Meeting minutes abbreviations: which to use, and which to spell out

Minutes and minute notes are full of abbreviations, and most are harmless. A few cause real misunderstandings, mostly around dates, deadlines and who owns what. This guide is for freelancers, consultants and anyone who writes up client calls on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. It lists the abbreviations you will meet, says which belong in minutes a client will read and which to spell out, and gives a shorthand for the rough notes you take during the call. The difference between the two documents is in meeting minutes vs meeting notes.

Which abbreviations are used in meeting minutes?

These are the ones that turn up most, in the order a set of minutes meets them:

Abbreviation	Meaning	Where it appears
MoM	Minutes of meeting	The title or the email subject
Apols	Apologies: people who sent apologies for not attending	The attendee list
Chair	The person running the meeting	The attendee list
B/F	Brought forward from a previous meeting	Actions carried over
AP, AI	Action point, action item	The actions list
TBC	To be confirmed: a fact not yet checked	Decisions, dates, figures
TBD	To be decided: a choice not yet made	Open questions
EOD, COB	End of day, close of business	Deadlines
EOW	End of week	Deadlines
w/c	Week commencing (the Monday of that week)	Deadlines and plans
ETA	Estimated time of arrival or completion	Status updates
WIP	Work in progress	Status updates
OOO	Out of office	Availability
FYI	For your information, no action needed	Notes
N/A	Not applicable	Empty sections
AOB	Any other business	The last agenda item
C/F	Carried forward to the next meeting	Unfinished items

TBC and TBD are not the same, and mixing them up changes what the minutes say. "Launch date TBC" means a date exists and needs checking; "launch date TBD" means nobody has chosen one.

Which abbreviations are safe in minutes a client will read?

The ones everyone in the meeting already uses. AOB, TBC, FYI, N/A and Q&A are safe almost anywhere English is the working language. So are terms the client used themselves, such as the name of their product or system.

Spell out:

• Your own acronyms: internal tool names, your shorthand for a feature, the code name of a workstream the client has never heard.
• Anything with two meanings: "PR" is a pull request to a developer and public relations to a marketing manager; "SLA" and "MVP" mean different things to different people.
• Anything in a decision or an action. Those are the lines people are held to, so they should survive being forwarded to someone who was not there.

The usual rule works: write the term in full the first time, with the abbreviation in brackets, and use the short form after that.

What if the client reads English as a second language?

Use fewer abbreviations, and almost no idioms. A client in Munich, Madrid or Mumbai may read your minutes in English perfectly well and still stop at "w/c", "COB" or "ballpark". Many will paste them into a translation tool, which tends to leave abbreviations untouched or translate them letter by letter, and turn idioms into nonsense.

Three habits make minutes travel:

• Plain words over abbreviations, except the handful everyone uses, such as FYI and N/A.
• Dates with the month as a word, which every translation tool handles correctly.
• One idea per sentence, so a sentence translated on its own still makes sense.

If the client works in another language altogether, write the minutes in it. Writing in English and hoping is how an action item changes owner between two languages.

How should you write dates and deadlines in minutes?

With the month as a word. "03/11" is 3 November in London and March 11 in New York, and both readers will be sure they are right. Write "Tuesday 3 November", with the weekday, which also catches a typo in the date.

Deadline abbreviations need the same care:

Instead of	Write	Why
EOD	"by 17:00 London time on Friday 30 October"	Whose day? Ends when?
EOW	"by Friday 30 October"	Some people's week ends on Thursday, some on Sunday
w/c 2/11	"the week starting Monday 2 November"	Day-month order, again
ASAP	A date	ASAP is a wish, not a deadline
CST, IST	A city or an offset: "Chicago time", "UTC+5:30"	Each of these codes stands for more than one zone

How to write action items covers the rest of a deadline: an owner, a verb and a date.

What shorthand works for rough meeting notes?

One character at the start of each line, so the lines that matter can be found in seconds after the call. These never leave your desk, so they can be as terse as you like:

D   decision          D hosted search for ph1 (P ok)
A   action            A T creds Thu
Q   open question     Q who signs off design? P to find out
#   exact figure      # retries 5 not 3
"   their words       " refunds same day in the dashboard
!   risk              ! their IT blocking staging since the 9th
?   I missed this     ? audit date, 10:14

Turn the shorthand into words before anything is sent. A minute note that says "A T creds Thu" means something to you today and nothing to the client's manager next month. The full method is in taking notes during a meeting you are also running.

How long should the minutes be once they are written out?

Usually about a page for an hour's client call, sized by what was decided rather than by how long people talked. How long meeting minutes should be goes section by section, and the client meeting minutes template has a layout to copy.

How does TrackHeros write abbreviations and dates?

It writes from what was said. TrackHeros records Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls and writes a summary, decisions, and action items with an owner and a due date. A due date is kept as it was said, such as "end of next week", and, where the meeting date makes it clear, also resolved to a calendar date, which the action-items list sorts by and marks overdue. The minutes keep the words that were said, so write the date out before sending if the client needs one. An owner whose name was not in the meeting is flagged for you to check.

If a client's own acronyms keep coming out wrong, a correction rule fixes them for that client's future meetings, for example "UBVA" to "UBA". The notes can be written in English or in eight other languages, set per client, which suits a client who works in German or Spanish; the languages page lists them. Each client's minutes follow its own template, copied for email or exported as a PDF on paid plans (pricing). More on correction rules and meeting minutes.