Stop digging through past minutes. Build governance memory instead.
Turn every meeting into an approved, searchable record — and an institutional memory that survives turnover. Board-ready minutes are how you start; continuity is what you keep.
Not a transcript. Not a folder of PDFs. A permanent, confidential record of how your organization is governed — that you can ask questions of, with citations from prior minutes.
14-day free trial · $0 today · credit card required · cancel anytime · board members always free
Have a year of past minutes? Import the whole archive →
board mtg 4/17
6 present
budget approved 5-1
jen send notices by fri
roof bid accepted - ABC 46k
mike dissented on parking issue
adjourned 8:30
MINUTES OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
April 17, 2026 · Quorum: 6 of 6 present · Called to order: 7:00 PM
Motion: Approve 2026 operating budget
Moved: M. Rodriguez · Second: L. Anderson · Vote: 5-1 · Passed
Action Item
J. Williams — Send assessment notices by Apr 21
Minutes, smithed in minutes — while everything is still fresh.
It catches what your secretary missed
Every draft is checked against 7 governance criteria — quorum, motions, votes, dissent — before you approve.
Import your entire archive
Years of PDFs and Word minutes become one searchable governance memory you can ask questions of.
Board members are always free
Invite your whole board, officers, and reviewers. You pay per organization — never per seat.
Designed for boards, LLCs, nonprofits, associations, and committees
- Private AI over your own records
- Answers cite their sources
- US-hosted
- No per-seat pricing
From one real, anonymized board archive — 2020 to 2026
- Meetings archived
- 96Meetings archived
- Decisions structured
- 149Decisions structured
- Motions tracked
- 161Motions tracked
- Actions captured
- 633Actions captured
- Years of history
- 7+Years of history
Ask your governance history
The questions a folder of PDFs can’t answer.
Ask a plain-English question about any board, company, nonprofit, LLC, or committee. See which part of MinuteSmith answers it — and where the answer comes from.
How the answer is built
You ask
“What did we decide about the pool vendor?”Searches your institutional memory
Every meeting your organization has held — scoped to your own boards at the database layer.
Pulls the exact governance records
The specific minutes and motions that decided it — nothing invented, nothing assumed.
A cited answer
Ask AIA cited answer drawn from four meetings — not a search-results list.
Every claim links back to its source minutes
Retrieval stays inside your organization’s archive. Your data is private and never used to train AI models.
The board switched to AquaPro Services at $1,850/month, effective when the AquaCare contract expires in August. The decision closed a four-meeting thread:
- Initially raised in the Annual Budget Review (resident complaints about AquaCare).
- An RFP was authorized but responses came in slowly — David Romano flagged the delay as overdue.
- By the Insurance & Town Hall meeting, two bids were in (AquaPro and CleanWater Co.).
- Approved 7-0 at the Town Hall Recap meeting.
Sources
More questions boards, companies, nonprofits & committees ask
Switching from something else?
Switch from
Word / Google Docs
A document you format by hand
Structured minutes + searchable memory
See the comparisonSwitch from
Otter / Fireflies
A transcript of one meeting
An approved governance record across years
See the comparisonSwitch from
BoardEffect / Diligent
A portal that stores documents
A record that remembers & answers
See the comparisonThe Governance OS
Not an AI minutes tool. Not a board portal.
MinuteSmith turns years of board records into a governed, searchable, explainable system. Six capabilities a folder of PDFs — or a generic note-taker — can’t give you.
Governance memory
Every decision, findable in seconds
Years of minutes stop being a folder of PDFs and become one searchable record. Ask a question in plain language and get an answer drawn from the meetings that decided it — with citations.
147 decisions · 161 motions, searchable
- Decisions
- Actions
- Topics
- People
- Committees
Board composition
Who serves, in what role, on which body
A live picture of the board: voting trustees, staff and advisors, officers, and committee assignments — resolved from the record, not a spreadsheet someone forgets to update.
47 people reconciled
- Trustees & advisors
- Officers
- Committee seats
- Review dates
Standing & reviews
Know who's due before it's overdue
Membership reviews, term expirations, and renewal requirements are tracked against your cadence — so the board sees what's coming instead of discovering it after the fact.
- Overdue reviews
- Upcoming reviews
- Term expirations
- Renewal rules
Accountability
Nothing slips between meetings
Action items extracted from minutes are tracked to completion, with owners and an audit trail. Overdue commitments surface in the next prep packet instead of being forgotten.
63 action items captured
- Open actions
- Overdue actions
- Assignees
- Audit trail
Committee governance
Committees as first-class bodies
Standing committees are modeled as their own bodies under the board — each with its own chair, members, and records — so committee history survives chair turnover the same way the board's does.
6 committees mapped
- Parent / child hierarchy
- Chairs & members
- Committee records
Governance intelligence
Answers the system knows — not guesses
For the governance families below, Ask AI answers from canonical records before any language model runs: deterministic, cited, and never inferred from prose.
