Meeting types · Board meeting
Board meeting minutes, without the note-taker.
Board minutes are a governance document before they are a summary — the wording of a resolution matters more than the discussion that produced it.
A board meeting is one of the few meetings where the notes outlive everyone in the room. Minutes get filed, referenced by auditors, quoted back in disputes and relied on by directors defending a decision years later. That raises the bar from 'roughly what we discussed' to 'the resolution as adopted, in the words it was adopted in'. A minute that captures the mood of a debate accurately but paraphrases the motion is not a board minute; it is a memo.
The company secretary taking those minutes by hand is doing two jobs badly at once. They are trying to follow a technical debate on covenant headroom while writing down the exact phrasing of the motion just put. The usual outcome is a set of minutes drafted from memory three days later, with the discussion reconstructed and the resolution wording checked against nobody.
Record the room and the drafting problem changes shape. GetNotes gives you a speaker-labelled transcript of the whole session, so the resolution can be lifted verbatim, and AI-written minutes that separate what was noted from what was resolved. The secretary edits a draft against the actual audio rather than writing one from scratch against their memory. Where a director asks for their dissent to be recorded, the form of words they chose is there to be lifted rather than approximated.
Boards also handle material the recording should not follow into. Remuneration items, individual employee matters and legal advice under privilege are often minuted deliberately thinly. Stopping the recording for those items is a normal, defensible practice — and it is easier to do deliberately than to unwind afterwards. Say plainly that the recording is stopping, minute that item by hand, and start a fresh recording when the board returns to open business.
Where it earns its keep
The resolution nobody wrote down word for word
The chair reads a motion approving the facility extension, someone proposes a change to the cap, and it passes with the amendment. Three weeks later the bank's lawyers want the resolution as adopted. The secretary has 'approved extension, amended cap' in a notebook and a very uneasy feeling.
A non-exec who dialled in for one item
One director attends for agenda item four only, then drops. The minutes need to show precisely which items they were present for, because their name cannot appear against a vote they were absent for. Timings are easy to lose when you are also chairing the discussion.
The AGM that ran to three hours
An annual general meeting with shareholder questions from the floor runs long and roams. Someone still has to produce a clean, orderly record of the questions asked and the answers given, without inventing a tidiness the meeting itself did not have.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Can GetNotes produce board minutes I can actually file?
It produces a strong draft, not a filed document. GetNotes transcribes the meeting with speaker labels and writes minutes covering the summary, decisions and action items. The company secretary still reviews the resolution wording against the transcript, adds the formal preamble your board uses, and puts the draft to the next meeting for approval in the normal way.
How do I keep confidential items out of the record?
Stop the recording before the item and start a new one afterwards. GetNotes only processes audio you actually record or upload, so anything captured outside a recording simply does not exist in the system. Boards commonly do this for remuneration, individual personnel matters and legal advice under privilege, and minute those items separately by hand.
Does GetNotes tell me who moved and seconded a resolution?
The transcript is speaker-labelled throughout, so the moment a director moves a motion and another seconds it is attributed in the record. GetNotes labels speakers automatically rather than by name, so you assign real names to the labels once — after that the resolution and its proposer can be lifted straight out of the transcript.
Our board runs longer than three hours. What then?
Pro supports recordings up to three hours each, with a fair-use allowance of 25 hours of audio a month. For a long board day, record in sessions that follow the agenda: one recording before the break, one after, or one per major item. That is usually better practice anyway, since it keeps each set of minutes tied to its agenda item.
Other meeting types
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