What is BoardTable?

BoardTable is a board management platform built specifically for Australian not-for-profits, charities, and community organisations. It brings together everything your board needs — meeting papers, minutes, actions, registers, and governance documents — into a single, secure, beautifully organised place. No more scattered PDFs in email, no more shared drives, no more 11pm reformatting sessions.

Every board member gets their own secure seat with role-appropriate access. The Company Secretary or Board Administrator manages the portal and prepares meeting packs. Directors read papers, RSVP, ask questions, and stay across actions — all without leaving BoardTable.

Logging In

BoardTable uses email and password authentication. Your administrator sets your account up and you receive a welcome email with instructions to set your password.

1. Go to boardtable.com.au/app and enter your email address and password.
2. Click Sign In, then enter the TOTP code from your authenticator app. Two-factor authentication is required for every account.
3. If you've forgotten your password, click Forgot your password? on the login page to receive a reset link by email.

Navigating the App

BoardTable uses a left sidebar as your primary navigation. Every section of the app is a click away from the sidebar. Here's how it's organised from top to bottom:

• Dashboard — Your home screen with upcoming meetings, outstanding actions, and recent activity.
• Meetings — All upcoming and past board meetings, board packs, RSVP, and minutes.
• Calendar — Shared board calendar combining meetings, committee sessions, and compliance deadlines.
• Actions — All actions arising from meetings, assigned to people with due dates.
• Strategic Plan — Your organisation's strategic objectives and KPI progress.
• Registers — Risk Register, Resolutions Register, Conflicts of Interest, and Related Parties.
• Committees — Committee structure, membership, and committee documents.
• Compliance — Compliance Calendar, ACNC AIS, and ASIC Reporting tools.
• Resources — Governance document library.
• Directors / Staff / Org Chart — People directory and organisational structure.
• Director Induction — Onboarding checklist and induction materials for new directors.
• Board Pulse — Anonymous board health and engagement check-ins.
• Reports Builder — Create and manage CEO, Chair, Treasurer, and other board reports.
• Finance — Board-ready financial dashboard (where enabled for your organisation).
• Date Voting — Doodle-style date polls for scheduling meetings.
• Circular Resolutions — Out-of-session board decisions requiring a vote.
• Administration — (Admin only) Manage users, analytics, audit log, backup, and import.

Your Profile

Your profile is how other board members see you. Keeping it current helps the whole board know who they're working with.

1. Click your avatar in the top-right corner.
2. Select My Profile from the drop-down.
3. Update your name, bio, contact details, LinkedIn URL, photo, and term dates.
4. Click Save — changes are visible to other board members immediately.

Two settings on this page are worth knowing about:

• Your calendar link. Generate it here and subscribe to it from Outlook or Google Calendar so board meetings appear in your own diary. Nothing is emailed to you otherwise.
• Notification preferences. Choose which activity emails you. This includes replies to message board updates — you are emailed when somebody replies to an update you posted, or to one you have already replied to.

Mobile Access (PWA)

BoardTable is a Progressive Web App (PWA), which means you can install it on your phone like a native app — no App Store needed.

iOS (Safari)

1. Open your BoardTable portal URL in Safari.
2. Tap the Share button (box with arrow pointing up) at the bottom of the screen.
3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add — BoardTable now appears on your home screen like any app.

Android (Chrome)

1. Open your BoardTable portal URL in Chrome.
2. Tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner.
3. Tap Add to Home screen or Install app.
4. Follow the prompts — BoardTable will appear on your home screen.

Viewing Upcoming Meetings

When you log in, the Meetings page shows all upcoming board meetings in chronological order. Each meeting card shows the date, time, location (or video link), the agenda, and your RSVP status.

Click any meeting card to open the full meeting detail — including the complete agenda, uploaded board papers, attached documents, and any pre-meeting questions from other directors.

RSVP

Let the board know whether you'll be attending — it only takes a click.

