What should meeting minutes include?

The meeting name, date, time and place, who attended and who sent apologies, the decisions made, and the actions with one owner and a due date each. Add the date of the next meeting. Leave out who said what unless it matters.

How long should meeting minutes be?

Short enough to read in two minutes. For most plant meetings that is one page. If the minutes are longer, the meeting probably covered too many topics, or the note taker wrote down discussion instead of decisions.

What is the difference between meeting minutes and notes?

Notes are for the person taking them. Minutes are the shared record: attendance, decisions and actions. Write minutes from your notes within a day of the meeting.

Who takes the minutes?

Someone other than the chair, so the chair can run the meeting. Rotate the job among regular attendees so it does not fall on one person. Name the minute taker in the header.

How is this different from a rolling action item list?

A rolling action item list is the running list used at a daily board, where the actions are the whole point. Minutes are for longer meetings and also record attendance, topics and decisions with their reasons. The Excel log here carries actions from meeting to meeting in the same way.

Free template

Updated November 6, 2026

Meeting minutes template

Meeting minutes are the short written record of a meeting: who was there, what was decided, and who will do what by when. They are not a transcript. This template has a one-page form to fill in during a plant, team or project meeting, with room for decisions, actions and the actions carried over from last time, and an Excel log that keeps every action from every meeting in one place and shows which are done, open or overdue, by owner. It is a working form: if a customer, a regulator or your safety committee needs a particular format, use theirs.

Free to use: print it, copy it and edit it for your team. Enter your name and work email once to download.

Page 1 of the meeting minutes form — Header and attendanceCarried-over actionsTopics and decisionsNew actions with owner and dateAction logDecision logSummary by owner

Filled-in Meeting minutes template: two weekly production meetings and seven actions — The same sheet filled in with the worked example (page 2 of the PDF, illustrative numbers). Open full size (opens the picture in a new tab)

When to use it

When to use a meeting minutes template

For any recurring meeting that makes decisions or hands out work: the weekly production meeting, a project review, a quality or safety committee.
When people leave the room with different ideas of what was agreed, and the same topic comes back the next week.
When actions go missing between meetings. The log carries every open action forward until it is closed.
When someone who was not there needs to know what was decided, without reading a page of notes.
Not for the daily huddle at the board. Use a rolling action item list there, and keep these minutes for the longer meetings.

How to fill it in

1
Fill in the header before the meeting
Meeting name, date, time, place, chair and who is taking the minutes. Write the attendees and apologies as people arrive, not afterwards from memory.
2
Start with last meeting's open actions
Read each one out and mark it done, still open or dropped. Anything still open is carried over to this page, so nothing disappears quietly.
3
Write one line per topic, then the decision
Note what was discussed in a sentence or two. Then write the decision in words a stranger could act on, and who made it. If nothing was decided, write that.
4
Turn every job into an action
One owner, one verb, one date. Write it before the topic closes, and read it back so the owner hears it.
5
Send the minutes within 24 hours
Type the actions into the Excel log the same day. The log works out the status of each one from the due date and the done date.
6
Open the next meeting with the log
Filter the log for open and overdue. That list is the first item of the next meeting.

Three documents, three jobs

Agenda, notes and minutes are not the same thing

Mixing them up is why minutes turn into long pages nobody reads.

Document	Written	For whom	What goes in it
Agenda	Before the meeting	The people who will attend	Topics, who leads each, how long, and what to read first.
Notes	During the meeting	The note taker	Whatever helps the note taker remember. Not shared.
Minutes	Within a day after	Attendees and anyone affected	Attendance, decisions, actions with owner and date. Short enough to read in two minutes.

Agenda
Written
Before the meeting
For whom
The people who will attend
What goes in it
Topics, who leads each, how long, and what to read first.
Notes
Written
During the meeting
For whom
The note taker
What goes in it
Whatever helps the note taker remember. Not shared.
Minutes
Written
Within a day after
For whom
Attendees and anyone affected
What goes in it
Attendance, decisions, actions with owner and date. Short enough to read in two minutes.

A filled-in example

Illustrative, not a benchmark

An example (illustrative): the weekly production meeting at a made-up Plant 2, on 28 October and 4 November 2026, with the log read on 6 November.

The log holds 7 actions from 2 meetings: 2 from 28 October and 5 from 4 November. It also holds 4 decisions.
Two actions are Done: the spare labeller sensor (Priya, due 2 November, done 3 November) and the request to maintenance about the line 3 conveyor (Lena, due 5 November, done 5 November).
One is Overdue and was carried over: re-time the line 1 changeover with a stopwatch (Marcus, due 3 November, not done). It opened the 4 November meeting and is still open.
Four are Open: posting the scrap count by shift is due today, 6 November, so it is not overdue yet. The other three are due 9, 12 and 13 November.
Done % = 2 ÷ 7 = 28.6%. By owner: Priya 2 actions (1 done), Marcus 2 (1 overdue), Dana 1 and Lena 2 (1 done).
On 4 November the plant manager decided to buy the sensor kit and not a single sensor, because two of the three labeller sensors are the same age. The reason is in the log beside the decision.

Anyone can see what was agreed, who owes what, and that the one late action is Marcus's re-timing, three days late, instead of finding out at the next meeting.

Common mistakes

Writing down what everyone said
Minutes record what was decided and who will act. A page of quotes hides the one line people need.
Actions with no owner or no date
Write 'Dana, 9 November', not 'the team will look at it'. An action without a name and a date will not get done.
Sending them a week later
By then the next meeting is close and the actions are already late. Send them within a day.
Keeping actions only in the minutes
If the actions live on separate pages, nobody sees the whole list. Keep one log across meetings and sort it by owner and due date.
Leaving out the decision's reason
In three months nobody remembers why. One line of reason saves the same argument later.

Download the template

Free to use: print it, copy it and edit it for your team. Enter your name and work email once to download.

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