- Composition
- Reviews & standing
- Actions
- Decisions
Composition, reviews & standing, actions, and decisions are answered deterministically from your records and verified against a real multi-year archive. Participation analytics (who presents or moves most often) is under development and is not yet presented as a deterministic answer.
Built from real board-governance workflows, MinuteSmith turns every meeting into clean minutes and action items — then remembers every decision, so the record answers questions long after the meeting ends.
Built for
- HOAs, condos, nonprofits, LLCs, corporate & advisory boards
- Boards, committees, and councils of any kind
- Property managers & anyone running recurring meetings
A live view, not a filing cabinet
This is what your board has actually been spending time on — across the last 12 months.
Every meeting becomes part of a running picture: what’s rising, what’s overdue, what keeps coming back. One glance tells you where to spend the next 10 minutes.
Starts working after just a few meetings
- Trends appear automatically
- Recurring issues surface without tagging
- Action items roll up across boards
Already have a year of past minutes? Upload them all at once — even a single PDF — and MinuteSmith organizes them into searchable, board-ready records.
Continuity, not just notes
Each meeting builds on the ones before.
One decision can span half a year of meetings. MinuteSmith keeps the whole thread in one place — so any board member can see exactly how it got here.
- JanuaryRaisedReserve shortfall flagged in open forum
- FebruaryDeferredTabled pending three contractor bids
- MarchReviewedBids compared; finance committee weighs in
- AprilApprovedMotion carried 5–0 · $42,000 allocated
- MayClosedAction complete — funds transferred
Customer data isn’t used to train AI models. Retrieval is scoped to your own boards at the database layer. See our security page for what’s actually shipped.
New to the idea? Learn what governance memory is and why it matters for boards.
Built to the standard a board expects.
Governance records are sensitive. MinuteSmith treats them that way — isolated per organization at the database layer, encrypted in transit and at rest, and versioned with a content-hashed audit trail.
Per-organization isolation
Each board's archive is isolated at the database layer with Postgres Row-Level Security, and every query is scoped to your own boards.
Encrypted in transit & at rest
TLS in transit, encryption at rest. Your minutes are never used to train AI models. Your data is hosted in the United States.
Immutable audit trail
Every approved record is content-hashed and versioned — who decided what, and when, is provable.
Full posture — encryption, retention, and what we explicitly do and don’t claim: Security · Trust Center
What compounds over time
Day one is a clean record. Year one is institutional memory.
MinuteSmith gets stronger the longer you use it — every meeting deepens what the next one starts with.
Day 1
A clean record of one meeting
Paste notes, drop a recording, or upload a PDF of past minutes. MinuteSmith produces board-ready minutes with quorum, motions, votes, action items, and compliance flags — in under a minute.
Month 1
Ask AI activates across your meetings
After two or three meetings, ask the archive a question and get a cited answer — “what did we decide about the 2025 budget?” — with links back to the source minutes.
Month 6
Recurring topics surface themselves
The same topic keeps coming back — a vendor renewal, the annual budget, a recurring policy question. MinuteSmith notices and threads it across meetings, so the board can see the full arc of a discussion that’s spanned half a year.
Year 1
The archive outlives the people
When the secretary, the president, or the community manager turns over, the new person inherits a fully searchable record of every prior decision — not a binder, not a Dropbox folder, not someone’s memory. Continuity briefs walk them into their first meeting already caught up.
No additional setup at any horizon. Every capability above is active from your second meeting onward — and gets stronger as the archive grows.
Start with your archive, not from zero
Generic AI note apps start today.
MinuteSmith can start with years of history.
Drop a folder of past minutes — PDFs, Word docs, even scanned-and-OCR’d copies. MinuteSmith parses them into structured meetings, extracts attendees and decisions, and indexes everything for cross-meeting search.
A year of past minutes typically becomes searchable in minutes. Ask AI works across the imported archive on day one — no waiting until you’ve generated new meetings to get value.
- PDF, Word, and image-scanned minutes all supported
- Attendees, decisions, and action items extracted per meeting
- Continuity briefs immediately reflect the imported history
- Unlimited import included on Governance Professional and Portfolio
What an import looks like
… 8 more files
12 meetings imported · 38 action items · 14 decisions
Searchable as of 2 min ago. Ask AI is active.
Run your organization like a real entity
Beyond minutes: MinuteSmith keeps your documented decisions, governance records, and institutional history organized over time — governance continuity, not legal advice.
Documented decisions
Resolutions, written consents, and authorized decisions — with who approved them and when.
Governance continuity
A cadence you keep, an organized records vault, and a timeline of how the organization has operated.
A continuity packet
Export an organized PDF to hand to your attorney, CPA, or advisors — organized source material, not certification.
Who this is for
Designed for organizations where the record has to outlive the people. Every decision, every action item, every motion — searchable across years and across leadership turnover.
HOA & condo boards
Community associations keeping a clear record across owner-turnover, board-turnover, and management-firm-turnover.