1. Open the meeting from the Meetings page.
2. Find the RSVP section near the top of the meeting detail.
3. Click Attending, Apologies, or Maybe.

Your RSVP is visible to administrators and other board members. The administrator can see a summary of all RSVPs before the meeting brief is sent.

Meeting Documents

Board papers and supporting documents are organised under each agenda item. To access them:

1. Open the meeting.
2. Browse the agenda — each item lists its attached paper(s).
3. Click any document name to open it in the built-in PDF viewer.
4. Use the Download button to save a copy to your device.

For administrators: when you attach a paper to an agenda item you can tick Also save this file to Resources. Use it for papers that are standing reference material — a policy, a strategy, terms of reference — so they do not have to be uploaded twice. The library copy keeps this paper's access settings, so a confidential paper does not become an open one.

Smart Paper Summaries

BoardTable includes a smart analysis tool that can read a board paper and give you a quick overview — ideal when you're pressed for time before a meeting.

1. Open the meeting and find the document you want to summarise.
2. Click the ✨ Summary button next to the document name.
3. Smart analysis reads the document and generates a structured summary: key points, recommendations, and any decisions required.

Board Book

Need a printable version of the full meeting pack? The Board Book function compiles all agenda items and attached papers into a single, print-ready PDF.

1. Open the meeting.
2. Click 📄 Board Book near the top of the page.
3. BoardTable generates the PDF pack — this may take a moment for large packs.
4. The PDF downloads to your device, ready to print or read offline.

Submitting Questions Before a Meeting

Directors can submit questions on agenda items ahead of the meeting, giving the administrator and management time to prepare answers.

1. Open the meeting and navigate to the relevant agenda item.
2. Click Ask a question under that item.
3. Type your question and submit — it's visible to administrators and can be addressed in the meeting or in writing beforehand.

Minutes

Minutes move through clear stages, and the stage is shown wherever the board reads them, so nobody has to guess whether what they are looking at is settled.

• Draft — not yet accepted. Circulated to the board, but not yet the formal record.
• Accepted by the board. Confirmed at a later meeting. This is the permanent record.

Draft minutes are labelled as such on the meeting's Minutes tab and against the Previous minutes item in the next meeting's pack — which is exactly where the board is asked to confirm them.

For administrators

Minutes can be written in BoardTable's minutes builder, or written elsewhere and uploaded. If you upload them, the Meeting Minutes panel asks whether they are a draft awaiting the board's acceptance or already accepted — choose draft for minutes going to the next meeting for confirmation.

When the board accepts them, press Record acceptance on that meeting. The label changes everywhere the board sees it, and the acceptance is timestamped in the minutes history.

Link the previous meeting under Link to Previous Meeting Minutes so the minutes appear automatically against that agenda item in the next pack, rather than being attached by hand.

Tabling a committee's minutes

An agenda item can table another meeting's minutes, including a committee's. Where the minutes come from a committee, the pack names that committee rather than calling them the board's own "previous minutes".

Calendar

The Board Calendar shows all scheduled events relevant to your board — meetings, AGMs, reporting deadlines, committee sessions, and key governance dates.

Navigate to Board → Calendar to see a monthly view. Events are colour-coded by type. Click any event to see its full details.

BoardTable does not email calendar invitations. Meetings will not appear in Outlook on their own. To get them there, open My Profile and generate your personal calendar link, then paste it into Outlook → Add calendar → Subscribe from web (or Google Calendar → Other calendars → From URL). New and changed meetings then flow through automatically. There is also an "Add to calendar" button on each meeting for a one-off download.

The calendar feeds itself automatically. As well as any events you add by hand, it pulls in every board meeting, every sub-committee meeting, and every compliance obligation that has a due date — so you don't have to re-enter them. Each source has its own colour (board meetings, each committee, and compliance all appear distinctly), and clicking one of these items jumps straight to the meeting or compliance record it came from.

