Vendor contact registers

What a vendor register actually holds

For each vendor, the register should carry the company name, the service they provide, a direct contact person, a phone number or email, and any working notes a new director would otherwise have to learn by trial and error: which gate code the landscaper uses, who actually returns calls, whether the pool company needs 48 hours' notice. None of that lives anywhere else.

It certainly does not live in the minutes. Robert's Rules is explicit about what minutes are for:

"Minutes are a record of what was done at a meeting, not a record of what was said."

Source: Robert's Rules of Order, Frequently Asked Questions, Robert's Rules Association

So a motion approving the landscaping contract shows up in the minutes. The number to call when the sprinklers break at 6 a.m. does not, unless someone wrote it down somewhere built for exactly that.

Not the same thing as your contract file

A vendor contact register is not a substitute for a contract register, the document that tracks the agreements themselves, their terms, and their renewal dates. The underlying contracts are, in some states, official records with their own retention rules: Florida requires associations to keep a current copy of every contract for at least seven years and bid records for one year, and California requires executed contracts to be kept as association records available for member inspection. Check your own state's requirements, since Florida and California are the only two verified here and most states differ.

The vendor register holds none of that paperwork. It holds who to call, and what dealing with that vendor is actually like day to day.

Build it so it survives a departure

CAI's own framing of succession planning is that institutional knowledge, history, and business relationships are assets a departure puts at risk, and that boards should act before a departure is imminent rather than after.

"There's no better time than the present to deal with the unexpected and protect the businesses that have been built over the decades."

Source: Passing the torch: Why succession planning is essential for community association professionals, Community Associations Institute (CAI)

That guidance was written about management company succession, not volunteer boards directly, but the same risk applies: the director who has called the same roofer for eight years is carrying knowledge nobody else has. CAI's guidance for incoming board members backs this up from the other direction, telling new directors they do not need to master everything on day one and should lean on colleagues, management, and counsel instead. A vendor register is what makes that possible specifically for vendor relationships: an incoming director calls the number on the list instead of reconstructing eight years of history from memory.

Update it the moment something changes, a new vendor, a lost contact, a person who no longer answers, rather than trying to rebuild it from memory during a transition meeting.