A meeting needs formal minutes when a statute, a regulator or the body's own rules say so: a company board, charity trustees, a maintained school's governing board and its committees, a council. Most other meetings, from a project stand-up to an advisory forum, need less: a short note of what was agreed and a log of actions with owners and dates. A word-for-word transcript suits very few meetings.
This guide is published by EdCitation. It compares the five kinds of record, says where the law chooses for you (country by country), and gives our own templates for a note of meeting and an action log. We read each rule at its source on 26 September 2026. Treat the guide as general information rather than legal advice; for your own organisation, your clerk, company secretary or solicitor has the last word.
EdCitation's tools sit around the meeting, never inside it. Cite a source turns the address of a guidance page into a reference for the papers line of a note or log, and Check your paper turns written instructions into a list of requirements. How to take minutes, once you know you need them, is in our guide to taking meeting minutes.
Which record does a meeting need?
The record follows from two questions: does anything outside the meeting require a record, and what will people need to find in it later? The table compares the five records.
| Record | What it holds | When required or useful | Who approves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formal minutes | Attendance and quorum, interests declared, each resolution in its exact words, votes, reasons, actions | Required by statute, a regulator or the body's constitution: company boards, charity trustees, school governing boards, councils | The next meeting, then signed by the chair |
| Note of meeting (action notes) | Who attended, the points agreed, actions with owners and dates; little or no discussion | Advisory groups, forums, working groups, one-off meetings with a partner | Usually the chair or organiser; circulated for comment rather than formally approved |
| Action log | One row per action: owner, due date, status, date closed | Any series of meetings that hands out work, especially project teams | Kept by the secretary or project manager, reviewed at each meeting |
| Decision log | One row per decision: date, who decided, the reasons, the papers, what it replaces | Projects, programmes and technical teams, including decisions taken between meetings | Whoever holds authority at that level |
| Transcript or recording | Every word, or the audio and video | Only where a law, the body's rules or a clear purpose needs every word | Nobody approves it; it is checked for accuracy |
For the informal records, the last column is our view of common practice, not a rule we read. Records also combine: a board keeps minutes and an action log; a project, a note and both logs.
Choosing in six steps
- Check whether a statute or regulator requires minutes for this kind of body (see the next section). If it does, keep formal minutes.
- Read the body's own governing document: articles, constitution, bylaws, terms of reference or standing orders. If it names a record, keep that one.
- Ask who will rely on the record later: an auditor, a regulator, members, a court. The more outside readers, the closer to formal minutes.
- If work is handed out that runs past this meeting, keep an action log.
- If decisions are taken that people will later need to understand, including decisions made between meetings, keep a decision log.
- Only if a purpose needs every word, record or transcribe, and tell people first.
Whatever the record, name each document it relies on by title, publisher, date and address; EdCitation's Cite a source makes that reference from a web address, a DOI or an ISBN.
When are formal minutes required?
Formal minutes are required wherever the law or a regulator builds them into how a body governs itself. Your governing document may ask for more.
Companies in the UK
Section 248 of the Companies Act 2006 requires every company to record minutes of all proceedings at directors' meetings and to keep them for at least ten years. Failing to comply is an offence by every officer in default. A note or an action log alone does not meet the section for a board meeting.
Charities in England and Wales
Guidance from the Charity Commission for England and Wales (2024) treats minutes as a charity's legal record of each meeting, sets out their contents (among them the reasons for decisions, the advice taken and the actions agreed), and asks that they be approved at the next meeting and signed by the chair. Trustees of charitable companies and CIOs must take minutes of trustee meetings; the guidance gives keeping periods of at least ten years for charitable companies and six for CIOs, trusts and unincorporated associations. We did not find the guidance saying anything about informal notes or action logs.
School governing boards and their committees in England
For maintained schools, the School Governance (Roles, Procedures and Allowances) (England) Regulations 2013 make the clerk responsible for minutes of the governing board (regulation 15), and regulation 26(7) extends the duty to committees: their minutes are drawn up by the committee's clerk and signed by its chair at the next meeting. The Department for Education (2026) adds that a board must receive regular reports, including signed minutes, from any joint committees it sets up, and that decisions taken under chair's action go into the board's minutes.
Councils in England and Wales
Under the Local Government Act 1972 (schedule 12, paragraph 41), a local authority's minutes are signed by the person presiding at the same or next suitable meeting, and a signed minute is received in evidence.
