Extract data from meeting minutes
Meeting minutes are the official record of what a group decided and who agreed to do what next, and for a corporate board, a committee, or a project steering group they are the document an organization has to be able to produce on demand. A company secretary preparing the pack for the next Cedar Ridge Holdings board meeting, an auditor testing that the Audit Committee approved a related-party transaction, and a program manager chasing action items from a weekly stand-up all read minutes for the same structure: who attended, what was on the agenda, what was decided, and what action each person owns with a due date. Minutes issued on 2026-05-16 for a meeting held on 2026-05-14 carry weight under governance bodies such as the Remuneration Committee and the Audit Committee, yet they usually arrive as free-form documents that nobody can query. The structure is consistent even though the prose is not. A set of minutes names the meeting date, time, and location, lists attendees and apologies, records the agenda in sequence, captures the decisions and any votes, and ends with an action register of tasks, owners, and target dates. Recurring bodies reference prior minutes, so a decision in the current set may amend one minuted on 2026-02-12. Under Companies House record-keeping rules, a company has to retain minutes of directors' meetings and members' resolutions, so the retention and the accuracy both matter. Action items are the part people reuse most, because an owner such as Sarah Mitchell with a task due 2026-05-28 needs to surface in a tracker rather than sit buried in a paragraph. Talonic reads the minutes and returns the meeting metadata, the attendee list, the agenda, the decisions, and the action register as structured fields and tables. An action assigned to Daniel Okafor, due 2026-06-04, with a status of in progress, comes back as its own row, so a governance or project team works from a live task list instead of re-reading the document.
What gets extracted from meeting minutes
How extraction works for meeting minutes
Minutes are produced in Microsoft Word and Google Docs, exported from board portals such as Diligent and BoardEffect, and scanned from signed copies, so headings, numbering, and table styles vary from one secretary to the next. Talonic reads the document and maps it to the meeting minutes schema in the Field Registry, which separates the meeting metadata from the attendee list, the agenda, the decisions, and the action register rather than treating the minutes as one block of prose. Attendees and apologies are split into their own tables, each agenda item keeps its sequence and presenter, and every action item is captured with its owner, due date, and status so it can feed a tracker. A decision that amends a prior resolution is linked to the meeting it references. Because minutes are a governance record that has to be retained and produced on request, each captured value returns with a confidence score and a pixel-region pointer under DIN SPEC 91491 conformity, so a company secretary or an auditor can verify an attendee or a decision against the signed source.
Sample extraction
Signed minutes of a quarterly board meeting with an action register
{
"subject": "Q2 Board of Directors Meeting",
"meeting_date": "2026-05-14",
"meeting_time": "14:00 CET",
"meeting_location": "Cedar Ridge HQ, Conference Room A",
"organizer.name": "Sarah Mitchell",
"prepared_by": "Marcus Lee",
"attendees": [
{
"name": "Sarah Mitchell",
"role": "Chair",
"department": "Board"
},
{
"name": "Daniel Okafor",
"role": "Director",
"department": "Board"
},
{
"name": "Priya Raman",
"role": "CFO",
"department": "Finance"
},
{
"name": "Marcus Lee",
"role": "Company Secretary",
"department": "Legal"
},
{
"name": "Lukas Bauer",
"role": "Non-Executive Director",
"department": "Board"
}
],
"absent_attendees": [
{
"name": "Elena Rossi",
"reason": "Apologies, travel"
},
{
"name": "Tomas Herrera",
"reason": "Apologies"
}
],
"attendee_count": 5,
"absent_count": 2,
"invited_count": 7,
"quorum_met": true,
"decisions": [
{
"sequence": 1,
"description": "Approved the FY2025 audited accounts",
"votes_for": 5,
"votes_against": 0,
"abstentions": 0
}
],
"action_items": [
{
"description": "Circulate the revised capex plan",
"assigned_to": "Daniel Okafor",
"due_date": "2026-06-04",
"status": "in_progress"
}
],
"next_meeting_date": "2026-06-11"
}Frequently asked
Does it split attendees, apologies, and the action register into tables?
Yes. The people present, the apologies noted, the agenda, the decisions, and the action items are each returned as their own table, so a board pack that reads as continuous prose becomes a set of queryable records without losing the order in which items were taken.
How are action items captured for tracking?
Each action item comes back with its description, the owner it is assigned to, a due date, and a status such as pending or in progress, so a project or governance team can load the register straight into a tracker rather than transcribing tasks out of paragraphs.
Can it link a decision that amends an earlier one?
When a set of minutes references a prior meeting or resolution, that reference is captured so a decision that revises an earlier one is linked to it, which matters for a board that reviews a running history of what it approved, such as a resolution minuted on 2026-02-12.
Does it record votes and quorum?
Where the minutes state them, the vote tally and the attendance count are captured, so a reader can confirm that a quorum was present and that a resolution carried before relying on the decision.
Ready to extract from your own meeting minutes?
Author note
Reviewed by Talonic engineering · last reviewed 2026-07-06