What should a meeting minutes template include?

A header with the body, date, time and location; attendees and apologies; approval of the previous minutes; one block per agenda item with its decision; an action table with owners and due dates; and the close time plus next meeting date.

Do I need a different template for board minutes?

Yes. Board minutes add quorum, the formal wording of motions, who proposed and seconded each one, and the vote count. Team minutes need none of that, and adding it makes them slower to write and less likely to be read.

Should meeting minutes be a Word document or something else?

Whatever your organisation keeps its records in. Plain text or Markdown pasted into the email body is the most reliable choice for team meetings, because it stays searchable and readable on a phone. Formal bodies usually want a filed document.

How long should meeting minutes be?

For a typical team meeting, one page or less. If your minutes are longer than the agenda, you are recording discussion that nobody will read. Boards and committees run longer because the reasoning behind a decision has to survive.

Can I reuse the same template for every meeting?

Within one type of meeting, yes, and you should — a stable structure is what makes minutes scannable and comparable over time. Across different types of meeting, no: a stand-up and a board meeting need different fields.

Meeting Minutes Templates You Can Copy (4 Formats)

The short answer: Use the shortest template your meeting type allows. Team meetings need a header, decisions and an action table. Board meetings add quorum, motions and votes. Everything below is plain text you can copy straight into an email or a document.

Templates for minutes are usually either a bare list of headings that does not tell you what to write, or a formal board template imposed on a meeting that needed four lines. Here are four, matched to the meetings people actually hold, with a note on what changes between them.

1. Standard team meeting

The default. Records outcomes, not discussion. Aim for under a page.

MINUTES — [Team name] weekly meeting
Date: [Monday 19 August 2026]   Time: [10:00–10:45]   Location: [Meeting room 2 / video call]

Present: [names]
Apologies: [names]
Minutes taken by: [name]

1. Minutes of the previous meeting
   Approved as circulated. / Approved with the correction that [...].

2. [Agenda item]
   [One or two sentences: what was decided, not what was discussed.]
   Decision: [the decision, stated plainly.]

3. [Agenda item]
   [...]

4. Any other business
   [Item, or "None raised."]

ACTIONS
| # | Action | Owner | Due |
|---|--------|-------|-----|
| 1 | [What will be done] | [Name] | [Date] |
| 2 | [...] | [...] | [...] |

Meeting closed: [10:45]
Next meeting: [Monday 26 August 2026, 10:00]

2. Board or committee meeting

Formal bodies need more, because the record has to stand up on its own. The additions are quorum, the exact wording of motions, who proposed and seconded them, and the vote.

MINUTES — [Organisation] Board of Directors
Date: [19 August 2026]   Time: [14:00–15:30]   Location: [...]

Present: [names and roles]
In attendance (non-voting): [names and roles]
Apologies: [names]
Chair: [name]   Secretary: [name]
Quorum: Confirmed / Not met.

1. Declarations of interest
   [Name] declared an interest in item 4 and withdrew from the vote. / None declared.

2. Minutes of the meeting held on [date]
   RESOLVED: that the minutes of the meeting held on [date] be approved as a
   correct record.
   Proposed: [name]   Seconded: [name]   Carried: [unanimously / 5 for, 1 against, 1 abstention]

3. Matters arising
   [Item and its current status.]

4. [Agenda item]
   [Short summary of the discussion, including the main alternatives considered.]
   RESOLVED: that [the decision, in full sentence form].
   Proposed: [name]   Seconded: [name]   Carried: [vote count]

5. Any other business
   [Item, or "None."]

ACTIONS
| # | Action | Owner | Due |
|---|--------|-------|-----|
| 1 | [...] | [...] | [...] |

Meeting closed: [15:30]
Next meeting: [date, time, location]

Signed: ______________________   Date: ____________
[Name], Chair

Boards are also where the approval step stops being a formality — see how meeting minutes get approved and signed for the motion wording and who signs.

3. Project meeting or stand-up

Short, repetitive meetings need a template that is faster to fill in than the meeting was to hold. Drop the prose entirely.

STAND-UP — [Project]   [19 August 2026, 09:15]
Present: [names]   Absent: [names]

Status: [Green / Amber / Red] — [one line on why, if not green]

Blockers raised
- [Blocker] — [owner] — [what unblocks it]

Decisions
- [Decision made in the meeting, if any. Otherwise "None."]

ACTIONS
| # | Action | Owner | Due |
|---|--------|-------|-----|
| 1 | [...] | [...] | [...] |

Carried over from last time: [action #, owner, new date]

4. One-to-one

Not minutes in the formal sense — there is nothing to approve — but the same discipline turns a one-to-one from a chat into something with a memory.

1:1 — [Name] & [Name]   [19 August 2026]

Since last time
- [What happened to the actions from the previous session.]

Discussed
- [Topic] — [outcome in one line]

Agreed
- [Anything either person committed to.]

ACTIONS
| # | Action | Owner | Due |
|---|--------|-------|-----|
| 1 | [...] | [...] | [...] |

Next: [date]

What actually changes between them

	Team	Board	Stand-up	1:1
Quorum recorded	No	Yes	No	No
Motions, proposer, seconder	No	Yes	No	No
Vote counts	No	Yes	No	No
Discussion summarised	Rarely	Yes	No	Briefly
Formally approved later	Sometimes	Yes	No	No
Signed	No	Usually	No	No
Realistic length	½–1 page	2–4 pages	5 lines	½ page

Everything else — header, attendance, actions with owners and dates — is common to all four. If you only remember one thing about the structure, remember that the action table is the part people come back for, so it goes at the bottom where it is easy to find, in the same place every time.

Filling them in without missing anything

The template is the easy half. The hard half is that you cannot chair or contribute properly while writing down what everyone says — which is why minutes so often get written from memory hours later, with the actions half-remembered.

Record and Transcribe (our app, for iPhone and Apple Watch) records the meeting and transcribes it automatically, labelling each speaker, so you fill the template in afterwards from an accurate account rather than from what you managed to scribble. Tell the room you are recording it for the minutes — say it at the top, before anything substantive is discussed.

Free to try: three transcriptions, no card.

For the phrasing conventions once the structure is in place — past tense, third person, no adjectives — see what tense meeting minutes should be written in. And if you are not sure which of these four you should be producing at all, what meeting minutes are sets out the three types and when each applies.