US corporations and societies
In California, section 1500 of the Corporations Code requires a corporation to keep minutes of the proceedings of its shareholders, its board and the board's committees, and allows them in written form or a form that can be converted into it. Other states have their own codes; we read only California's for this guide. A club or society that adopts Robert's Rules of Order takes on its view of minutes as a record of actions taken rather than of the talk (Robert's Rules Association, n.d.).
When is a note of meeting enough?
A note of meeting is enough when no law or rule asks for minutes and the meeting advises, co-ordinates or informs rather than governs. It records who was there, what was agreed and who will act, in a page or less.
A real example shows the choice made in writing. The terms of reference of the Farm Tenancy Forum, a group of industry bodies and officials that advises the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, say the forum is not a formal public body and that its meeting notes and actions will be recorded and shared with members but not published. The department's secretariat prepares "minutes or meeting notes and issues and action logs". An advisory forum chose notes and logs, in writing.
Our template for a note of meeting
This template is ours; fill the square brackets.
Note of meeting: [name of group or purpose] Date, time and place (or call): [ ] Present: [names or roles] · Apologies: [ ] Note taken by: [ ] · Circulated: [date]
1. [Agenda item] Agreed: [one sentence per point agreed] Actions: [action] ([owner], by [date])
2. [Agenda item] Agreed: [ ] Actions: [ ]
Open actions from earlier meetings: see the action log. Papers referred to: [title, author, date, address] Next meeting: [date]
Corrections to [name] by [date]; after that this note stands as the record.
The last line stands in for formal approval: it gives people a date to object by. The papers line cites each document in full, so a later reader finds the version the meeting saw.
What is the difference between an action log and a decision log?
An action log tracks what people agreed to do until each item is closed; a decision log keeps what was decided, by whom and why, so the reasoning outlasts the people. Work handed out needs the first; choices others will later question need the second.
What government project guidance says
The UK government's project delivery standard (Government Project Delivery, 2025) asks that decisions be made in line with the organisation's governance framework, assessed against defined criteria and communicated to the stakeholders concerned, and that information be recorded, version controlled and retrievable by those who need it. It does not prescribe a log: version 2.1 never mentions one. We read that version in a copy published by the Major Projects Association, because the official project delivery site returned a check for robots.
For technical decisions the government is more specific. A framework from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and Government Digital Service (2025) asks each architectural decision record to carry a title, date, status, context, the decision, its consequences, the stakeholders consulted and links to supporting documents, approved at the level the decision affects, from a team lead up to the Technical Design Council. It is recommended at every level and mandatory only for decisions that cross government. The Government Digital Service's own engineering guidance adds a rule worth copying into any decision log: an old decision is marked as superseded, with a link to the one that replaced it, rather than rewritten (Government Digital Service, n.d.).
Two sources could not be read: the PRINCE2 pages at AXELOS, which load their text by script, and the Project Management Institute's paper on project logs, which refused our request. Nothing here draws on either.
Our template for an action log
This template is ours. One row per action; a closed action stays, with its date.
| No. | Action | Owner | Raised | Due | Status | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | [What will be done, starting with a verb] | [One named person or role] | [Meeting and date] | [Date] | Open, done or dropped | [Date] |
For a decision log, change the columns to: number, decision, date, who decided, reasons, papers relied on, and "replaces" or "replaced by". A decision that is reversed gets a new row; the old one is marked, not deleted.
Should you record or transcribe the meeting instead?
Usually not. A transcript holds everything and highlights nothing, so the decisions still have to be written up, and it raises consent questions a note does not.
Where recording is expected
In England, anyone attending a council meeting open to the public must be allowed to report on it, which includes filming and audio recording, under section 100A of the Local Government Act 1972 as amended in 2014. A private board or team meeting has no such rule.
Consent and data protection, briefly
In the UK, data protection sets the terms. The Information Commissioner's Office (n.d.), in guidance now under review, expects an organisation that records video calls to document its reasons, ask whether audio alone would do, tell those recorded, and delete the file once its purpose is served, not keep it "just in case".
In the US, one participant's consent is enough under federal law, provided the purpose is lawful (18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)). California requires the consent of all parties to record a confidential communication, a term that excludes open public proceedings (California Penal Code § 632). Other states differ; check the one where each person sits. Our guide to taking meeting minutes has more on recordings and AI note-takers.
What does EdCitation do for the papers around a meeting?
