Meeting minutes template (with example)
Meeting minutes are the short written record of a meeting: who attended, what was decided, and which actions were agreed, each with an owner and a due date. Good minutes are not a transcript. They capture decisions and next steps in a form someone who missed the meeting can act on, and they are sent within a day while everyone still remembers.
What should meeting minutes include?
Meeting minutes should include the meeting details, attendees, the agenda items, the decisions made, the action items with owners and dates, and anything left open.
The template
Copy this into a doc and fill it in during or straight after the meeting.
| Section | What to write |
|---|---|
| Meeting | Name, date, time, location or call link |
| Attendees | Who was there, and who was invited but absent |
| Purpose | One sentence: why this meeting happened |
| Agenda items | Each topic discussed, in order, with a two- or three-line summary |
| Decisions | Each decision in one sentence, and who made it |
| Action items | Task, owner, due date |
| Open questions | What still needs an answer, and who will find it |
| Next meeting | Date, time and the main topic |
Keep the decisions and action items in their own sections, even when they also appear in the summary. They are the parts people come back for.
What does a completed set of meeting minutes look like?
A completed set of meeting minutes lists who attended, records each decision in a sentence, and ends with dated action items that each have one owner.
Fieldwork Studio meets Northwind Bakery for a weekly website check-in. Names are invented.
- Meeting: Northwind website, weekly check-in, Friday 6 November 2026, 10:00 to 10:30, video call
- Attendees: Dana Cole (Northwind, owner), Luis Ortega (Northwind, marketing), Priya Shah (Fieldwork, project lead), Sam Rivera (Fieldwork, developer). Absent: none
- Purpose: Review the first design round and confirm content dates.
- Agenda 1, design round 1: Dana likes the home page and wants the ordering button above the fold on mobile.
- Agenda 2, content: Luis has copy for four of six pages; menu photos are booked for 12 November.
- Agenda 3, ordering provider: the test account expires 5 November, so Sam needs a new one.
- Decision: the ordering button moves above the fold on mobile (Dana).
- Decision: launch stays on 4 December (Dana and Priya).
- Action: revise the mobile home page. Owner Priya, due 10 November.
- Action: send the remaining page copy. Owner Luis, due 11 November.
- Action: renew the ordering provider test account. Owner Dana, due 7 November.
- Action: connect ordering to staging. Owner Sam, due 13 November.
- Open questions: Does the bakery want gift cards online? Dana to decide by the next call.
- Next meeting: Friday 13 November, 10:00, design round 2.
How do I write meeting minutes quickly?
Write meeting minutes quickly by filling the template during the meeting, recording decisions and actions as they happen, and sending the minutes the same day.
- Prepare the frame before the meeting. Paste the agenda into the template so you only fill in outcomes.
- Write decisions as sentences, not discussion. "Launch stays on 4 December" beats a paragraph about timelines.
- Give every action one owner and a date. "We'll look into it" is not an action item.
- Confirm actions out loud in the last two minutes. It catches missing owners.
- Send within 24 hours, and ask people to reply if anything is wrong. Silence then means agreement.
- Keep them where the work is, not in an inbox, so the next meeting can start from the open actions.
What are common meeting minutes mistakes?
The most common meeting minutes mistakes are writing a transcript, leaving actions without owners or dates, and sending the minutes days later.
- Too long. If it takes ten minutes to read, nobody reads it. Aim for one page.
- Actions buried in paragraphs. Pull them into their own list.
- No record of who decided. When a decision is questioned later, the name matters.
- Minutes no one can find. Store them with the project, not in someone's personal notes.
For client projects, the first meeting usually follows a project kickoff meeting agenda, and the regular update to the client can follow a client report template.
How can I keep meeting minutes with the project in Flori?
In Flori, meeting minutes can live as a doc on the client's project, and each action item becomes a task with an owner and a due date, so nothing agreed in a meeting is lost.
Flori is a CRM with project management for freelancers, agencies and small teams. If you use Fireflies, Granola or Fathom, Flori can turn meeting notes into tasks, and an assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT connected to your workspace can draft the minutes and the action list from the notes for you to review before anything is saved.
FAQ
What is the difference between meeting minutes and meeting notes? Meeting notes are whatever someone wrote down for themselves. Meeting minutes are the shared, official record: attendees, decisions and action items, written so the whole group, including people who missed the meeting, can act on them.
Who should take meeting minutes? Anyone except the person running the meeting, who needs to focus on the discussion. On small teams the project lead often does both; in that case, fill the template straight after the call while it is fresh.
How long should meeting minutes be? One page for most meetings. Record decisions and actions in full and summarize the discussion in a few lines per agenda item. Detail beyond that rarely gets read.
When should meeting minutes be sent? Within 24 hours of the meeting. Ask attendees to reply with corrections by a set date, so the minutes become the agreed record.
Do meeting minutes need to record who said what? Usually not. Record who made each decision and who owns each action. Quotes are only worth including when the exact wording matters, such as a client approval.
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