The Club Secretary's Complete Handbook

So you're the new club secretary.

Maybe you put your hand up at the AGM because nobody else would and you felt guilty. Maybe the outgoing secretary cornered you in the car park after training and said "it's really not that much work." Maybe your name just appeared in the minutes of a meeting you weren't even at. However it happened, the role is yours now, and you're probably wondering what you've actually agreed to.

Here's the honest answer: the club secretary is the most important operational role in any community organisation. Not the most prestigious - that's the president. Not the most technically demanding - that's the treasurer. But if the secretary stops working, the club stops functioning. Full stop. The president can miss a month and nobody notices. The treasurer can be a bit late on the books and the world keeps turning. But if nobody is calling meetings, writing minutes, managing correspondence, and keeping the records straight? Everything quietly falls apart.

The good news is that it doesn't have to consume your life. I've seen clubs where the secretary is doing 20 hours a week because they've inherited a mess of paper files, a shared Gmail inbox with 4,000 unread emails, and a constitution nobody has read since 1997. I've also seen clubs where the secretary spends three hours a week and everything runs like clockwork. The difference isn't the size of the club. It's the systems.

This guide is going to walk you through all of it - what the role actually involves, how to do each part well, and how to set yourself up so that when you eventually hand it over to the next person, they don't want to kill you.

The five core responsibilities

Before we get into the detail, let's name the job clearly. Every club constitution will word it slightly differently, but the secretary's responsibilities fall into five buckets:

1. Meetings. You organise them, prepare agendas, make sure they're properly called with the right notice, and ensure they're quorate. This includes both committee meetings and general meetings (your AGM, SGMs).

2. Minutes. You record what was decided, not what was said. More on this shortly, because it's the thing most new secretaries get wrong.

3. Correspondence. You're the club's official point of contact. Inbound mail, emails from the state sporting body, enquiries from prospective members, that letter from council about the lease - it all comes through you. In many clubs, you're also the public officer, which means you're the registered contact with Fair Trading, Consumer Affairs, or whichever state body handles incorporated associations where you are.

4. Records. The member register, the constitution, committee contact details, insurance certificates, minutes of all meetings, correspondence files. You're the custodian of the club's institutional memory.

5. Compliance. Annual returns to your state regulator, annual information statements to the ACNC if you're a registered charity, reporting to your state sporting body, insurance renewals. Missing these deadlines isn't just embarrassing - in some jurisdictions it can mean personal liability for committee members.

That's it. Five things. If you're doing things that don't fit into these five buckets, you're probably doing someone else's job. Which is generous of you, but it's also how secretaries burn out.

The minutes formula

Let's tackle the most visible part of the job first, because it's where new secretaries spend the most anxious energy.

Here's the thing about minutes: they are not a transcript. They are not a summary of everything everyone said. They are a legal record of decisions made and actions assigned. That's it. If you're writing three pages of minutes for a one-hour committee meeting, you are writing too much.

The formula I recommend is dead simple. For every agenda item, record:

• The topic (one line)
• The decision (what was resolved, and the exact wording of any motion)
• The vote (moved by, seconded by, carried/not carried - you don't need to record individual votes unless someone specifically asks for their dissent to be noted)
• The action (what needs to happen, who is doing it, and by when)

That's it. Four things per item. You don't need to capture the fifteen-minute debate about whether to paint the clubhouse blue or green. You need to capture: "Resolved to repaint the clubhouse exterior in blue. Moved Kim, seconded Raj, carried unanimously. Action: Kim to obtain three quotes by 15 May."

Some specific tips from years of watching clubs get this wrong:

Use a template. Same format every time. Same headings. It takes ten minutes to set one up and it saves you hours across the year. Your template should have: date, time, location, attendees, apologies, confirmation of previous minutes, business arising, agenda items, general business, next meeting date.

Record names on actions. "The committee agreed to look into new uniforms" is useless. "Sarah to research uniform suppliers and present three options at the June meeting" is useful. If nobody is named, it won't happen.

Write them within 48 hours. Your notes will make sense on Tuesday. By the following Monday, they'll be hieroglyphics. Get them done while the meeting is fresh and circulate them as draft minutes. I know this sounds obvious. You would be amazed how many secretaries leave minutes until the day before the next meeting and then try to reconstruct what happened four weeks ago from illegible scribbles.

Don't minute the confidential bits in detail. If the committee discusses a member complaint or a HR issue, your minutes should note that the matter was discussed and record any decision, but they should not include the specifics. Minutes are discoverable in legal proceedings and accessible to members under most constitutions. Write every line as if it might be read out in court - because technically, it could be.

For more on this, see our detailed guide to meeting minutes for clubs.

The 5-hour week

Here's the benchmark I use: if you're the secretary of a standard community club - let's say 50 to 500 members, monthly committee meetings, one AGM a year, affiliated with a state or national body - you should be spending roughly 3 to 5 hours a week on secretary duties.

