What to include on LLC Minutes of Your Meeting

What are the minutes of an LLC meeting? They are effectively a summary of the important meetings you have in your LLC. At the initial meeting after you've created your LLC, the members will do basic tasks like adopting the operating agreement, and appointing managers and officers, among other things.

They also help memorialize important decisions you make. And you might be asking - do I always need to draft minutes for my LLC?

Legally, probably not. But there’s a lot of advantages to following formalities like taking minutes. It helps “strengthen the corporate veil.”

How? It gives the impression that you’re a more serious company and not just a sham.

It’s also nice so you can prove something that purportedly happened at the meeting actually occurred--e.g. if you and other members agreed to pursue a deal with someone and the deal didn’t work out, the other members couldn’t come back and say you screwed them over by pursuing that deal.

How to Keep LLC Minutes

You just simply record notes from the meeting. Use our template and follow these steps.

1. Write down your LLC’s name, the date, and address where the meeting was held.
2. Write down the names of the members and indicate who was present and who was absent at the meeting. And if there’s other people who aren’t members but are present at the meeting, write their names down as well.
3. If you sent a notice of the meeting prior to the meeting, attach it to the minutes. Otherwise, attach a waiver of notice signed by all the members of the LLC.
4. Write down the names of the documents that were approved by the members. Usually, these documents are the Articles of Organization and the Operating Agreement.
5. Write down the records of the amount deposited by each member toward their capital contribution. If the amount is paid in the form of services, indicate that.
6. Write down all other decisions made at the meeting.
7. Have the minutes signed by all the members who were present at the meeting and place it in the LLC records.

Do I need to include the LLC minutes in my operating agreement?

Nope! Those are two separate things. Your operating agreement--if you have one (you should)--will have all the information about how your LLC should be run. But, you could use the minutes to indicate that you adopted your operating agreement or that you amended it.

Do you need a lawyer for this?

The biggest question now is, "Do you need to hire a lawyer for help?" Sometimes, yes (especially if you have multiple owners). But often for single-owner businesses, you don't need a lawyer to start your business.

Many business owners instead use tools like Legal GPS for Business, which includes a step-by-step, interactive platform and 100+ contract templates to help you start and grow your company.