Can you run your committees on SharePoint?

Yes, you can. If your organisation has Microsoft 365, you can run your committees with what's already in it, at no extra cost: SharePoint for the papers, Microsoft Lists for actions, Teams for the meetings and Forms for declarations of interest.

This post shows you how to set it up. Then it shows you where it stops working, because it does, and it helps to know where before you get there.

I was secretary to four committees for years, so I've lived with both halves of this.

The setup, in five steps

1. Give each committee a home in SharePoint. If membership differs between committees and papers mustn't cross over, give each committee its own site. If broadly the same people sit on everything, one governance site with a document library per committee is simpler. Inside, a folder per meeting, named with the date first (2026-09-14), holding the agenda, papers and minutes. The Terms of Reference sit at the top, with a version number in the file name.

2. Put actions in a Microsoft List. This is the step that makes the biggest difference. Don't leave actions buried in the minutes that raised them. Give the list columns for the action, the owner (a Person column, so it points at a real account), the due date, a status (Open, In progress, Closed, Superseded), the meeting it came from and a link to the evidence that closed it. Add two views: everything open, grouped by owner, and everything due in the next month. That list is what you send round before each meeting.

3. Give each committee a Teams channel. Schedule meetings in the channel calendar, so recordings and transcripts land somewhere people can find them, and point the channel's Files tab at the committee's library.

4. Write the minutes from a Word template. Fix the headings: attendance, quorum, declared interests, decisions, actions. Then anyone standing in for the secretary produces the same record you would.

5. Collect declarations of interest with a Microsoft Form. One response per member per year, with the answers landing in an Excel file. Bear in mind that a form is a snapshot from the day it was filled in. An interest declared out loud in a meeting goes in the minutes and nowhere else.

Alongside those, keep a simple list of members: name, role, voting or non-voting, start date and end date.

Naming and habits

Half of this is habit, and the habits decide whether it all survives a change of secretary. Put the date first in every file name, in year-month-day order, so files sort themselves. Add what the document is: agenda, paper, minutes, ToR. Number anything that gets revised. Write down how long you keep things, even if it's one line.

Then add one page to the site that explains how this committee's paperwork works: where things go, what they're called, who has access and when the pack goes out. It's the most useful thing you can leave a successor.

Where it stops working

None of this is hard. But it's all manual, and manual holds until the questions get harder. These are the points where I've seen it give way.

The vote after two people leave. Everyone agreed you were quorate at the start. Then two members leave before item seven, and the chair asks whether the vote still stands. The Terms of Reference say half the voting members plus one, so someone works it out aloud while everyone waits. Nothing in the folder can answer it, because the folder holds documents and this is a question about people on a date.

The action that keeps moving. An action is due in March. It moves to April, then June, then September. The list shows September and nothing else. The committee never agreed to any of those changes. The owner just edited the date.

The auditor's question. Who was entitled to vote on 14 September last year? Everything you need exists: the Terms of Reference in force then, the membership on that date, who attended and who declared an interest. But it sits in four places that aren't joined up, and putting the answer together takes an afternoon you'll spend again next year.

The day the secretary leaves. The folders and lists are still there. What goes is everything that was never written down: which papers mattered, why an action was parked, who votes when a member is away. Some of those answers used to be a person.

Each of these is survivable. The cost is time, and a slow loss of certainty about what the committees below your board decided.

The same Microsoft 365, with the record built in

I begged for years for software that fixed this, and in the end I built it. Governance Hub is the setup above with the committee record built in. Membership has dates, so a question about last September has an answer. Quorum is worked out against the Terms of Reference in force at the time. Decisions and actions are kept as records, not sentences inside a document. And an item referred from one committee to another carries its history with it.

It installs into your own Microsoft 365. People sign in with the work account they already have, papers stay in your own SharePoint, and PolicySight holds none of your data.

It costs £9,999 once, with every user included, and support is optional at 20% of the licence a year. Registered charities with income under £1m pay £4,999 once, with optional support at £999 a year. Governance Hub runs on Power Pages, so your users also need a Power Pages licence from Microsoft. Full details are on the pricing page.

If you'd rather watch than read, there's a two-and-a-half-minute walkthrough.

If the setup above works for you

I'd like to hear how. The organisations that keep it going usually have one person doing something sensible that nobody has written down. Drop me a message.