Who Should Have Access to Your Minute Book and Why It's Important

So a question that we get asked is who should have access to a Minutebook and when? Ultimately, I can tell you, in working with over 2,500 businesses, a lot of times it's the individual shareholders that are really the ones who need to have access to it. For the bulk of the time, I would say senior officers of the company, especially if they're on some of the resolutions, being president, secretary, treasurer, a vice president role, they should have access to those documents. They should be able to see those documents. But one of the one area of an outside party that tends to look at your Minutebook somewhat often is the bank. So if you have any sort of borrowing, they'll be looking at different resolutions. They'll want to see your articles of incorporation. So there will be elements of your Minutebook that you'll have to share with other related parties, like a bank. For sure, if you're getting audited by any of the formal authorities, like the income tax, whether it's payroll, workers compensation, anything like that, they may request the Minutebook and they have the authority to review everything. And in fact, if it's not up to date, those parties will actually and could actually impose penalties for not having those things up to date. So it's important that they are. So for the most part, the Minutebook is quietly put aside, whether it's digitally or whether it's in a physical form. Maybe your key senior management staff have access to it. Potentially the bank is going to ask for things every now and again, but the authorities, the external authorities, the government agencies that work with us, and we work within their framework, they're eligible to request these documents and, and we need to have them available for them. So for the most part, again, the Minutebook is pretty quiet rate until it's required for something. And if it's not up to date, it could cause us some problems.