Florida law is emphatic that your association must keep minutes, and almost silent on what they should say. The condominium law and the homeowners association law — Chapters 718 and 720 of the Florida Statutes — both make minutes an official record, both require you to keep them for seven years, and both give owners the right to inspect them within days of asking. Neither tells you what belongs in them, who should write them, or how they get approved. That gap is why minutes are the single most improvised job on most boards — and why the same association can produce beautiful minutes one quarter and nothing at all the next, depending on who came to the meeting.
General information for Florida communities, not legal advice. Your governing documents may impose stricter requirements than the statutes described here.
What the law actually requires
The short version for condominiums and HOAs alike, then we move on. For the full meeting rules — notice periods, quorum, agendas, proxies — we have separate guides for HOA board meetings and condo board meetings.
| Requirement | Condominium (Ch. 718) | HOA (Ch. 720) |
|---|---|---|
| Minutes are an official record | Minutes of all meetings of the association, the board, any committee, and the unit owners | Minutes of all meetings of the members and of the board of directors |
| Format | Written record | Written form, or a form convertible to written within a reasonable time |
| Retention | 7 years | 7 years — or longer if your governing documents say so |
| Owner inspection | Within 10 working days of a written request | Within 10 business days of a written request |
| Missing that window | Creates a rebuttable presumption that the association willfully failed to comply — which is what turns a paperwork lapse into an expensive one | |
| Video-conference meetings | The recording is itself an official record, alongside the minutes | No equivalent statutory recording requirement |
Read that last row twice if you are a condominium. If your board meets by video conference, the recording is not a convenience — it is a record you are obliged to keep, on the same footing as the minutes themselves. Associations that treat the Zoom link as disposable are discarding official records without realising it — and for condominiums with 25 or more units those records now interact with the website posting obligations too.
What the statutes do not do is tell you what minutes should contain. There is no statutory template, no required level of detail, no prescribed format — which is why Florida association counsel such as Kaye Bender Rembaum and Becker publish their own guidance on what boards should record. That freedom is the problem: with no standard, the quality of your permanent record depends entirely on whoever volunteered.
Five ways minutes fail
1. They record the discussion instead of the decisions. Minutes are not a transcript. A near-verbatim account of who said what about the landscaping bid creates a document that is long, slow to approve, and unhelpfully quotable in a dispute. What matters is the motion, who made it, and the outcome.
2. They record the motion but not the vote. "Motion to approve the roof contract" tells a future reader nothing. Who voted which way, and whether anyone abstained or was absent, is the part that actually establishes what the board decided and who is accountable for it.
3. The draft never gets approved. A draft sitting in someone's email is not a record. It becomes one when the board adopts it, and boards that adopt minutes two or three meetings late accumulate a backlog that becomes very awkward the moment an owner asks to inspect.
4. They exist but cannot be produced. The ten-day clock does not care that the secretary who has them is on holiday, or that they live on a laptop that was replaced last year. If minutes cannot be handed over inside the window, the association is presumed to have failed willfully — and unwinding that presumption is a legal exercise, not an administrative one. Our guide on records requests covers what follows.
5. Nobody is clearly responsible. The most common failure of all. The secretary took them last year, the manager takes them sometimes, and this quarter a director volunteered. Nobody owns the outcome, so the standard drifts. This is felt hardest in small self-managed associations, where the same three people carry every job.
Six ways to get minutes done
There is no statutory requirement to do this any particular way. These are the six approaches Florida associations actually use, with what each one really costs you.
| Approach | Typical cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Volunteer secretary | Free | Small associations with a reliable volunteer |
| Manager or CAM | Inside the management fee | Professionally managed communities |
| Record now, write later | A phone, or a recorder under $100 | Backing up whoever writes them |
| Generic AI transcription | Roughly $10–$30 per user, per month | Getting an accurate transcript fast |
| Professional minutes service | Quoted per meeting — the highest per-meeting cost here | Contested or high-stakes meetings |
| Platform workflow | Flat monthly — Mosaic is $199 | Self-managed boards meeting often |
1 · A volunteer secretary
Free, and the most common. Works when you have a capable, reliable volunteer who attends every meeting. It fails on holidays, on resignations, and at contested meetings — where the person taking the notes is also the person arguing. Quality swings with the individual, and continuity ends the day they step down.
