If you must have meetings, you should probably make sure those meetings matter, shouldn’t you? (especially since, according to our post on meeting statistics, a lot of people think their current meetings could’ve just been an email) There’s nothing worse than trying to reference something that happened in a meeting but having no actual record of the thing that happened. This is where meeting minutes come in, as they help ensure that the important beats of every meeting are available for use later.

That said, keeping track of meeting minutes can be a drag, especially if your team, company, or organization doesn’t have an established meeting minutes template in place. A good meeting minutes template (or templates, in case you hold different types of meetings) can make tracking the events of every meeting simple, and shave a lot of minutes off the process.

Accurate and thorough meeting minutes can make your whole team’s jobs easier, so we’ve compiled the following list of tips for creating templates you can follow. We also created some of our own minutes templates you can download to automate the process.

What Are Meeting Minutes?

Meeting minutes provide a record of what happened in a meeting, as well as important details like the time, date, and attendees. What the minutes look like can vary for different types of meetings; minutes for a board meeting would contain different information than, say, corporate minutes or the minutes for an internal team meeting.

Typically, meeting minutes are reserved for more “official” meetings that will likely be referenced over and over again by people who both attended and didn’t attend the meeting.

Because they’re considered official records and legally binding, meeting minutes are usually approved by multiple members of the governing body of the entity holding the meeting — usually either management or the board. This process typically takes place at the beginning of the next meeting, and an official meeting minutes template can ensure that the approved minutes happen quickly and efficiently.

Who Takes Minutes In Meetings?

The person who takes minutes in meetings is called the minute taker or meeting recorder, but that role can be held by anyone (an assistant, a secretary, or anyone willing, really) as long as they are appointed beforehand by the meeting’s governing body. For less formal meetings, the minute taker can just be someone the group appoints before the meeting begins.

A good meeting notes template can help whoever takes the meeting minutes, but there are other options that can automate the process entirely. Read on!

What Meeting Minutes Should Include

The exact details that should be included in a meeting minutes document can depend on the specific type of meeting or corporate meeting minutes template, but most notes documents or templates should contain:

• Meeting title. This title will typically contain the name of the organization and the type of meeting that was held. “Rev Quarterly Board Meeting,” for example.
• Date, time, and location. Include the physical location of the meeting, but if there are remote locations, be sure to list them.
• List of attendees. This includes names, titles, and roles (if any) in the meeting.
• Agenda items. A list of topics planned for discussion.
• Open issues. Items that surfaced in the last meeting but were not fully resolved.
• Next steps. Action items to be tackled.
• Adjournment. The time the meeting wrapped up.
• Next meeting date. If decided upon during the current meeting.

These are the bare essentials for any meeting minutes template. Depending on your organization’s needs, you might consider adding a summary, voting results, highlights, or anything else (as long as it’s formatted succinctly).

Meeting Minutes Templates

To keep minutes consistent, we strongly recommend using a meeting minutes template for every type of meeting you hold. A good template can save a lot of time otherwise spent organizing notes by providing a clean, clear list of required items. A template essentially is just a list of notes from the meeting but presented in a way that is simple to reference, fill out, and compare over time.

While specific details can vary, there are two broad types of meeting minutes templates: business meeting templates and board meeting templates. Business meetings are typically held by management or senior officials of a company, while board meetings are held by the board of directors or trustees.

At Rev, our primary goal is to streamline your workflow and boost productivity for your entire team. As such, we’ve created minutes templates that do both.

Business Meeting Template

Our business meeting template is more of an all-purpose template you can use for all types of meetings even though it’s geared specifically for corporate or business meetings. It includes:

• Meeting title
• Name of the meeting (or the person taking the meeting notes), date, and location
• Attendees (present and absent)
• Agenda items
• Open issues
• Next steps

This template is best used as a printout, but you can edit the download using Adobe Acrobat.

Board Meeting Template

Our board meeting template is similar to what you’d use for a business meeting, with a few added sections. It includes:

• Meeting title
• Name, date, time, and location
• Attendees (present and absent)
• Opening remarks
• Approvals/denials
• Unfinished action items
• Agenda items
• Decisions made
• Adjournment time
• Next steps

This template is best used as a printout, but you can edit the download using Adobe Acrobat.

Benefits of Taking Good Minutes

Because meeting minutes are an official and (in many states) legally binding record of business and board meetings, it’s important to take clear and accurate meeting minutes. Using templates helps the minute taker record exactly what transpired, in real time.

Accurate and thorough meeting minutes can help save time and effort in the moment by acting as “official” notes of events, but they can also help long-term. With consistent meeting minutes, companies can compare the evolution of their meeting and the ideas proposed within them. They’re also official reference points for votes, decisions, actions to be taken, and other meeting activities. Essentially, meeting minutes hold everyone accountable for what is said and done.

Let AI Do The Heavy Lifting

While there will almost always be a human involved in taking meeting minutes, AI is stepping up to take the load off of the minute-takers of the world through workflow automation and meeting minute transcription. Most meetings held today are recorded, and most of those are then transcribed with AI tools. AI transcription makes traditional note-taking in a meeting a thing of the past.

New platforms like VoiceHub go even further by automatically transcribing and summarizing any meeting. VoiceHub is especially helpful with meeting minutes because it’ll create a template based on the content of your meeting that you can then customize and use over and over. Whatever your preferred meeting notes format, VoiceHub can help.

Rev Makes Meetings Matter

If your meeting is important enough to include meeting minutes (and let’s be honest, even if it’s not) Rev is here with a variety of tools to make recording, transcribing, and summarizing your meeting as easy as possible so it’ll be on record forever.

Rev VoiceHub goes even further by providing automatic template generation, meeting insights and highlights, and even the ability to attend meetings in your place.