Minute books

[TJ Mason]

Quezzie for seccies...

When I became secretary of my club, I inherited very little from my predecessor. There were no minutes from him or his predecessors - it looks like he never recorded any minutes himself and discarded or lost the minutes made by previous secretaries.

I'm currently using a ring binder with loose-leaf A4 pages, and am treating it as a sort of club diary as well as recording the minutes of meetings.

I'm aware that the minute book has legal and insurance meaning, so I'd like to get it right. So what format of minute book do other clubs use, please? And what level of detail do you record in it?

[SVL]

Good question .... I also use the ring binder method.

[Steffi]

The ring binder method sounds. You don't have to go into to much detail, I do my minutes in report form.

[Furface]

Sadly, I keep all ours currently on the 'puter, and plan to create a hard copy by the next AGM. I note important decisions, but usually put "after discusssion...". And I do like a few jokes

[ben tarrow]

Originally Posted by Furface

Sadly, I keep all ours currently on the 'puter, and plan to create a hard copy by the next AGM. I note important decisions, but usually put "after discusssion...". And I do like a few jokes

Likewise, I take notes (wild scriblings) and type up as soon as possible on the computer, whilst I can still remember what it all means.
I am given to believe that minutes only take on a legal bearing AFTER they have been accepted as an accurate record of the meeting, usually at the next meeting.
Seperately we have an "incident book" (not an accident book, the accident book is for recording accidents) bit like a club diary where we can record day to day occurances that may need refering back to at a later date. This is a bound book (so that no one can remove pages) and each entry is dated at the top and signed at the bottom (to prevent additions to an entry) Most of the entries therein are requests for have a gos to give them status as recorded events, but we also record invaders (people who walk across our fields) and even arguements and complaints between members.
I shall publish it as a best seller one day.

My predecessor gave me a large cardboard box with all the minutes and correspondence dating back over the lifetime of our club (some 53 years). This forms part of our club history and it is nice to be able to look back through the yellowing paper and see that the problems we have today are not so different from the problems that beset the founder members of this club. Secretaries, like members, come and go, but the club goes on.