When to use it
Every business or officer meeting. Instead of typing minutes into a Word doc that lives on one officer's laptop, the Recorder builds the record where the council's data already is: attendance carries over from meeting check-ins, the officer slate pre-fills, and motions become a searchable history. Approve the minutes to lock them; reopen later only to make a correction the way the council amends the minute book.
Step by step
- Open Programs → Meeting Minutes. You'll see every business/officer meeting for the Columbian Year with its status (Not started · Draft · Approved).
- Find the meeting and click Start minutes (or Open if a draft exists). Attendance and the officer roster are pre-filled from the roster.
- Set the meeting mechanics — call to order and adjourned times (in the council's timezone), quorum, guest count. Members-present is read live from attendance.
- Check off Officers Present, and note whether the previous meeting's minutes were approved.
- Fill in the order of business sections you need — correspondence, Chaplain's message, officer reports, unfinished/new business, Good of the Order, and so on. Empty sections are simply left off the record.
- Under Motions & Resolutions, click Add motion for each one: the text, who moved and seconded it, the disposition (carried / failed / tabled / withdrawn), a voice or counted vote, and any dollar amount.
- Click Save as you go. When the record is complete, click Approve & lock — this stamps the approver, snapshots attendance, and freezes the record.
- Click PDF any time to download the minute-book page for the binder or the archive.
Tips & gotchas
- Approved minutes are locked. To fix something, click Reopen for correction — the standard "amend the minutes" path — then Save and re-approve.
- Attendance is the source for members-present. Take attendance for the meeting (Brotherhood → Participation, or member self check-in) and the count flows in automatically.
- Motions carry a name snapshot as well as a member link, so the record stays accurate even if a member is later merged or removed.
- Visible to members controls whether an approved record is readable by members in the app; leave it on for transparency, or off for a sensitive session.
- Minutes attach to a meeting on the calendar — a meeting only appears here if it's a business_meeting or officer_meeting event.
Related
- See also motion-log
- See also council-bulletin
- See also calendar