Use the event-type filter at the top to focus the view — show only board meetings, a single sub-committee, compliance due-dates, or your own added events — and the search box to find an event by name. Only events you added manually can be edited or deleted; the auto-fed items are managed from their own area (the meeting, committee, or Compliance Calendar).

Actions

Actions are tasks arising from board meetings — captured during minutes and assigned to specific people with a due date.

Navigate to Board → Actions to see:

• Actions assigned to you (shown prominently at the top)
• All board actions, organised by status: Open, In Progress, and Complete
• The meeting the action arose from, the due date, and who it's assigned to

To mark an action complete, click the checkbox next to it. The board administrator will be notified. You can also add a progress note before marking it done.

Circulars

Circulars are formal decisions made by the board outside of a scheduled meeting — for example, approving an urgent contract or a minor policy amendment. In most jurisdictions and constitutions, circular resolutions are a valid way for boards to pass decisions between meetings.

Navigate to Board → Circulars to see all open and past circulars.

1. Open a circular to read the proposed resolution and any supporting documents.
2. Vote In Favour or Against, or abstain if appropriate.
3. Optionally add a comment with your vote.

Once all required votes are received (or the deadline passes), the circular is finalised and added to the Resolutions Register automatically.

Committees and groups

Navigate to Planning & resources → Committees. A committee holds its own meetings; a group is simply a set of people. They are the same record, so you are not managing two lists.

• Every committee and group, and who is on each one as chair or member
• The committee's meetings, and a button to schedule another
• Its terms of reference

Committee membership controls who sees the committee's papers. A meeting scheduled for a committee starts visible only to that committee's members. Administrators keep access, and you can widen it to the whole board under Access Control before publishing — so a finance committee meeting can be opened up, while a recruitment panel reading applications stays closed.

Terms of reference. Upload them on the committee and they are filed in the Resource Library at the same time, so the board can find them there too. They are stored once, not copied, so there is never a second version drifting out of date. Terms of reference are readable by the whole board — they say what a committee is for — even when the committee's own papers are not.

Resource Library

The Resource Library is where your organisation stores governance documents that board members need ongoing access to — constitutions, policies, financial statements, templates, board charters, and more.

Navigate to Resources → Resource Library to browse by category, or use the search bar to find a specific document. Click any document to open it in the PDF viewer, or use the download icon to save it locally.

Document Confidentiality

Some documents have restricted access, indicated by icons next to their names:

Strategic Plan

Navigate to Planning & resources → Strategic plan to view your organisation's objectives, their key measures, and the actions under each. This is a live view — administrators update progress at any time, giving the board a current picture.

Financial years

Objectives run for the whole life of the plan. Actions are set each financial year, so after the first year they accumulate under the same objectives.

Use Sort by year… in the toolbar to label each action with the year it belongs to, then set the Reporting on… dropdown to the year the board reports against. Actions from earlier years fold away into a "historical record" strip under each objective — still there, still openable, but left out of the progress figures, the summary band and the board-pack view, so a percentage reflects this year's commitments rather than last year's completed work.

Directors

Navigate to People → Directors to see profile cards for all current board directors. Each card shows the director's photo, name, role on the board, term dates, a short bio, and contact details (where they've provided them). Click any card to see the full profile including committee memberships and LinkedIn.

Staff

Navigate to People → Staff to see profiles of staff members who have been added to the portal. This helps board members know who's who in the organisation — particularly useful for new directors finding their feet.

Updating Your Own Profile

Keep your profile current so other board members always have accurate information about you. Navigate to My Profile via your avatar menu to update your bio, photo, contact details, LinkedIn URL, and term dates. See Your Profile in Getting Started for step-by-step instructions.

Risk Register

Navigate to Registers → Risk Register to see your organisation's current risk landscape. Each risk is rated on two dimensions:

• Likelihood — how probable is the risk occurring (1–5 scale)
• Impact — how severe would the consequences be (1–5 scale)

The combined score determines the risk's colour rating: green (low), amber (medium), or red (high/critical). Click any risk to see its full detail, including the mitigation strategy and the person responsible for managing it.

