About MinuteSmith

Why MinuteSmith exists

Boards are built to turn over. Secretaries rotate, directors’ terms end, and volunteers hand off — and when they do, the reasoning behind past decisions tends to leave with them. The motion that settled a dispute two years ago, the vote that set a policy, the action item everyone agreed to but no one wrote down clearly: that institutional memory is the first thing lost across a change in leadership, and it is the hardest thing for a new board to rebuild.

MinuteSmith exists to make that memory durable. Our aim is narrow on purpose: produce minutes that stand up as a governance record, and keep every board’s own history searchable so the next secretary, the next chair, and the next board inherit the full record instead of a folder of PDFs. Continuity is the product — the AI is just how we make it practical for volunteer-run and small boards to keep records at that standard.

What MinuteSmith is

MinuteSmith turns rough notes, audio recordings, transcripts, scanned handwritten pages, and imported historical minutes into board-ready meeting records. It identifies and structures motions, seconds, vote counts, attendance, and action items, runs seven compliance checks (quorum, motion completeness, vote counts, executive session handling, action item owners, call-to-order, adjournment), and tracks every action item through completion. Board members review and approve via private link — no account required. Ask AI lets a board search every meeting it has ever held using natural language.

Who MinuteSmith is for

Boards and organizations that meet regularly and need to maintain governance records. In practice that means homeowner associations (HOA), condominium associations, cooperative housing boards, nonprofit boards of directors, LLCs and founder-led businesses, advisory boards, family offices, standing committees, and the property-management firms that staff multiple boards at once. MinuteSmith assumes a recognizable meeting structure (call to order, motions, votes, action items, adjournment, or the LLC/ advisory equivalent — resolution, written consent, signature) and is optimized for organizations that need a searchable, defensible record over time, not a casual recap.

What MinuteSmith is not

It is not a generic meeting transcription tool. Otter, Fireflies, and Fathom produce summary transcripts of conversations. MinuteSmith produces minutes — a different document with legal and governance weight: motion text, mover and seconder, vote counts, attendance, action items with owners and due dates, executive-session handling, and compliance citations.

It is also not a board portal in the “document library” sense. MinuteSmith focuses on the minute-taking workflow and the institutional memory built from a board’s own meetings, not on being a general-purpose file vault.

How it differs from generic AI note-takers

• Document type. Minutes, not transcripts. The output is structured as call-to-order, attendance, motions, discussions, action items, and adjournment — the format a board secretary actually files.
• Compliance grounding. Seven structural checks run on every generated set of minutes and surface as visible flags, not as marketing claims.
• Institutional memory. Every meeting a board uploads (including imported historical PDFs) becomes searchable context for Ask AI, so a new secretary can answer “what did the board decide about pool hours last year?” without paging through old files.
• Source grounding. Ask AI answers are sourced from the board’s own minutes; the underlying retrieval and vendor processing is documented at /how-ask-ai-works.

Who operates MinuteSmith

MinuteSmith is owned and operated by MinuteSmith LLC, a Virginia limited liability company based in Fairfax, VA. The same entity is the legal operator across the product, billing, and customer support — there is no separate parent corporation, no portfolio company structure, and no third-party reseller. When you are trusting a vendor to hold years of your board’s governance record, it should be clear who that vendor is and who answers when you write in; with MinuteSmith it is one accountable company.

Customer data is hosted in the United States (Supabase Postgres on AWS us-east-2). Architecture, data-handling, and vendor relationships are documented in plain English on the Security and Privacy pages. The Trust Center is the canonical place for IT reviewers.

Contact

Product and billing: contact@minutesmith.com or (888) 685-4065 (email is the preferred contact method)
Operational status: /status
Security / compliance docs: /trust-center