What to Include in Meeting Minutes (and What to Leave Out)

The short answer: Minutes record decisions, actions with owners, and the formal facts of the meeting. They do not record the conversation, they do not record who said what, and they should be short enough that people actually read them.

The most common mistake in minute-taking is writing down too much. A transcript of what was said is not minutes — it is raw material, and handing it to colleagues is passing on your work rather than doing it. Here is what belongs in the record, what actively does not, and why the distinction matters more than the formatting.

The formal header

Every set of minutes starts with the facts that make it a record rather than a note:

• The body meeting — the committee, board, team or group by its proper name.
• Date, start time, and location (or the fact that it was held remotely).
• Attendees, with apologies from those who could not come.
• Who chaired and who took the minutes.
• Whether a quorum was present, if your rules require one.

This section looks like bureaucracy and is the part that matters most years later. A decision whose validity is questioned turns on exactly these details — who was present, whether enough of them were, and when.

The four things worth recording

Everything else in the meeting compresses into four categories. If something does not fit one of them, it probably does not belong.

1. Decisions. What was agreed, in the words the group agreed to. For formal motions, record the exact wording, who proposed and seconded it, and the outcome of the vote — usually the counts for, against, and abstaining rather than who voted which way.

2. Actions. Every action needs an owner and a date. “Marketing to review the pricing page” is not an action; “Priya to circulate revised pricing copy by 12 August” is. An action without a named person is one nobody has taken.

3. Matters deferred. What was raised and explicitly postponed, and to when. This is the category most often dropped, and its absence is why items quietly disappear between meetings.

4. Recorded dissent. When someone asks for their objection to be minuted, record it. This is a right in most governance settings, and it exists precisely so the record is not just the majority’s account.

What to leave out

This is the half that is rarely written down, and it is where minutes go wrong.

Verbatim dialogue. If it reads like a script, it is a transcript. Minutes summarise outcomes.

Who said what during discussion. Standard practice is to record that a matter was discussed and what was decided, not who argued which way. This is not evasiveness — it is what allows people to change their mind in a meeting, which is the point of having one. The exceptions are formal motions and requested dissent.

Characterisations of anyone’s behaviour. “After a heated exchange” and “reluctantly agreed” have no place in a record. Describe outcomes, not temperature.

Your own view. The minute-taker’s job is to record, not to assess. No commentary on whether a decision was sensible.

Anything confidential that does not need to be there. Minutes circulate more widely and survive longer than people expect. Personal information, unproven allegations, and commercially sensitive detail deserve a deliberate decision before being written down, not an automatic one.

Phrasing: the one-line version

Past tense, third person, no adjectives — “The committee approved the budget”, never “we approve” or “the committee approves”. That convention is near-universal and it is worth getting right, because inconsistent tense is the fastest way to make minutes read as a personal account rather than an official record.

There is more to it than one line, and it is a topic of its own: what tense meeting minutes should be written in covers voice, naming people, quoting, and a worked before-and-after example.

A template you can copy

[Group name] — Minutes
Date · Time · Location
Present: …            Apologies: …
Chair: …              Minutes: …

1. Decisions
   • …

2. Actions
   Owner        Action                          Due
   …            …                               …

3. Deferred
   • … (to [next meeting date])

4. Any recorded dissent
   • …

Meeting closed at [time]. Next meeting: [date].

Written is not the same as official

Minutes stay a draft until the group agrees they are accurate, which normally happens as the first item of the following meeting. That step is what turns your document into the record — and skipping it leaves you with an account nobody formally accepted. How meeting minutes get approved and signed covers the approval itself, what a signature actually evidences, and the right way to correct an error discovered after approval.

Getting there from a recording

If you record the meeting, the transcript is your source material rather than your output. The method is to read it once for decisions, once for actions with owners and dates, and once for anything deferred — then throw the rest away. We set that process out fully, with worked examples, in how to write meeting minutes from a recording.

Recording helps most with the part minute-takers find hardest: capturing an accurate decision while also participating in the discussion. A recording with speaker labels lets you check the exact wording afterwards instead of reconstructing it from memory. For how to record a meeting in a room so the transcript is usable, see our guide to recording in-person meetings — and ask the room before you start.

Two companions to this one. What meeting minutes are covers the three types — action, discussion and verbatim — because the right answer to “what goes in” depends on which you are writing. And once you know what goes in, what tense meeting minutes should be written in covers how to phrase it: past tense, third person, no adjectives. If you would rather start from a structure than a blank page, there are four templates here.