Amending previously approved minutes

The motion you actually need

Once the board approves minutes, they become the official record of that meeting. But errors surface later anyway: a vote recorded wrong, a motion's wording garbled, a whole item left out. Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, the parliamentary authority most associations adopt by reference in their bylaws, has a built-in fix for exactly this. It is not something the secretary does quietly, and not something the chair orders. It is a motion, brought to a current meeting, seconded, and voted on like any other piece of business.

"If a correction to previously approved minutes is adopted, the secretary does not actually alter the content of the original minutes, but may make a marginal notation indicating the corrected text or referring to the minutes of the meeting at which the correction was adopted."

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

The original text stays put

This is the part boards get wrong most often. Correcting minutes does not mean deleting the mistake and replacing it with a clean version. The original wording of the approved minutes remains exactly as written. What changes is that a note gets added alongside it, pointing to the correction or to the meeting where the board voted to make it. That way anyone reading the record later, an owner, an auditor, a judge, can see both what was originally recorded and what the board later fixed, and when.

How many votes it takes to adopt that correction depends on your association's own parliamentary authority and governing documents. Check your bylaws and adopted parliamentary authority rather than assuming a specific threshold.

Who gets to decide

The board president cannot fix approved minutes by personal decision, even if everyone in the room agrees the president's memory is correct. Final say belongs to the body as a whole, exercised through a vote, not to whoever is running the meeting.

"ultimate and final approval lies with the body itself. The president or chair does not have the parliamentary authority to direct the secretary how to correct meeting minutes."

Source: Who may correct meeting minutes?, Jurassic Parliament (Ann Macfarlane, Professional Registered Parliamentarian)

This only applies once minutes have already been approved. If the error is spotted before approval, while the minutes are still a draft, that is a simpler process, covered in correcting minutes.