Meeting minutes are the official record of who said and did what during a meeting. That includes everything from decision-making to meeting details and company announcements.
Sounds easy, right?...
You'd be surprised.
That's why our team here at Plaud is going to share with you our in-depth guide on how to write meeting minutes, including templates and examples you can use at your next meeting.
We just want to warn you that poorly managed meetings cost businesses over $37 billion per year, according to Business Insider. You need to learn how to write meeting minutes the right way.
This guide covers everything you need to know about taking effective notes in your next meeting. We’ve included meeting minutes examples and our best-performing meeting minutes templates to get you started. Plus, we'll walk you through how AI-powered tools like the Plaud Note AI voice recorder make your life a lot easier by doing about half of the work for you.
Ready? Let's begin.
What Are Meeting Minutes?
Meeting minutes are a formal written record of the decisions, discussions, and assignments made during a meeting. Think of them like a meeting summary that ensures the team stays in sync. Minutes are official and shareable, in contrast to informal meeting notes, which might be disorganized and personal.
The key components of effective meeting minutes include:
- The start time (when the meeting was called) and when the meeting was adjourned
- Meeting details (e.g., meeting date, time, location, attendees)
- Agenda items and discussion
- Decisions and votes
- Action items with owners, tasks assigned, and due dates
- Significant announcements or updates
- The next meeting date (date and time)
Keep in mind that meeting minutes are not the same as a meeting transcript.
Transcripts record every word of a meeting, while meeting minutes record key points that participants need to recall and take action. They’re used for legal records, tracking accountability, and as a means of communication for those who were unable to attend.
What Should You Include When Writing Meeting Minutes?
In general, meeting minutes should include key decisions, assigned action items, and important discussion points. But the level of detail depends on several factors, such as who the minutes are for (e.g., an absent colleague vs. all board members) and the purpose of the meeting (e.g., planning the Christmas party vs. reviewing a financial report).
How to write meeting minutes may also depend on whether they will serve as documentation, reference, or compliance records.
Here’s what to include in effective meeting minutes:
- Date, time, and attendees: These key details are important for accountability.
- Meeting purpose: What’s the goal? This provides the context readers need to make sense of the summary.
- Agenda items: Break the minutes into sections matching the agenda. Your goal here is to maximize scannability and fast retrieval.
- Key discussions: You absolutely must capture the key points, but don't waste time capturing every word. Here's an example of a good minute detail: “Team discussed marketing budget concerns. Decision deferred until Q2.”
- Decisions made: Bold these if you can. Auditors, lawyers, and higher-ups care more about decisions than anything else. Make sure they're easy to spot.
- Action items: Who’s doing what by when? Write it clearly: “John – finalize vendor contract by March 15.”
- Follow-ups: The last step is to note unresolved issues. That way, they don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Meeting Minutes Should Exclude:
- Verbatim conversation or detailed discussions
- Personal opinions or off-topic tangents
- Confidential information (other than specifically authorized)
- Repetitive or unnecessary points
We understand that it can be difficult to keep minutes brief because it’s hard to know during the conversation what will matter most post meeting. This is why it’s helpful to use an AI-assisted notetaking tool.
These tools listen to the entire meeting and suggest meeting minutes automatically. Even if a responsible person is taking the minutes manually, AI note takers can help catch any important points that slip through the cracks.
How to Create Your Meeting Minutes With AI？
Taking meeting minutes with AI is as easy as pushing “record” and letting an AI tool record your meeting. After the meeting ends, AI tools automatically transcribe and organize your meeting into concise minutes you can file away or share.
Many skeptics claim that “AI cannot replace human experts” in meetings. While we admit that’s true, in reality, the biggest problem with meeting minutes is actually human error.
We all know how easy it is to get distracted during meetings or forget important points. Who hasn’t?
It’s also common to miss details when people talk over each other or talk too quickly.
That’s the beauty of AI: it solves these problems. It’s not replacing you (and probably never will). It’s there to complement your strengths and make up for minor human errors.