Some weeks it'll be one hour. Some weeks - AGM prep week, annual return week - it'll be ten. But averaged across the year, 5 hours a week is the ceiling. If you're consistently above that, something is wrong, and it's usually one of these three things:

You're doing work that isn't yours. The most common version: the secretary ends up running communications because they're already "doing the emails." Sending the weekly newsletter, updating the website, posting to social media - none of that is secretary work. It's communications work, and it should have its own volunteer or subcommittee. Just because you have the login doesn't mean it's your job.

Your systems are manual. If you're maintaining the member register in a spreadsheet, chasing membership renewals by text message, and emailing meeting agendas as Word documents, you are spending hours doing things that should take minutes. This isn't a technology problem - it's a process problem. We'll come back to this.

You inherited a mess. The previous secretary's filing system made sense to them. To you, it looks like someone organised a library by throwing the books at the shelves. This is painful but temporary. Spend one weekend sorting things out, set up a filing structure that makes sense, and you'll save the time back within a month.

Here's roughly how those 5 hours should break down in a typical week:

Task	Time
Correspondence (checking and responding to emails)	1–2 hours
Minutes from last meeting (write-up and circulation)	1 hour
Agenda prep for next meeting	30 minutes
Record-keeping and filing	30 minutes
Compliance and admin tasks	30 minutes

Some of those tasks don't happen every week - you won't have minutes to write unless there was a meeting - but they average out. The important thing is to be honest with yourself about where your time is going. If correspondence alone is eating 5 hours a week, you need to work out why. Is it because you're the only point of contact for all enquiries? That's a structural problem the committee needs to solve, not something you should absorb personally.

Correspondence and communications

The secretary's inbox is the club's front door. Prospective members, council, the state sporting body, insurance brokers, sponsors, parents with complaints, that bloke who wants to book the clubhouse for his 50th - they all email the secretary.

First rule: get a role-based email address. If you're using your personal email for club business, stop immediately. Set up secretary@yourclub.org.au (or whatever your domain is). If you don't have a domain, even secretary.yourclub@gmail.com is better than your personal address. When you leave the role, you hand over the email address and your successor has full history and context. If you're using your personal email, you either have to forward thousands of emails or your successor starts from zero.

Second rule: don't become the default contact for everything. You're the official correspondence point, yes. But that doesn't mean every enquiry needs to go through you. Set up clear contact points: membership enquiries go to the membership coordinator, coaching questions go to the head coach, facility bookings go to the grounds manager. Your job is to make sure those contact points exist and are published, not to be the relay for every message.

Third rule: respond within 48 hours, even if the answer is "I'll get back to you." Clubs lose prospective members because nobody replied to their enquiry for two weeks. You don't need to have the answer immediately. You need to acknowledge the email and set an expectation. "Thanks for your enquiry - I've passed this to our membership coordinator and you should hear back within the week" takes thirty seconds and makes the difference between someone joining and someone giving up.

For official correspondence - letters from regulators, formal notices, anything related to the constitution or legal obligations - keep a correspondence register. This sounds formal, but it's just a simple log: date received, from whom, subject, action taken, date responded. You'll thank yourself at AGM time when someone asks "whatever happened with that letter from council about the car park?"

Records management

You are the custodian of the club's records. This is less glamorous than it sounds, but it matters. When a dispute arises, when an insurance claim is lodged, when a new committee takes over - the records are what everyone turns to.

Here's what you need to keep and for how long:

Keep permanently:

• The constitution (and all amendments, with dates)
• The certificate of incorporation
• The register of office-bearers (historical - every committee, every year)
• Life membership records

Keep for 7 years minimum:

• Meeting minutes (committee and general meetings)
• Financial records and statements (work with your treasurer on this)
• Correspondence registers
• Insurance policies and certificates of currency
• Contracts and agreements

Keep current:

• The member register (names, addresses, dates of admission, financial status)
• Committee contact details
• Current insurance certificates
• Current lease or licence agreements

Discard responsibly:

• Superseded drafts (once the final version is filed)
• Routine correspondence older than 3 years (unless related to a dispute or legal matter)
• Expired promotional material

On the member register specifically - your state's Associations Incorporation Act almost certainly requires you to maintain one, and it almost certainly specifies what information it must contain. In most jurisdictions, it's the member's name, address, date of admission, and date of cessation. Some states also require you to record whether each member is financial. The register must be available for inspection by members, usually on request with reasonable notice.

A spreadsheet works for a small club. For anything over about 80 members, you'll want something purpose-built, because the register needs to be accurate in real time - not "I'll update it when I get around to it." When a member pays their renewal, their financial status needs to change. When someone resigns, they need to be recorded as ceased. When you're preparing for the AGM and need to verify who's entitled to vote, you need that register to be current and trustworthy.

