Site meeting minutes that actually get actioned
Site meeting minutes do two jobs. In the short term they tell everybody what they agreed to do before the next meeting. In the long term they are the project's memory — and on a job that turns contentious, the closest thing to contemporaneous evidence of who knew what, and when.
Most minutes do the first job adequately and the second badly.
Number points so they survive
The single most useful convention: a discussion point keeps its original number for as long as it stays open, carried across every meeting until it is closed.
A common scheme numbers each point by the meeting it originated in — so 7.03 is the third point raised at meeting 7, and it remains 7.03 at meetings 8, 9 and 10 while it is still live. Actions hang off it as 7.03.a, 7.03.b. Anybody can then see at a glance that a point has been open for four meetings, which is information a renumbered list destroys.
Closed points drop out of the running agenda but stay in the record of the meeting where they closed. What you must never do is renumber from one each week — it makes the history unreconstructable and it is the most common failing in minutes written in a word processor.
Write actions that can actually be done
Every action needs three things, and most minutes supply one or two:
- A named owner. Not a company — a person. "Contractor to confirm" means nobody has to.
- A date. "ASAP" is not a date. "Before next meeting" is acceptable only if the next meeting has one.
- An outcome that can be verified. "Review the drawing" cannot be checked. "Confirm in writing whether the revised layout affects the riser positions" can.
Record the status honestly at each meeting — open, delayed, done — rather than quietly rolling delayed items forward. A point that has been delayed four times is telling you something, and hiding it in the numbering only delays the reckoning.
Attendance and apologies
Record who was present, who sent apologies, and who each of them represents. It matters more than it seems: an instruction accepted at a meeting the subcontractor did not attend is an instruction they can reasonably say they never received.
The acceptance clause
Minutes only work as a record if there is a defined moment they become final. The standard mechanism is a clause stating that the minutes are taken as accurate unless a written objection is received within a set window — seven days is typical — after which they stand as the project record.
This is what stops a party disputing, eight months later, something recorded and circulated at the time. It only holds if the minutes genuinely were circulated promptly, so the discipline of issuing within a day or two of the meeting is doing real work.
Issue them while it is fresh
Minutes written a week later are a reconstruction. The practical answer is to capture points during the meeting and issue the same day — which is why Snagger's minutes carry forward attendees and open action points from the previous meeting automatically, keep the original numbering, and produce the PDF with the acceptance clause on it before everybody has left the room.