Meeting minutes software

How to take meeting notes highly depends on the context of your organization and the type of meeting you are conducting. There are many examples of meeting notes or templates for meeting minutes. Which one to choose depends on the role a meeting summary plays the practices in your organization.

Is it just rough documentation as a reminder for the team? Is it about documenting the decisions made? Is it legally binding and needs to be a transcript? It depends … We know one thing though - having a great meeting minutes software can help greatly.

In any case, structure and readability are crucial for an effective meeting protocol. When it is just long prose, with buried tasks and decisions, no one will read it and all tasks will be out of sight and lost.

Without a decent structure, meeting notes are quickly forgotten and just taken out when there is a dispute about what has been discussed. It is not an action item, people work with.

One major flaw of meeting notes is: everybody’s tasks are listed somewhere in the meeting notes. They are not assigned individually, and it is in the responsibility of your attendees to make the next step and derive the personal todos from the meeting notes. But using our meeting minutes software, it assigns tasks in meetings (learn more about our meeting task assignment software capabilities)

Otherwise this takes much time, requires discipline, and is frequently forgotten!

No matter whether you take meeting notes in Microsoft Word, in OneNote or any other word processing tool. We have never seen the “perfect” meeting minutes template since the context can be so different.

We read many examples and developed a meeting minutes best practice in several iterations. The result is the following meeting minutes structure for each agenda item with separate sections for:

• agenda description (from the agenda)
• meeting notes
• list of decisions made
• table of assigned tasks with deadlines (who, what until when)

We follow this structure for all agenda topics. At the end of each meeting protocol, there is a table of so-called side issues (on the “parking lot”). These are issues not directly related to the agenda, but important to take care of. They are recorded and assigned to attendees like the other tasks, but they are not related to a specific topic.

Our customers give us positive feedback on the above structure. You can easily apply this structure in your meeting protocols in OneNote or Word. With our meeting minutes software, your meeting notes will be even more effective with yoyomeeting. Among many other features, all tasks are assigned in your meeting individually to the individual responsible, so nothing gets lost.