Step by step

1. Open the minute book

   In the left-hand navigation, find the Meetings group and click Minutes. The screen loads your organisation's minute book, showing up to 40 sets of minutes sorted newest first. Each row carries a label built from the linked meeting's date and type, a status, and the text of the body.

2. Read the status of each set of minutes

   Each set of minutes shows a plain-English status: draft minutes appear as 'The draft', submitted minutes as 'Before the meeting', approved minutes as 'Approved', and archived minutes as 'Archived'. If amendments have been recorded, their count appears beside the status. The action buttons shown on each row depend entirely on which status it carries.

3. Approve submitted minutes

   Find the minutes labelled 'Before the meeting' and click 'They are approved'. This submits the form and triggers the approval workflow. The page immediately refreshes to show the updated status.

4. Understand what the approval workflow checks and writes

   The workflow loads the minutes document and confirms you hold the lodge-admin or worshipful-master role; if you do not, it stops with a Forbidden error. If you do, it stamps the document with status 'approved', the current date and time as approvedAt, and your own user id as approvedBy. A 'minutes.approved' event is written to the audit log.

5. Know that approved minutes are locked

   Once approved, the body, title, date, and all verified-time fields are protected. Any direct attempt to edit them is blocked by the collection's validation rules. The status field is equally locked: it can only move forward through the workflow, not by a direct API call or manual save.

6. Open the amendment panel

   On a set of approved minutes, MinutesForm renders two controls: an 'Amend them' toggle button and a 'Close the book on them' form. Clicking 'Amend them' opens an amendment panel inline, showing a textarea pre-filled with the current text of the minutes and a text field for the reason. A button labelled 'Amend, and put them up for approval again' appears at the bottom of the panel.

7. Write the correction and state the reason

   Edit the body text in the textarea until it is correct, and type the reason for the amendment in the reason field — this field is required and cannot be left blank. When you are ready, click 'Amend, and put them up for approval again'. The corrected text is converted to the document format used by the editor before it is saved.

8. Understand what the amendment workflow writes

   The workflow rejects an empty reason immediately. If the reason is present it saves the corrected body, resets status to 'submitted', records the current date and time and your user id as submittedAt and submittedBy, and appends an entry to the amendments array containing the reason, the timestamp, and your id. The amendments array is write-locked to the workflow, so this is the only way to add to it. A 'minutes.amended' event is written to the audit log with the reason as its description.

9. Confirm the amended minutes are back in the approval queue

   The page refreshes automatically. The amended minutes now show 'Before the meeting' with the amendment count incremented, and the 'They are approved' button reappears. The approval cycle can repeat as many times as needed; every amendment's reason, timestamp, and author are preserved on the document and in the audit log.

What happens next

Approved minutes become the settled record for your organisation. Their body, title, date, and verified meeting times are locked against silent changes. If something must be corrected later, the amendment process re-opens them to 'submitted', records exactly who made the change and why, and requires a named approver to sign off again. The approver's identity and timestamp are written by the workflow itself, not entered by hand, so the record cannot be backdated or attributed incorrectly.

The full history — every amendment's reason, the author, and the date — sits on the document alongside the current approved text and is also captured in the audit log. Regulators, visitors, or members who need to understand how the record reached its present form can trace every step.

Good to know

The 'Close the book on them' option appears alongside 'Amend them' on approved minutes.

Any attempt to approve minutes without the required role is blocked with a Forbidden error on the server. Contact your organisation's administrator to have the correct role assigned before you try again.