Ask HN: How do you manage corporate formalities for your companies?
I&#x27;m on three boards. They couldn&#x27;t be more different.<p>One is the BoD of an Oakland Chinatown condo association. It&#x27;s a large building (348 units). The board has eight members. Three American-born tech&#x2F;finance people in our mid-30s, an architect from mainland China in his 30s, a retired Cantonese nurse in her 90s, and three Cantonese small business owners -- restauranteur, real estate, and travel agency owner.<p>This group is very paper-oriented, largely because the level of computer literacy is extremely low (the RE guy flatly refuses to use email). Secretary takes all the meeting minutes. We keep a paper minute book in the HOA management office with the full corporate records in it going back 40+ years. We don&#x27;t have annual reports, but are required to send annual &quot;disclosures&quot; with a statutorily-required list of items, which I wrote with some help from our attorney last year.<p>Legally, the entity is a nonprofit corporation. Condo associations (us) are subject to pretty intense regulation in California (google &quot;Davis-Stirling&quot; if you want to know more): specific deadlines for member communication, notice requirements for meetings, properly-formed budget disclosures, and an annual &quot;disclosure&quot; package with about 30 required items in it (reserve study, budget, mailing address of management, exact amount of assessments, etc) This board has real diversity across age, language, and culture, which reinforced the value of civility and following procedure. In the past, the group approved major maintenance projects verbally, which caused a ton of fighting when people wasn&#x27;t sure what course of action had been decided. I found using more formality, things like writing resolutions in advance (rather than scribbling them on paper during the meeting) really helped lower the temperature of our meetings (less yelling and suspicion), and foster an environment of trust. One of the (previous) members had served on the board of a US public company, which was a hell of an education, though honestly he was kind of an asshole. That&#x27;s a different story, though ;)<p>We keep our official notes in a paper minute book. The secretary signs the notes after each meeting and the minutes of the last meeting are always approved by motion in a subsequent meeting. We use Confluence as a collaboration and drafting platform for things (e.g. infrastructure resolutions, where we decide which project to do), which actually works quite well, though only the young people use it. A wiki is a really excellent tool for drafting the language of legal text with help from other members.<p>My second company is a holding company. It&#x27;s an LLC (partnership) with three members. We decided to go &quot;full tech&quot; on this, our minute book is hosted in git, all the notes are in plaintext markdown, we approve meeting minutes using tags, etc. Most of our formal documents are in Mac pages &#x2F; PDF format and we have a folder called &quot;docs&quot; where they&#x27;re kept, alongside the &quot;meeting-minutes&quot; folder which holds agendas, official record of the meetings, the text of resolutions considered&#x2F;passed, etc.<p>I also have a California corporation (S) I used for a consulting company with employees. I&#x27;ve had this a while now (5+ years) so will probably use this to manage the holding company&#x27;s assets. It&#x27;s just me currently so not as formal, though I do keep a record of major decisions and actions.<p>Email if you have any questions, I&#x27;m happy to discuss this.