19 August 2026 · Updated 24 August 2026 · By Heni Hazbay
What Are Meeting Minutes? Definition, Types and Examples
Meeting minutes are the official written record of what a meeting decided. What they contain, the three main types, and how they differ from notes.
The short answer: Meeting minutes are the official written record of what a meeting decided — attendance, decisions, and actions — approved at a later meeting so they become the organisation’s accepted account of what happened. They are not a transcript, and they are not your personal notes.
Almost every organised group produces them, and almost nobody is taught what they actually are. Here is the definition, where the odd name comes from, the three types you will meet in practice, and the line between minutes, notes and a transcript.
What meeting minutes are
Meeting minutes are the official written record of a meeting: who was there, what was decided, and what happens next. They are written by a designated person, circulated to attendees, and formally approved at the following meeting. Once approved, they stop being one person’s account and become the organisation’s account.
That last step is what separates minutes from every other kind of meeting document. A summary you email round is useful. A set of minutes that has been proposed, seconded and approved is authoritative — it is what the organisation will point to in a year’s time when someone asks what was agreed.
Why they are called “minutes”
The name has nothing to do with time. It comes from the Latin minuta scriptura — “small writing” — meaning rough notes jotted down quickly during proceedings and written up properly afterwards. The English word for sixty seconds arrived from a different Latin route entirely. Two unrelated words that happen to be spelled the same.
This matters more than trivia: it tells you what minutes were always meant to be. Not a recording of everything said, but a condensed record made small on purpose.
What minutes are used for
- Establishing what was decided, when memories differ months later.
- Assigning accountability — every action has a name and a date against it.
- Bringing absent members up to speed without a meeting to explain the meeting.
- Satisfying governance requirements. Companies, boards, charities, unions, HOAs and public bodies are frequently obliged to keep minutes of formal meetings, either by law or by their own constitution.
- Evidence. In a dispute, approved minutes are usually the strongest available account of what a group agreed.
Types of minutes: the three that matter
Most guidance treats “minutes” as one thing. In practice there are three, and picking the wrong one is why minutes are so often either useless or unbearable to write.
| Type | What it records | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Action minutes | Decisions and action items only. No discussion. | Team meetings, project meetings, stand-ups — the default for most organisations |
| Discussion minutes | Decisions, plus a short summary of the reasoning and the main arguments | Boards, committees, anywhere the why has to survive |
| Verbatim minutes | Everything said, word for word, attributed to speakers | Legal proceedings, public inquiries, disciplinary hearings, some parliamentary bodies |
Action minutes are what most teams should be writing. They are short, they are fast, and they are the format people actually read. If your minutes run to four pages for a forty-minute meeting, you are writing discussion minutes for a meeting that did not need them.
Discussion minutes exist because some decisions have to be defensible later. A board that rejects a proposal needs the record to show it considered the alternatives, not just that it voted no.
Verbatim minutes are rare and expensive. They are what people picture when they imagine a stenographer, and they are almost never the right answer for an ordinary meeting.
The same three, under other names
Two other classifications describe the same documents and cause a lot of confusion, because they cut the set differently rather than adding to it.
In business communication the usual split is resolution minutes, narration minutes and verbatim minutes. Resolution minutes record only what was resolved — the same document as action minutes. Narration minutes add the reasoning, as discussion minutes do. The vocabulary differs; the documents do not.
In a company-law context minutes are usually classified by which meeting they record rather than by how much detail they hold — minutes of board meetings and minutes of general meetings, each with its own retention and inspection conventions. Those conventions vary by jurisdiction and by your governing document, so treat this as vocabulary rather than as a rule, and check your own requirements.
The practical point across all three schemes: decide how much of the discussion has to survive, then write to that. Everything else is naming.
Minutes, notes and transcripts are three different things
These get used interchangeably and they should not be.
- Notes are yours. Unstructured, opinionated, incomplete, never circulated. A useful raw input.
- A transcript is the full text of what was said, usually with speaker labels. It is a record of words, not of decisions — an hour of meeting is roughly nine thousand words of transcript, and nobody reads that.
- Minutes are the structured, approved record of outcomes. Typically a page.
The practical relationship runs one way: a recording produces a transcript, a transcript makes the minutes far easier to write, and the minutes are what goes on the record. We wrote up that whole workflow in how to write meeting minutes from a recording.
What goes in them
At minimum: the name of the body meeting, date, time and place; who attended and who sent apologies; whether the previous minutes were approved; each agenda item with its decision; every action with an owner and a due date; the time the meeting closed; and the date of the next one.
The harder question is what to leave out — and there is more to leave out than most people expect. What to include in meeting minutes covers both sides, and the tense and style conventions cover how to phrase it once you know what goes in.
Getting them written without hating it
The reason minutes are dreaded is that taking them well is genuinely hard — you cannot listen properly and write properly at the same time, and the person taking minutes is usually the person who most needs to contribute.
Recording the meeting removes the conflict. Record and Transcribe (our app, for iPhone and Apple Watch) records the room and transcribes it automatically with a label on every speaker, so you can take part in the meeting and write the minutes afterwards from an accurate account rather than from memory and half a page of shorthand. Record other people only with their knowledge — say at the top of the meeting that you are recording it for the minutes, which is both the courteous move and the one that keeps you on the right side of the rules wherever you are.
You can try it free with three transcriptions, no card required.
Minutes are a small document with an outsized job: they are the only part of a meeting that outlives everyone’s memory of it. Write the type your meeting actually needs, keep them short, and get them approved.