Conflict of Interest

Navigate to Registers → Conflict Declarations to view and manage conflict of interest declarations.

Declaring a conflict

1. Click Declare a Conflict.
2. Describe the nature of the conflict — the relationship, organisation, or interest involved.
3. Indicate whether it is a direct or indirect conflict.
4. Submit — your declaration is logged with a timestamp and is immediately visible to administrators.

Annual nil returns

At the start of each year (or as required by your board's policy), you may be asked to confirm a nil return — a statement that you have no new conflicts to declare. BoardTable will prompt you with a notification when this is due.

Compliance Calendar

Navigate to Registers → Compliance Calendar to see your organisation's regulatory obligations and deadlines — ASIC filings, ACNC annual reports, ATO returns, insurance renewals, and any other compliance milestones your administrator has added.

Each item shows the due date, responsible person, and current status. Overdue items are highlighted in red. Completed items are ticked off with a completion date.

Resolutions Register

Navigate to Registers → Resolutions to find a complete, searchable record of all board resolutions — both those passed at meetings and circular resolutions passed between meetings.

Each resolution entry shows the resolution text, the date it was passed, how it was passed (meeting or circular), and a link back to the source minutes or circular. This is your permanent record of board decisions.

Committee recommendations

A committee recommends; the board decides. So a motion carried in a committee meeting is recorded as a recommendation, named with the committee that made it — not as a decision of the board.

It stays outstanding until the board answers it, and the answer is recorded as accepted, amended or declined against the meeting where the board decided. That way a recommendation cannot quietly go nowhere: the register can always show what a committee has put to the board that the board has not yet answered.

Related Parties

Navigate to Registers → Related Parties to maintain a register of entities or individuals that have a relationship with your organisation that could influence or be influenced by board decisions — subsidiaries, associated trusts, entities where directors hold material interests, and similar.

This register supports your obligations under accounting standards (AASB 124 for companies, AASB 1060 for smaller NFPs) and good governance practice. Entries can be linked to conflict of interest declarations for a complete picture.

ACNC Annual Information Statement (AIS)

Navigate to Compliance → ACNC AIS to access the Annual Information Statement pre-fill tool. For ACNC-registered charities, BoardTable uses data already held in your portal — board membership, governance structure, financial year — to pre-populate as much of the AIS as possible, reducing the time it takes to complete your annual regulatory obligation.

Review the pre-filled fields, make any corrections, and then transfer the finalised answers directly into the ACNC portal. The tool also flags any fields where BoardTable doesn't have enough information so nothing is missed.

ASIC Reporting

Navigate to Compliance → ASIC Reporting for tools that help with your annual ASIC obligations — including annual statement review, director change notifications, and registered address confirmations. The tool surfaces the information ASIC needs, drawn from your BoardTable data, so you can complete filings faster and with confidence.

Org Chart

Navigate to Org Chart in the sidebar to see a visual hierarchy of your organisation — from board level down through executive leadership and key staff. This helps directors quickly understand who's who and how the organisation is structured.

Administrators can manage the chart from the same view — adding, editing, or removing nodes and connections. Each node can include a person's name, title, and photo drawn from their BoardTable profile.

Director Induction

Navigate to Director Induction in the sidebar to see your induction checklist and onboarding materials. This is designed for new directors joining the board — it walks you through the key documents to read, policies to understand, declarations to complete, and introductions to make before your first meeting.

Each item on the checklist can be ticked off as you complete it. The board administrator can see your progress and reach out if you're stuck. Induction materials — the constitution, board charter, strategic plan, and policies — are linked directly in the checklist so everything is in one place.

Capability Matrix

Navigate to Capability Matrix in the sidebar (admin users only) to see a visual matrix of the skills and experience across your board. This is a governance best-practice tool that helps the board understand its collective capabilities and identify gaps for succession planning or targeted recruitment.