EdCitation does the citing and checking around a meeting; it never writes anyone's minutes, notes or logs. When a note or log names a document, EdCitation is the strongest choice for citing it, in our view: it reads the page or the publisher's record and shows what it found instead of writing an entry from memory. We ran two free tools for this guide and quote what came back.
A decision log's source, cited
We gave Cite a source the web address of the government's architectural decision record framework. Its APA 7 entry, title in italics, read:
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. (2025, November 4). Architectural Decision Record Framework. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/architectural-decision-record-framework/architectural-decision-record-framework
The date is right. Two things need correcting, and the tool shows what it read from the page so both can be changed: GOV.UK lists the Government Digital Service as a second publisher, which the tool left out, and APA 7 puts a page's title in sentence case. Our references below carry the corrected entry.
A forum's terms of reference, read as a checklist
Check your paper was made for assignment briefs and instructions like them. We pasted in the Farm Tenancy Forum's whole terms of reference. It returned an empty checklist and set aside 20 sentences as things no rule could test, among them the quarterly meetings and the three-yearly review. It read one heading, "Confidentiality and use of official information", as a sentence. And the two sentences this guide cares about, on notes, actions and logs, appeared in neither list. Read terms of reference and standing orders yourself. The tool is built for written instructions such as an assignment brief; a tender's brief, with its page limits and required sections, is much closer to that.
Evidence in a board paper or business case
A board paper or business case that goes before a meeting stands on its evidence. Find sources looks across roughly 300 million published works for the study a sentence needs; Verify references sorts a finished list into verified, doubtful and not found, flags retractions, and never files a reference it could not check under "not found". Neither needs an account or costs anything; what Pro and Max add is on the pricing page.
Quick questions
Do all meetings need minutes?
No. Minutes are required where a statute, a regulator or the body's own rules require them, such as company boards under the Companies Act 2006; most other meetings need only a note and an action log.
What is the difference between minutes and a note of meeting?
Minutes are the formal, approved record of a governing body, with resolutions in exact words and votes. A note of meeting is a short, informal record of what was agreed and who will act.
What is the difference between an action log and a decision log?
An action log tracks tasks until they are closed. A decision log records each decision, who made it, why, and what it replaced.
Can a recording or transcript replace the minutes?
Where minutes are required, no: the law asks for minutes, and a transcript still leaves the decisions to be found. Recording also needs a purpose and notice to the people recorded.
Can EdCitation write my meeting notes or action log?
No. The note and the log are yours to write; EdCitation's free Cite a source supplies the reference for each document they mention.
References
- California Corporations Code § 1500 (2023). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CORP§ionNum=1500
- California Penal Code § 632 (2017). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN§ionNum=632
- Charity Commission for England and Wales. (2024, July 19). Charity meetings (CC48). GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-and-meetings-cc48/charities-and-meetings
- Companies Act 2006, c. 46, s. 248. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/section/248
- Department for Education. (2026, July 15). Maintained schools: Governance guide. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/maintained-schools-governance-guide/maintained-schools-governance-guide
- Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. (2024, November 5). Farm Tenancy Forum: Terms of reference from 2024. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/farm-tenancy-forum-terms-of-reference-from-2024/farm-tenancy-forum-terms-of-reference-from-2024
- Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, & Government Digital Service. (2025, November 4). Architectural decision record framework. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/architectural-decision-record-framework/architectural-decision-record-framework
- Government Digital Service. (n.d.). Documenting architecture decisions. The GDS Way. https://gds-way.digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk/standards/architecture-decisions.html
- Government Project Delivery. (2025). Government functional standard GovS 002: Project delivery (Version 2.1). Cabinet Office. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/project-delivery-functional-standard
- Information Commissioner's Office. (n.d.). How can we comply with the data protection principles when using surveillance systems? https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/cctv-and-video-surveillance/guidance-on-video-surveillance-including-cctv/how-can-we-comply-with-the-data-protection-principles-when-using-surveillance-systems/
- Interception and disclosure of wire, oral, or electronic communications prohibited, 18 U.S.C. § 2511 (2018). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511
- Local Government Act 1972, c. 70. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/70/section/100A
- Robert's Rules Association. (n.d.). Frequently asked questions. Robert's Rules of Order. https://robertsrules.com/frequently-asked-questions/
- School Governance (Roles, Procedures and Allowances) (England) Regulations 2013, SI 2013/1624. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/1624/regulation/26