context, not commitment.
• Decision — something was decided. The strictest type: the tool will not save a decision with an empty minute field, because a decision that says only "packing film" records nothing.
• Action — someone will do something. Requires an owner and a due date, without exception (see the action rules).
• Information — noted for the record. Attendance, a dates-for-your-diary note, a figure tabled without discussion.

The discipline matters because the types blur in the room. A discussion drifts into "so we'll do that then" — is that a decision? If it changed what the organisation will do, minute it as a decision with its own item. "KA will look into it" — is that an action? If it matters, yes, with a name and a date; if it does not survive being given a date, it was never really an action. The type-mix chart keeps the meeting honest over time: a series whose items are almost all information is a status email with chairs, and the fix is an agenda that asks questions needing answers rather than reports needing nods.

Writing decisions that survive re-reading

A decision minute is read twice: once the day after, by people who were there, and once months later, by someone who was not. Write for the second reader. A durable decision records four things:

• What was decided — in operational words. "Run a two-week trial of the 19-micron film on the retail line, starting Monday", not "discussed film options".
• Who decided — the approver or proposer, especially where money or authority is involved.
• What was rejected — the alternative considered and turned down, and why. This is the part everyone omits and the part that stops the same argument being re-had in three months.
• Any condition or limit — "maximum eight operatives", "revert immediately if puncture rates rise". Conditions are half the decision.

Two or four sentences is usually enough. If a decision needs a page, it probably needed a paper, and the minute should say "approved the paper tabled by MC" and where the paper lives.

The action rules

The tool enforces two rules on every action, and refuses to save the row otherwise:

• One named owner. "Someone should" means nobody will, and "the maintenance team" is a way of spelling nobody. One name — the person the next meeting will ask.
• A due date, even a rough one. An action without a date is a wish. If the honest answer is "sometime next month", put the end of next month — a rough date that gets reviewed beats no date that gets forgotten.

It also refuses a due date earlier than the meeting the action was raised in, which is nearly always a typo and occasionally a fantasy. Statuses run open → in progress → done; use superseded when a later decision made the action pointless, so your completion rate stays honest instead of carrying zombie actions forever.

The completion rate counts every action ever raised in the current filter, including superseded ones — a meeting that raises ten actions and closes two is running at 20% whatever the excuses, and the number is more useful blunt than flattered.

Running the meeting from last week's open actions

The single habit that separates meetings that work from meetings that recur: the first agenda item is always the action review. Before any new business, walk the open actions from every previous meeting — done, not done, or superseded, owner by owner, out loud.

The Open actions across all meetings table on the Reports tab is that agenda item, pre-built: every open and in-progress action, oldest due date first, marked Overdue, Due soon or Scheduled, with its age in days and the meeting it came from. Work down it from the top. Anything closed gets its status changed on the spot; anything carried gets said out loud, and the age column quietly records how many times. An action that has been carried three weeks running is not late — it is either not going to happen, in which case supersede it honestly, or it is blocked, in which case the blockage is the real agenda item.

Minute the review itself as an agenda item ("Review of open actions") with a one-line summary of what moved, as the sample does. The review takes five minutes and it is the five minutes that make the other fifty-five mean anything.

Attendance

Record attendance once per meeting, in the attendees field of the meeting's first item — the sample uses an information item titled "Attendance" as item 1, which keeps the printed minutes conventional. Initials are fine; record apologies too ("AF, KA, RS; apologies MC"). Attendance matters more than it looks: it establishes who heard a decision made, and therefore who cannot later claim they did not know. If a decision is challenged, "you were in the room and the minutes were circulated" is the whole answer.

The confidentiality flag

Some items do not belong in the circulated copy — an individual's performance, a negotiation position, a price. Tick Sensitive — exclude from shared copies on those items. Be clear about what the flag does: it marks the row so you can find and handle it; it does not automatically strip the item from a print or an export. Before circulating, either minute sensitive matters in deliberately neutral words ("a personnel matter was discussed; see the chair's confidential note"), or keep a separate file for the closed session — the traditional and safer answer. Assume any circulated copy will eventually be read by the person it is about.

Minutes vs an action tracker

There is a separate, simpler tool (CM8-74, the Meeting Action Tracker) that records only actions — no agenda, no decisions, no attendance. The split is deliberate. Use the action tracker when actions are the only output you care about and they flow in from many sources — a dozen different meetings, calls, corridor conversations — and what you want is one cross-cutting to-do list with ageing and close rates. Use this tool when the meeting itself needs a record: what was discussed, what was decided and by whom, who was present — with the actions kept in context. A governance meeting, a project board or any meeting whose decisions someone may later question needs the full minutes. A daily stand-up needs the tracker. Running both for the same meeting means typing every action twice, so pick one per meeting and stay with it.

Printing — the distributable minutes

Print Report is how minutes leave this tool. The report opens with the headline tiles and charts, then Minutes of the latest meeting — the most recent meeting's items in item-number order, with each minute, owner, due date and status — then the open actions across all meetings, then the full register. Print to PDF and circulate: the latest-meeting table is the conventional set of minutes, and the open-actions table is the first agenda item of the next one, so a single PDF closes one meeting and opens the next.

Two habits: circulate within a day or two, while memories can still correct the record; and check the filter line — the report reflects the current filter, so clear filters before printing anything described as complete, and deal with flagged items before the PDF leaves you.

FAQ

One file per meeting series, or one file for everything? Either works. A series per file keeps the charts clean, since items-per-meeting trends only mean much within one series. Several meetings in one file is fine too — the title and date keep them apart, and the open-actions table usefully merges them.

What about item numbers? Number items 1, 2, 3… within each meeting; the printed minutes follow that order. Attendance as item 1 and the action review as item 2 is a sensible standing pattern.

Do agenda and information items ever stay open? Rarely. They default to done because minuting them completes them. Leave one open only if the item itself is unfinished business that must reappear — though usually the honest version of that is an action with an owner.

Someone disputes the minutes — what now? That is the system working. Corrections belong at the next meeting: minute the correction as its own item there rather than silently editing history, and amend the original only once the room has agreed the change. Better still, read decisions and actions back at the end of each meeting so disputes die in the room.

Can I minute a decision made outside a meeting? Yes — give it the date it was made and a meeting title like "Decision between meetings", and confirm it at the next meeting. A decision that lives only in a chat thread is a decision you will one day fail to find.

Saving your work

Minute items, 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. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo. Minutes are often the only record an organisation keeps of its decisions — export after every meeting and keep the file where the meeting's papers live.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Minutes record what the note-taker heard, filtered through what they understood, and the gap between that and what was meant only shows itself when the minute is challenged. The strongest control is procedural, not technical: read the decisions and actions back to the room before the meeting closes, and circulate promptly so corrections arrive while memories are fresh.

Whether minutes are formally required, what they must contain, how they are approved and how long they must be kept differ by country, by sector and by the kind of body meeting — a company board, a charity's trustees and a project team all answer different rules. This is a record-keeping aid, not legal or governance advice, and its counts are only as good as the classification of the items behind them.