Directors can be prompted to complete a skills self-assessment, which feeds into the matrix. Admins can also enter or adjust scores manually. Common skill categories include financial literacy, legal, industry knowledge, risk management, human resources, and digital/technology.

Board Pulse

Navigate to Board Pulse in the sidebar to participate in short, periodic check-ins about the health and functioning of the board. Responses are anonymous — only aggregated results are visible to administrators, never individual answers.

Board Pulse helps your board have informed conversations about how it's working together — meeting effectiveness, information quality, trust, and alignment — without needing a formal board review every time. Questions rotate to keep the check-ins fresh and relevant.

Reports Builder

Navigate to Reports Builder in the sidebar to create structured board reports — CEO Reports, Chair Reports, Treasurer / Finance Reports, Committee Reports, Risk Reports, and more. Each report is written in a rich-text editor with AI writing assistance available for drafting or refining sections.

1. Click New Report and choose the report type.
2. Set the reporting period and add sections — each section has a heading and a body you can write or paste into.
3. Use the ✨ AI Assist button in any section to help draft content based on your notes or data.
4. When complete, export to Word for final formatting, or attach the report directly to a meeting agenda item.

Finance Dashboard

Navigate to Finance in the sidebar to access the board-level Finance Dashboard (where enabled for your organisation). It provides a clear, board-ready view of your organisation's financial position without requiring directors to interpret a raw spreadsheet.

The dashboard includes:

• Overview — Total income, operating result, cash at bank, and current ratio with budget variances highlighted
• Consolidated P&L — Income and expenditure by operating unit, actual vs budget
• Balance Sheet — Assets, liabilities, and net assets position

Three reporting periods are available: the most recent month, the financial year to date, and the next year's budget. Toggle between them using the period selector at the top of the dashboard.

Date Voting

Navigate to Date Voting in the sidebar to participate in meeting date polls — a Doodle-style tool built directly into BoardTable so you don't need a third-party service. When your administrator is planning a meeting and wants to find the best time, they'll create a date poll and invite you to vote on your availability.

1. Open Date Voting when you have an active poll to respond to.
2. Review the proposed date and time options.
3. Mark each option as Available, Unavailable, or If needed.
4. Submit — your responses are visible to the administrator so they can pick the best date.

Inviting Users

To add a new board member, staff member, or external stakeholder to your portal:

1. Click the ⚙️ gear icon in the top navigation.
2. Select Plan & Users.
3. Click Invite User.
4. Enter their name, email address, user type, and role.
5. Click Send Invitation — they'll receive an email with a link to set up their access.

Setting User Types

Each user has a type that determines what they can see in the portal:

• Board Director — Full access to board content, meetings, papers, and registers. Can see Restricted documents.
• Staff — Access to standard documents and content assigned to them. Cannot see Restricted or Confidential documents by default.
• External — Limited access — typically used for auditors, lawyers, or committee members who aren't directors. Admin configures exactly what they can see.

Managing Roles

Separately from user type, each user has a role that determines what they can do:

• Admin — Full portal management: create meetings, manage users, update registers, access all settings.
• Member — Standard access for their user type. Can RSVP, vote on circulars, and update their own profile.
• Viewer — Read-only. Can view content but cannot vote, RSVP, or make changes.

You can change a user's role at any time from ⚙️ → Manage Users.

Analytics & Reporting

Navigate to ⚙️ → Analytics for an organisation-wide view of how your board is performing. The dashboard has two tabs:

• Organisation — headline KPIs (meetings held, average attendance, action-completion rate, overdue actions, open risks, compliance on-time rate) followed by charts: meeting cadence over the last 12 months, action status, your open-risk profile by severity and category, and compliance posture.
• By meeting — drill into a single meeting to see who has opened the board pack and which papers have been viewed.

Director engagement shows each director's board-book read rate, papers viewed, RSVPs, and questions submitted — useful for spotting who may need a nudge before a meeting.

