When you own a business, there are steps you need to take to make sure you maintain that “corporate veil.”  One of those steps is to hold an annual meeting, and as a record of that meeting, generate meeting minutes, or notes of what was discussed at that meeting.

So after a year in existence for my little oil holdings company, I NEED MINUTES!  Being the single member of my LLC, what kind of topics do I discuss in my meeting with…. myself?

According to an article I found at Inc.com, your minutes need to contain details of the following activities:

• Electing corporate officers and directors
• Setting salaries and bonuses
• Declaring dividends
• Electing S corporation status
• Approving transactions between the corporation and its shareholders, such as loans to shareholders or leasing property to/from them
• Adopting employee benefit plans, such as a qualified retirement plan, an adoption assistance plan, an education assistance program or a medical reimbursement plan. Annual contributions to the retirement plan should also be approved by the board and recorded in the minutes.

In addition, it’s also good to discuss any financial obligations and year end tax results.

So for this years minutes, I will include:

• The original LLC formation and the decision to elect S-corp status 
• The decision to pay off the initial bank loan for the first interest
• Approve the reimbursement of personal expenses (including the total amount)
• Total expenses paid by the company for oil field service to the wells
• Total income from oil and gas production
• Total profit and the implications on year end taxes

That should just about cover it; for this year anyway.

The article also discusses how long you should keep these minutes (indefinitely) and where to keep them.  It also suggests different pieces of software to generate these minutes, but considering the size of my fledgeling company, and the fact that I’m tight with my money, I’ll stick to Microsoft Word.

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