Template for Writing Meeting Minutes, Step by Step

What are meeting minutes for?

The discussions are over, the participants have left, the work seems finished. Yet one essential step remains to close the meeting properly: writing the minutes. Whatever the company's requirements, good minutes follow a few rules, because they have two jobs.

• Remind each participant of the essential points discussed and of what they committed to do.
• Inform those who were not present of the purpose of the discussions and of the decisions taken.

Minutes that do neither are simply archived and forgotten. Minutes that do both become the starting point of the next meeting. For a broader view of the subject, see our complete guide to meeting minutes.

Choose the form of your minutes

The first step is to decide how detailed the document will be. The writer's workload depends directly on this choice.

For most business meetings, action minutes are enough, and they are the most likely to be read. Choose once, write it in the template, and keep the same form for a given meeting.

Steps for writing meeting minutes

1. Before the meeting: prepare the frame

Good minutes are based on the agenda. Copy the agenda items into your template before the meeting, with the header and the list of invited participants already filled in. During the meeting, you only have to complete each section.

2. During the meeting: note decisions, not sentences

Do not try to write everything down. For each agenda item, note the decision, the open questions and the actions, with who does what and by when. If a decision is unclear, ask for it to be restated before moving on: that is part of the writer's role. Our article on taking notes for a meeting report details the techniques.

3. After the meeting: write quickly

Start writing as soon as possible after the meeting, while the discussions are still fresh in your mind. The ideal is to have prepared the summary beforehand by taking effective notes, so that writing is mostly a matter of cleaning up.

4. Have it checked, then send it

Have the minutes reread by the chair of the meeting, then send them to the attendees, the absentees and anyone affected by the decisions. Send them before the actions start, not the week after.

The writing template, section by section

The secretary or writer follows a rigorous format. Here is the template, with the sentence to write for each section.

The themes are presented in the order of the agenda, which is generally the chronological order of the meeting. For the layout of the final document (header, fonts, action table), see our template for the presentation of a meeting report.

Wording rules that make minutes useful

• State decisions affirmatively. "The budget is approved" rather than "the budget was discussed and seems acceptable".
• Start each action with a verb. "Send the revised schedule to the client" is clear; "schedule" alone is not.
• One owner per action. When several people are involved, name the one who answers for it. The RACI matrix helps to separate the owner from the contributors.
• Precise dates. "15 March" rather than "soon" or "next month".
• Neutral tone. Minutes report what was decided, not the writer's opinion. In action minutes, decisions are attributed to the meeting, not to individuals.
• Short sentences, no unexplained acronyms. The minutes must be understood by someone who was not there.

Minutes, a tool with multiple objectives

By following these few rules, it is easy to produce clear and useful minutes. A good title and a good structure allow the reader to:

• locate the meeting instantly;
• know who attended;
• understand what was discussed;
• identify the essential information: decisions and actions;
• prepare the next meeting by recalling the points raised previously.

That last objective is often overlooked. The action table of one set of minutes is the first agenda item of the next meeting: what is done, what is late, what is blocked. To see this cycle on a real case, read our example of management committee minutes.

Writing minutes with a dedicated tool

If you are new to writing minutes, a template and a few examples are the best way to learn. When meetings follow one another, a dedicated tool removes most of the copying. In Perfony, the agenda prepared before the meeting becomes the structure of the minutes, decisions and actions are entered live, and each action joins the shared action plan with its owner and deadline. At the next meeting, the review of previous actions is already there.