My team’s minutes got much easier to follow when we started using an AI note-taker called Plaud Note. Plaud Note is a physical recording device with an AI brain. It transcribes and summarizes meetings instantly and even recognizes who’s speaking. Plaud AI will save you hours each week and prevent you from missing a single detail.
Further Reading: Learn more about how to automate your notes with AI in this in-depth guide.
Here’s how our clients use Plaud Note to improve the meeting minutes from every meeting:
1. Prepare for a Productive Meeting
Before you open Plaud Note, set a purposeful agenda and write down the basics of the upcoming meeting (who’s attending, the date, the time, and the purpose of the meeting). The AI doesn’t have this context, so it’s helpful to write it down manually and add it to your AI minutes later.
2. Capture Everything With Plaud Note
During the meeting, let Plaud Note do the heavy lifting. It records every word, so you don’t have to stress or scribble down the details. A good way to think about it is that it's like your personal secretary or stenographer. It writes down everything so you can save your brain for more important tasks.
3. Extract Key Information
This is the #1 value of artificial intelligence for most of our customers.
Post meeting, Plaud Note creates a transcript and an AI summary. It can even understand nuance and pick out individual speakers and ideas. So, you can expect your Plaud AI meeting notes to contain high-level insights broken down into categories for easy scanning. For example, in a recent meeting, Plaud AI automatically organized our minutes into agenda recap, outcomes, and revised deadlines. It understood everything without us having to do a thing.
It used to take me an hour to prepare minutes like this. Now, it takes five minutes.
4. Utilize Your Minutes And Follow Through
After you've got your Plaud AI meeting notes, you can share them directly via the Plaud app. Or, you can integrate your existing tools (Drive, Notion, etc.) with Plaud to automatically store, organize, and access your minutes where your team already works. Plaud Note works fast, so you can have beautiful meeting notes ready to share at the next board meeting in minutes.
Further Reading: Our AI voice recorder can do a lot more than just record and transcribe. Check out this guide to learn more about what Plaud AI can do for your meetings.
Meeting Minutes Templates
We want to share some tried and tested meeting minutes templates with you to help improve your minute-taking skills.
You shouldn’t take all types of minutes in the same way. Using a formal, compliance-focused style for a casual team check-in is a waste of time and effort.
Below are a few of the high-performing meeting minutes templates our company uses internally to keep minutes focused and actionable.
Project Meeting Template
Our standard project meeting minutes template is the gold standard of our industry. It’s designed for project status update meetings. It keeps the focus on tracking progress and identifying roadblocks, helping teams stay aligned on milestones, risks, and next steps.
Meeting type: Project status update
Purpose: Track progress, identify roadblocks, and resolve solutions
Template structure:
[Project name and phase]
[Members and roles]
[Status update summary]
[Milestone report]
[Risk assessment]
[Resource allocation]
[Future steps and timelines]
Kick-off meeting template
Our kick-off meeting template is for project initiation meetings where the goal is to align the team, clarify objectives, and outline the project scope.
Using one of these templates ensures that everyone knows the what, why, and how of the project before it begins. And it helps decrease scope creep, sets expectations, and aligns everyone involved with the goals of the project.
Whether they follow through or not is on you.
Meeting type: Project initiation
Purpose: Orient team, define objectives, define scope
Template structure:
[Project overview and purpose]
[Team member introduction and role]
[Scope and deliverables]
[Timeline and key milestones]
[Communication guidelines]
[Success criteria]
[Action items for first steps]
Standup meeting template
We know how much you all love daily stand-up meetings (just kidding!).
This template is for regular progress check-ins. It’s a template for meeting notes with action items that helps teams stay aligned and address roadblocks quickly. It’s built to highlight achievements, assess priorities, and determine areas where support is needed.
Meeting type: Daily/Weekly check-in
Objective: Align teamwork, determine blockers
Structure of template:
[Last period's achievements]
[Priorities and areas of focus now]
[Blockers and help requests]
[Inter-team dependencies]
[Fast announcements]
[Scheduling next check-in]
Board Meeting Minutes Template
Board meetings require clear, concise, and objective minutes due to the high-stakes nature of the meetings. Auditors have a statutory right to see board minutes, and they are legally required in many jurisdictions around the world.