Nonprofit boards
Charitable, educational, religious, and civic organizations with formal governance and board rotation every 2–3 years.
Property management
Community managers producing consistent minutes across portfolios of associations — each one with its own searchable archive.
LLCs & founder-led businesses
Operating agreements expect documented decisions. MinuteSmith makes keeping them a habit, not a backfill.
Advisory & small corporate boards
Startup boards, family offices, and quarterly advisory boards where the decisions made between meetings need to survive them.
Standing committees
Audit, finance, governance, and nominating committees — each on its own thread, with its own action items, history, and chair-turnover continuity.
Built specifically for board minutes — not transcription, not generic AI, not a document store.
Compared to ChatGPT & Copilot
A chatbot has no permanent memory of your board — every session starts blank, nothing is cited or approved, and your confidential minutes become a prompt in someone else’s model. MinuteSmith keeps every decision in one isolated archive, answers with a citation to the exact meeting, and never trains AI on your data.
Compared to transcription services
Transcripts capture what was said. Minutes require structure, decisions, and action items the board can formally review and approve.
Compared to board portals
Portals store files. MinuteSmith produces the minutes themselves, surfaces missing details, and tracks the approval workflow.
How it works
Capture your meeting
Paste notes, upload a transcript, record in your browser, or scan handwritten pages.
Generate structured minutes
Motions, votes, quorum language, and action items drafted in a consistent format in about a minute.
Understand board activity
Each meeting joins a live view of focus areas, trends, and overdue items — so you see the whole board at a glance.
Outcomes your board will notice
Designed around the four areas where boards lose the most time — and the most credibility.
Consistent minutes, every meeting
Every set of minutes follows the same structure, regardless of who took notes or which secretary is on duty.
Defensible record integrity
Missing quorum language, incomplete motions, and unclear vote records are surfaced for correction before the board approves.
Less administrative burden
Hours that secretaries and managers spent reformatting notes return to actual board work. Board-member access is always free.
Board alignment and memory
Every member reviews the same draft and knows what was decided. New members can read prior minutes to understand standing decisions without scheduling a call.
Why it matters
- Recurring issues surface before they become problems
- See what your board actually spends time on
- Track action items across all boards
- Stop digging through old minutes
Built for boards that need a defensible record
Three things every board minutes solution should do — and what MinuteSmith does specifically.
Cuts post-meeting work
Notes, transcripts, scans, or recordings become a structured draft in about a minute — review and approve instead of typing from scratch.
Consistent format every time
Motions, votes, quorum language, and action items follow the same structure regardless of who took notes — what auditors and successor boards actually need.
Drafts before you leave the room
Draft minutes are ready in minutes — often while details are still fresh.
Simple pricing — pay per organization, never per seat
Board members you invite are always free. 14-day trial, credit card required, cancel anytime.
Governance Essentials · $149/mo
Governance OS for a single organization
Governance Professional · $349/mo
Several boards & committees, with readiness & communications
Governance Portfolio · $699/mo
Multi-entity portfolio oversight & parent/child governance
Start with your most recent meeting.
Bring notes, a transcript, or a recording. Get a review-ready draft in about a minute — and a live view of your board’s focus areas, trends, and open issues from the very first meeting.
What happens next
- Upload a meeting
- Get structured minutes and insights
- See trends across your boards
Most teams start with one recent meeting.
Minutes, smithed in minutes.
No setup required. Upload a transcript or recording.
14-day free trial. Credit card required. Cancel anytime.
Frequently asked questions
How is MinuteSmith different from an AI note-taker like Otter or Fireflies?+
Note-takers transcribe and summarize a single meeting. MinuteSmith produces an approved governance record — motions, votes, and action items — and then builds a searchable institutional memory across every meeting, so you can ask what the board decided last year and get an answer cited to the exact minutes.
What is governance memory?+
Governance memory is the searchable, answerable record of what your board decided and why, preserved across years and board turnover. Instead of decisions living in one person's head or a folder of PDFs, MinuteSmith keeps the whole thread — every decision, who made it, and when — and lets anyone on the board ask questions across the full history.
Can MinuteSmith work with our past minutes?+
Yes. Import existing minutes — PDFs, Word documents, scanned pages, or Zoom transcripts — and years of history become searchable immediately, so Ask AI and continuity briefs work right away instead of only after new meetings accrue.
How much does MinuteSmith cost?+
Plans start at $149/month (Governance Essentials, one organization), with Professional at $349/month and Portfolio at $699/month. Pricing is per organization — invited board members are always free, with no per-seat fees. There's a 14-day free trial; a credit card is required and you can cancel anytime before it ends.
Do board members need accounts or pay per seat?+
No. Board members review and approve minutes through a private link without creating an account, and members you invite are always free. You're billed per organization, not per seat.
Is our governance data kept private?+
Each organization's archive is isolated at the database layer, retrieval is scoped to your own boards, and your minutes are never used to train AI models. See the security page for the full posture.