A board packet without the late night

Gather what the packet needs

Most packets need the same pieces each month: the last minutes and their action items, the treasurer's or bookkeeper's reports, giving and program numbers, grant deadlines coming up, and the decisions the board will be asked to make. Send Grantkeeper the files and it reads your calendar link for meeting dates.

Grantkeeper returns a draft agenda, a table of last month's action items with who owns each and whether it's done, a short narrative for the director's report, and a list of the decisions on the table. Attachments are labelled so board members can find them on a phone.

Keep every number tied to its source

Each figure names the report and the period it came from. Donation totals are not the bank balance, and restricted gifts stay on their own lines. Grantkeeper uses the balances your treasurer supplies and does not work out cash from giving reports.

If you run Ad Grants, the packet can include a short monthly summary: clicks, grant spend and recorded conversions, with a note on any tracking gaps. Grant spend is Google's in-kind advertising, not money in your account, so it sits apart from the finance numbers.

Deadlines and grant reports

Boards often want to see what's due before the next meeting. Grantkeeper adds a short list of grant applications, renewals and reports due in the coming weeks, each with the funder, the exact deadline and time zone, and the person responsible, taken from the award letters and funder notices you sent.

If a report is already late or a number is missing, the packet says so plainly. A clear open item is easier for a board to help with than a gap nobody mentions.

After the meeting

Send your notes after the meeting and Grantkeeper drafts the minutes: who attended, motions and votes as you recorded them, any recusals, decisions, and new action items with owners and dates. Anything unclear in the notes is marked for you to confirm. The board adopts the minutes; the draft is a starting point.

The IRS Instructions for Form 990 ask whether an organization documented its board meetings at the time, and describe that as by the later of the next meeting or 60 days after it. A draft written the same week makes that easier to keep up with.

Keep donor names, care requests and volunteer contact details out of the packet unless the board needs them for a decision. The board packet recipe and minutes recipe show the texts to send.