Calculator
What do your minutes actually cost?
Writing minutes is staff time that never shows up as a line item. Move the sliders to see what your town spends on it in a year.
Most towns land between $30 and $55 an hour once benefits are counted. The point is not the payroll line, it is the hours: whatever the total comes to, it is time your staff gets back for permits, records requests, and serving the residents the office actually exists for.
Staff cost per year
$10,944
- Sets of minutes per year
- 72
- Hours spent writing
- 288
- Equivalent full work weeks
- 7.2
- Evenings per month
- 6
Towns almost always spend more writing minutes in-house than outsourcing them. Tell us which boards you cover and we will send back exactly what yours would cost.
Find out what you would saveAn estimate, not a quote. It counts drafting time only, not the time spent circulating, correcting, and posting.
The bottleneck is the draft
Approval takes minutes. Getting something to approve takes hours.
Backlogs are a compliance problem
Open meeting laws in most states require minutes to be created, approved, and made available within a reasonable time. Late minutes are usually a staffing problem rather than a willingness problem.
The work is uneven
A routine meeting takes an hour. A budget hearing with a dozen motions and public comment takes an evening. The bad weeks land on the same person every time.
Review is not writing
Checking a draft against your own memory of the meeting takes minutes. Producing that draft from a recording is where the hours go.
See what a draft looks like for your board
Send a recording from your next meeting and we will generate those minutes at no cost, so you can judge the quality against your own record.