You can export the figures with Export summary (CSV) and Export engagement (CSV), or use Print / Save PDF to produce a board-performance report for your papers.

Audit Log

Navigate to ⚙️ → Audit Log to see a timestamped record of significant actions taken within the portal. This includes:

• User logins and logouts
• Documents uploaded or deleted
• Conflict declarations submitted
• Circular votes cast
• User permissions changed
• Meeting papers published or unpublished

The audit log is immutable — entries cannot be edited or deleted. It provides a full accountability trail for governance purposes.

Backup & Export

Navigate to ⚙️ → Backup & Export to download a full copy of your portal data. This includes all documents, meeting records, registers, minutes, and user data in standard formats (PDF and JSON).

We recommend running a backup at least quarterly, and always before major changes to your portal configuration. The downloaded file is not itself encrypted or password-protected, so treat it as you would a printed board pack — store it somewhere access-controlled, and delete it once you no longer need it.

Sending Meeting Brief Emails

The Meeting Brief is an automated email sent to all board members ahead of a meeting. It contains the agenda, RSVP summary, outstanding actions, and a link to the board pack.

1. Open the meeting from the Meetings page.
2. Click Send Meeting Brief.
3. Review the preview — you can customise the message if needed.
4. Click Send — all invited members receive the email immediately.

Groups

The separate Groups screen has been retired. Use Planning & resources → Committees instead, where a record can be a committee or a group, and committee membership genuinely does control who can read that committee's meetings and papers.

Import Wizard

Navigate to Administration → Import Wizard to bulk-import data into BoardTable — useful when setting up a new portal or migrating from another system. The wizard supports importing users, historical meeting records, documents, and registers from structured templates (downloadable from the Import Wizard itself).

1. Download the relevant import template (CSV or Excel format).
2. Fill in your data following the column structure in the template.
3. Upload the completed file — the wizard validates the data before importing and shows you a preview.
4. Confirm the import — records are created in your portal immediately.

How Your Data is Protected

• Documented data locations — BoardTable's intended primary Azure region is Australia East. Optional AI and transcription, email, payments and bot protection can process limited data overseas or globally; see our DPA. Production region and backup evidence is confirmed during customer security review.
• Encryption at rest — The application supports SQLCipher/AES-256 database encryption and separate AES-GCM protection for authenticator secrets when production keys are configured. Azure storage encryption is a deployment control that must be verified in the live subscription.
• Encrypted in transit — The application enforces HTTPS and HSTS outside local development. Azure controls the production TLS versions and cipher suites.
• Two-factor authentication — Every BoardTable account must enrol a TOTP authenticator before it can access board information.
• Session revocation — Signing out ends the session on the server, not just in your browser, and removing someone's access takes effect on their very next request.

Confidential Document Access Controls

BoardTable enforces document confidentiality at the server level — not just in the UI. This means that even if someone has the direct URL to a Confidential document, they cannot access it without the appropriate permission. Access controls are checked on every document request, every time.

Administrators can view and manage who has access to Confidential documents from ⚙️ → Manage Users.

Session Security

BoardTable sessions are time-limited. Signing out revokes the session on the server, and account deactivation, membership removal, role changes and MFA resets are re-checked on protected requests. The current session is not an inactivity timeout, so always sign out or lock your device when stepping away.

Data Export and Portability

Your data is yours. BoardTable does not lock you in. Administrators can export a full copy of all portal data at any time from ⚙️ → Backup & Export. If you ever leave BoardTable, we'll work with you to ensure a complete and clean handover of all your data in standard formats.

We do not sell your data or share it with third parties for marketing. Customer-directed AI, transcription, email, billing and bot-protection features use the providers disclosed in our DPA. BoardTable does not use customer content to train its own models; provider handling is governed by the applicable API terms and provider arrangements. Our full Privacy Policy is available at boardtable.com.au/privacy.