Running the Board Cycle — Company Secretary Guide

E-Board follows the board's year: Plan → Assemble → Publish → Review → Meet → Decide → Record. Everything is under eBoard in the menu.

1. Set up the board once

• Boards and committees — create the board, its committees (audit, risk, nominations…) and give each a number prefix (for example BR and AUD). Meeting and resolution numbers come from these.
• Directors — add each director with their seat (chair, independent, executive, secretary, observer), term and voting status. Directors who are not staff get an invitation: they activate a guest account that only reaches the board workspace.
• Settings → Rules — quorum, majorities, the chair's casting vote, written-resolution thresholds, conflict policy, paper and pack lead times, download and printing, signing route. Committees can override the board.
• Settings → Secretariat — name the people who run this board. If nobody is named, everyone with eBoard permissions can; once you name people, include yourself.

2. Plan the year

• Work plan lists business that must come to the board — monthly, quarterly, at every meeting, or once by a date — and who owns it.
• Governance calendar shows meetings, paper deadlines, compliance dates, term ends and questionnaires together. Library compliance sets (Companies Act, CMA, CBK, SASRA, IRA, State corporations) are illustrative: check each date against the current rules.
• Recurring series schedule a year of meetings at once; Papyrus keeps the next few on the calendar.

3. Prepare a meeting

1. Schedule — Meetings → New. Papyrus numbers it, builds the participant list from current seats and applies the agenda template.
2. Agenda — add items with a purpose (decision, approval, noting…), presenter and time. Mark items in camera or restrict them to named people. The agenda builder proposes standing items, work-plan business, deferred items, compliance dates and committee reports — accept them one by one.
3. Approve and send the notice — invitations go out with a calendar file; later changes update the same calendar entry.
4. Papers — request a paper from its author on an agenda item. Authors upload, fill in the cover sheet and submit; you review, ask for changes or approve. Late papers are flagged and authors are reminded.

4. Publish the pack

On the meeting's Pack tab, fill the pack from the approved papers, add dividers or notes, build a preview, then build and publish. Each director receives their own copy: withheld items (in camera, restricted, or recused) become a single placeholder page so page numbers stay the same for everyone. Republishing creates a new version with a change log; directors are told once.

The receipts list shows who has opened the pack and how much they have read.

5. Run the meeting

Open the Live room from the meeting. Record attendance (directors can check themselves in), watch quorum, take items in order, put the room in camera, record declarations, put motions and run votes, present papers with page sync and a pointer, and keep running notes per item. See Live meetings.

6. Record

• Minutes start from the record (attendance, declarations, resolutions in their exact wording, actions) and your running notes. Send them to the chair, circulate for comments, have them adopted at the next meeting, then signed and filed in the hash-chained minute book.
• Actions — owners report progress; carry open actions forward to Matters arising.
• Certified extracts of resolutions or minutes carry a QR code anyone can verify.

7. Report

Governance reports show attendance, committee coverage, how long papers and minutes take, pack reading, actions on time, declarations on file and compliance dates — and export the registers and the annual governance report. See Governance reports and integrations.