The filing structure itself doesn't matter much as long as it's consistent and someone other than you can find things in it. I've seen clubs use everything from a ring binder and a filing cabinet to Google Drive folders. Whatever you use, the structure should be: year > category > document. So: 2026 > Minutes > Committee Meeting 2026-04-15.pdf. Not "Minutes final v3 (2).docx" sitting on somebody's desktop.

Compliance obligations

This is the part that makes people nervous, and honestly, it should make you a little nervous. Not because it's hard - the tasks themselves are straightforward - but because the consequences of getting it wrong can be real. In most Australian states, committee members can be held personally liable if the association fails to meet its statutory obligations. That includes you.

The good news: there aren't that many obligations, and they're predictable. You know when they're due. You can put them in a calendar.

State/territory annual returns. If your club is an incorporated association, you must lodge an annual return (sometimes called an annual statement or annual summary) with your state regulator. This is typically due within a set period after your financial year end or your AGM. The requirements and fees vary by state:

• NSW: Annual summary to NSW Fair Trading within 1 month of AGM, or by 31 October.
• Victoria: Annual statement to Consumer Affairs Victoria within 1 month of AGM.
• Queensland: Annual return to Office of Fair Trading within 1 month of AGM, or by 31 December.
• WA: Annual return to Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, within 6 months of financial year end.
• SA: Annual return to Consumer and Business Services within 6 months of financial year end.
• Tasmania: Annual return to Workplace Standards Tasmania within 1 month of AGM.

Check your specific state or territory's Associations Incorporation Act for exact requirements. I'm not going to list every jurisdiction here because the rules change and you need to check the current legislation, not rely on a guide. But the principle is the same everywhere: the state wants to know you still exist, who your office-bearers are, and that you've held an AGM.

ACNC reporting. If your club is a registered charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, you must lodge an Annual Information Statement within 6 months of your reporting period end. For most clubs this means by 31 December if your financial year ends 30 June. The ACNC's requirements depend on your club's size - small charities have lighter obligations than medium or large ones.

State sporting body reporting. If you're affiliated with a state sporting body (and most clubs are), there'll be annual affiliation requirements - membership numbers, insurance confirmation, governance compliance, possibly a club health check. These vary wildly by sport and state, so check with your SSO directly. But they typically need to be lodged before the start of the new season.

Insurance. Public liability at minimum. Most state sporting bodies require it as a condition of affiliation, and your lease or licence to use council facilities probably requires it too. The secretary doesn't usually arrange insurance - that's often the president or a specific committee member - but you need to make sure the certificate of currency is current and filed, and that the insurer has been notified of any incidents. Check your policy's notification requirements. Some require incidents to be reported within a specific timeframe.

Change of office-bearers. When your committee changes - typically after the AGM - you need to notify your state regulator, and usually your state sporting body, your bank, and your insurer. Don't forget the bank. I've seen clubs where the old president still had sole signatory authority six months after stepping down because nobody told the bank.

Create a compliance calendar at the start of your term. Write down every obligation, its due date, and who's responsible. Put reminders in your phone or calendar two weeks before each deadline. This is genuinely the most important thing you can do in your first week.

The AGM - your biggest job of the year

The AGM is where everything you do all year comes together. It's also the meeting most likely to go sideways if you haven't prepared properly. I have a detailed guide on running your AGM step by step, but here's the secretary's perspective.

8 weeks before:

• Check your constitution for AGM requirements: notice period (usually 21 or 28 days), quorum, what business must be conducted, nomination procedures for office-bearers.
• Confirm the date, time, and venue with the president. Check it doesn't clash with finals, school holidays, or long weekends.
• Start preparing the annual report. Your section covers meetings held, key decisions, compliance lodged, membership numbers. Keep it to one page.

6 weeks before:

• Open nominations for committee positions. Your constitution will specify the process. Make sure the nomination form includes all required information (nominee name, nominator, seconder, position sought, nominee's consent).
• Chase the treasurer for the financial statements. They'll need to be ready for the notice.

4 weeks before (notice time):

• Send the formal notice of AGM to all members. Include: date, time, venue, agenda, any special resolutions, nomination forms (or deadline for nominations), proxy forms if your constitution allows proxies.
• The notice must go to every member, not just financial members (unless your constitution says otherwise). The notice period is a minimum - sending it early is fine, sending it late is a constitutional breach.

2 weeks before:

• Close nominations. Prepare the ballot paper if positions are contested.
• Compile the agenda pack: previous AGM minutes, president's report, secretary's report, treasurer's report and financial statements, any special resolutions, list of nominees for each position.
• Confirm catering, AV, printing, attendance register, voting papers.