Our meeting notes templates keep your minutes consistent and readable. They also make notes from previous meetings much easier to find. If you want to know what the vice president and the board discussed last month, just search it up and you'll find it instantly. You might know your business better than anyone, but your brain doesn’t have the computing power of our AI notetaker.
Here's a quick template you can use for board meetings if you don't have a note-taking device yet:
[Organization Name] Board of Directors Meeting
Date:
Time:
Location:
Attendees:
Absent:
Call to Order
Approval of Previous Minutes
Financial Report
Old Business
New Business
Action Items
Next Meeting
Adjournment
Minutes prepared by:
Date submitted:
The Plaud Template Community
Didn’t find the template you were looking for? Plaud's template community is the best place to find professional templates for every type of meeting. These templates are created by successful businesspeople, educators, and leading professionals around the globe. You can even add your own templates to contribute to the community.
Here’s a cool feature that we know you’ll love…With the photo-to-template tool, you can convert any template into a reusable digital template just by snapping a picture.
Meeting Minutes Best Practices
Lastly, we’d like to share with you some meeting minutes best practices to help you improve accuracy, productivity, and efficiency. Learning how to write a meeting summary the right way will pay back major dividends in the future. Here are some meeting notes best practices to incorporate into every meeting.
- Set an agenda: Always set a clear agenda. That means everyone comes in without clear context or expectations. Trust us, without clear expectations, you’ll end up with rambling minutes (that no one will ever look at) and hours of wasted time.
- Limit multitasking by delegating: Humans are terrible at multitasking (even though we think we’re great at it). Make sure one person is in charge of the minutes so the rest can actively engage in the meeting. Better yet, use an AI note-taker so everyone can dedicate 100% of their attention to the meeting.
- Take breaks: If you’re leading the meeting, remember that taking minutes can be exhausting. Take short breaks to give the note-taker time to catch up and recharge.
- Summarize key points: Focus on getting the gist of things rather than every little word. Key points include: agreements, decisions, changes, deadlines, goals, or anything that affects the work going forward.
- Record action items: Action items are decisions that determine what people need to do after the meeting. Make sure to include who is responsible for each task.
- Share and confirm: After the meeting is over, share the minutes with all participants and get confirmation of receipt. Over the years, we’ve found that staff who review meeting notes are more likely to follow through.
Taking minutes properly is just one part of having more productive meetings. But it’s a big part. Good minutes tell employees that they are being heard (and held accountable).
Conclusion
Learning how to write meeting minutes can save your business hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars per year. We know, because we use Plaud Note. Plaud Note records all of our meetings, no matter where they happen: online, in-person, or over the phone. And its AI summary tools transform every meeting into concise, scannable minutes. Plaud is the easiest way to write minutes that make sense for your business. That's all for today. Meeting adjourned.
FAQ
Do Meeting Minutes Require Approval?
Yes. In formal meetings, it's important to have the minutes approved and signed off on at the next meeting. This is a quality control measure to prevent errors in meeting minutes.
What is the Purpose of Meeting Minutes?
Meeting minutes provide an official record of the key points of a meeting, holding everyone accountable and keeping plans on course. Minutes record decisions, assignments, agreements, goals, and more. They can be used for a treasurer's report, learning what the board reviewed at the last board of directors meeting, or other business tasks. For example, providing essential information at a glance or providing more detail on the logic behind business decisions. You can even use them to see who was present or who approved which decision.
Why Are They Called Minutes of a Meeting?
The term "minutes" comes from the Latin minuta scriptura, or "small notes."
Who Should Write the Meeting Minutes?
Typically, the meeting organizer, secretary, or assigned note-taker records the minutes. Today, modern tools like AI note-takers are used to transcribe and summarize meetings, freeing up humans to participate in the discussion. If you're a small organization, preparing effective meeting minutes can be difficult. AI does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and levels the playing field.