2 · The manager or CAM
Usually inside the management fee — which in Florida typically runs $10 to $50 per unit per month for the whole service, not for minutes alone. You get consistency and a professional who knows what belongs in a record. But your manager is often participating in the discussion too, minutes compete with everything else in their week, and the file can leave with them if the relationship ends. If your CAM already turns out clean minutes on time, you do not have a problem to solve.
3 · Record now, write up later
A phone you already own, or a dedicated recorder for well under $100. It ends the “what did they actually say” argument. But someone still has to write the minutes, and the writing-up is exactly what gets deferred. For a condominium meeting by video conference, that recording is now an official record you are obliged to keep — so casual recording quietly creates a retention duty.
4 · Generic AI transcription
Roughly $10 to $30 per user per month. Tools like Otter, Fireflies and the AI note-takers now built into Zoom and Teams produce a fast, accurate transcript, and most have a free tier worth testing. What they do not produce is minutes. A transcript is close to the opposite of a minute — everything said, rather than what was decided — and converting one into the other is still manual work. They also know nothing about your bylaws, your motion history or your records obligations, and the file lands in a third-party account rather than the association’s records, which matters when an owner asks for it and the division is the next stop if you cannot produce it.
5 · A professional minutes service
Quoted per meeting, and the most expensive of the six on a per-meeting basis. A trained recording secretary attends and delivers a clean draft; some management companies offer this as an add-on, and independent providers price by meeting length and travel. Quality is high and the burden disappears entirely. It needs booking around your schedule, and approval, distribution and filing still sit with the board afterwards.
6 · A platform workflow — including ours
Flat monthly cost. Several association platforms bundle a minutes or documents feature alongside accounting and owner portals; Mosaic — our product, so weigh this accordingly — is built around the chain rather than the document, at $199 a month flat regardless of unit count. The argument for this category is continuity: notice, transcript, draft, review, approval, distribution and filing happen as one sequence, so nothing depends on who turned up. The argument against it is that you are adopting a system, which is overkill for a small association where the current arrangement already works.
Try Mosaic alongside your current software. No Risk!
- Keep yourself compliant on every statute change
- Keep your board compliant across every workflow
- Keep your HOA compliant and your owners happy
Which one fits your association
| If this is you | Start here |
|---|---|
| Small self-managed association, a reliable secretary, quarterly meetings | Keep doing what you are doing. Add a recording as backup and a written approval step, and you are compliant. |
| Professionally managed, minutes arrive on time | Nothing to fix. Confirm where the file lives and that it survives a change of manager. |
| Professionally managed, minutes are chronically late | This is a scope conversation with your management company before it is a software problem. |
| Contested board, disputed decisions, active owner complaints | Record every meeting and tighten approval. In a dispute the record is the argument. Association litigators will tell you the minutes are usually the first document requested. |
| Condo meeting by video conference | You already have a retention obligation for the recording. Make sure it is stored where the association controls it. |
| Self-managed, larger, meeting monthly, no reliable volunteer | This is where a workflow earns its keep — the volume is real and the continuity risk is highest. |
How Mosaic handles it
Full disclosure: this is our product, and the section exists so you can judge whether it fits. If one of the five approaches above already works for you, use it.
Mosaic treats minutes as a chain rather than a document, running from notice to filing:
Notice and scheduling. The meeting is scheduled against your bylaws — frequency, notice period, the article that governs it — and the notice and agenda go out to owners by email, with paper and postage handled for the owners who still need mail.
The live meeting. Mosaic joins the Zoom call or sits in the room and transcribes every speaker, with speaker recognition, so the record does not depend on anyone taking notes while also participating.
The draft. Minutes are drafted from the transcript — decisions, motions and outcomes, not a wall of dialogue.
Board markup and approval. The draft circulates for review in a suggesting mode, so directors can correct the record before adoption. If the motion was tabled rather than approved, the director who was in the room says so, in the document, and it is resolved before the minutes become final.
Distribution and filing. The approved version goes to every owner by email or printed and mailed, then lands in the records portal — which is where the ten-day inspection window stops being a fire drill. How you reach owners matters as much as what you send; our comparison of association communication tools covers the delivery side.
Alongside it, the compliance calendar tracks the statutory deadlines that attach to meetings and records for your specific association — by type, size and building — and alerts the responsible director before the clock fires, with the statute cited on each entry.
Mosaic is $199 a month, flat. It is worth a conversation if your minutes depend on one volunteer, if approval routinely slips, or if you could not produce three years of minutes inside ten days today. If none of those describe you, the honest answer is that you do not need us for this.
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