Academy/Minutes & Official Records
Draft minutes
The minutes your secretary just wrote are not official yet, and treating them as if they were is the mistake this lesson fixes.
Draft minutes are the first written record of a meeting, prepared by the secretary but not yet reviewed or approved by the board or membership. They are not an official record until a later meeting votes to approve them, so label them DRAFT, keep them internal, and never treat them as final until that vote happens.
Why the word "draft" matters
A secretary types up notes right after a meeting and sends them to the board the next morning. Those notes feel finished, but they are not the record yet. Nothing is official until the body that met votes to approve it.
"Draft minutes are the first written account of a meeting"
Source: Draft vs. Approved Minutes: What's the Difference?, MinutesSolutions
Best practice is to make that status visible on the document itself, not just understood informally.
"include the word 'DRAFT' at the top of draft minutes and include 'DRAFT' in the file name. Once approved, remove the word 'DRAFT' and add the approval date."
Source: Draft vs. Approved Minutes: What's the Difference?, MinutesSolutions
Who turns a draft into an official record
The secretary writes the draft, but the secretary does not get to declare it final. The board or membership approves minutes as a body, at a later meeting, and only that vote changes their status.
"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
That matters for a common shortcut: a chair who reads the draft and tells the secretary to "just fix that line" has not corrected the minutes. Only a vote of the body does.
When owners must actually see the draft
Whether, and how fast, a draft has to reach owners before it is approved varies by state. Check your own state statute and your bylaws before you set a policy.
In Virginia, the law sets a specific outer limit: draft minutes must be made available within 60 days of the meeting, or when they go out with the board's next meeting agenda, whichever comes first. Source: Code of Virginia Section 55.1-1815, Virginia General Assembly.
That is one state's rule, not a national one. It shows the kind of deadline that can exist, and why "we'll share them once they're approved" is not automatically safe everywhere.
Check yourself
Answer before you read the explanation, recalling it is what makes it stick.
The secretary emails last night's meeting notes to the board the next morning. Are they an official record yet?
A homeowner asks to see last month's minutes before the board has approved them. What should the board do?
A Virginia HOA's board just met. Under Virginia law, by when must draft minutes reach members if the board waits to send them?
Sources
- Draft vs. Approved Minutes: What's the Difference?, MinutesSolutions
- Who may correct meeting minutes?, Jurassic Parliament
- Code of Virginia Section 55.1-1815, Virginia General Assembly
Related elsewhere in the Academy
Minutes & Official Records
Next: find out exactly what happens at the meeting where a draft gets approved, or corrected, or both.
Whether your state sets a deadline for sharing draft minutes with owners, and what your bylaws require before a draft becomes official, varies by state and by your governing documents.