On the day:

• Arrive early. Set up the room, put out the attendance register, have spare copies of everything.
• Record attendance and apologies meticulously. You need this to verify quorum and to record who voted.
• Take careful minutes. AGM minutes are more formal than committee minutes because they're confirmed by the full membership.
• Record all election results, including vote counts for contested positions.
• Record the exact wording of any special resolutions and whether they passed (usually requires 75% majority).

Within 1 week after:

• Draft the AGM minutes and circulate to the new committee for review.
• Lodge your change of office-bearers notification with the state regulator.
• Update the bank signatories.
• Notify your state sporting body, insurer, and any other relevant parties of the new committee.
• File everything.

The AGM is also where things can get tense. Contested elections, difficult motions, vocal members who want to relitigate decisions from the year. Your job is to keep the process correct, not to manage the politics. Make sure the president is prepared to chair the meeting properly. If a special resolution is being proposed, make sure the wording is legally sound - get your state sporting body or a lawyer to review it if you're unsure. A badly worded resolution that passes can be worse than no resolution at all.

For much more on this, read our guide to running a successful AGM.

Working with the president and treasurer

The secretary, president, and treasurer form a triangle. When that triangle works, the club runs well. When it doesn't, you get one of two failure modes: either nobody communicates and things get missed, or one person (usually the secretary) ends up doing everything.

Here's how to make the triangle work:

Talk outside of meetings. If the only time the three of you communicate is at committee meetings, you're already behind. A quick weekly phone call or WhatsApp check-in - five minutes, literally just "anything I need to know?" - prevents surprises and keeps everyone aligned.

Respect the boundaries. The president leads. The treasurer manages money. The secretary manages administration. When you're drafting an email to the state sporting body about a governance matter, the president should see it before it goes. When the treasurer needs membership data for the financial statements, you provide it promptly. When the president needs a meeting called at short notice, you make it happen. But you don't need to attend every meeting the president attends, and you don't need to understand the chart of accounts. Stay in your lane and trust the others to stay in theirs.

Back each other up publicly. Committees work because the executive presents a united front. If you disagree with the president about how to handle something, have that conversation privately. In the meeting, support the decision that was made. This isn't about being a yes-person - it's about maintaining the credibility of the executive.

Keep each other honest on compliance. The treasurer should be reminding you about financial reporting deadlines. You should be reminding the president about constitutional obligations. Nobody should be assuming someone else is across it. Create a shared calendar or checklist and review it together quarterly.

Handover - setting your successor up for success

The single most valuable thing you can do as a secretary - more valuable than any individual meeting you'll run or letter you'll write - is to leave a proper handover when you finish your term.

I cannot stress this enough. The reason so many clubs operate in chaos is that institutional knowledge walks out the door every time a volunteer steps down. The new secretary starts from scratch, figures things out by trial and error, builds their own systems, and then two years later they leave and the cycle repeats. It's exhausting and it's entirely preventable.

Your handover document should include:

The basics. Login credentials for all club accounts (email, website, state regulator portal, state sporting body portal, social media if you manage it). Contact details for key external people: the person at the SSO, the council contact for the grounds, the insurance broker, the accountant.

The calendar. Every regular obligation, when it's due, and what's involved. Annual return due date. ACNC statement due date. Insurance renewal date. SSO affiliation deadline. AGM window per the constitution.

The files. Where everything lives. Whether that's a filing cabinet, a Google Drive, a shared folder on someone's laptop. A map of the filing structure. What's in each folder. Where the constitution is. Where the member register is.

The context. Things that aren't written down anywhere else. The history of the lease negotiation. The reason the constitution was amended in 2019. The ongoing dispute with the neighbouring club about the shared car park. The member who's been asked to show cause. This stuff matters and it lives in your head - if you don't write it down, it's gone.

The "watch out for" list. Upcoming deadlines. Pending issues. That grant application that's been submitted but not yet heard back on. The constitutional amendment that was deferred to next year's AGM.

Ideally, do this handover in person with your successor. Walk them through the documents, show them the systems, introduce them to the key contacts. Give them your phone number and tell them to call if they're stuck. Most people don't do this. Be the person who does.

For a detailed framework, see our committee handover transition guide.

Tools and systems that help

Look, you can do this job with a notebook, a shared email account, and a spreadsheet. People have been doing it that way for decades. But here's the reality: if you're maintaining a member register in Excel, chasing renewals by hand, emailing agendas as attachments, and storing minutes on someone's personal Google Drive, you're spending time on mechanics that should be spent on the actual work of running the club.

The minimum tech stack for a well-run club in 2026:

A role-based email address that transfers when you leave the role. Gmail or Outlook, free, takes five minutes to set up.

A shared document repository that the whole committee can access. Google Drive or OneDrive. Not someone's personal account - a club account. This is where minutes, agendas, reports, and policies live.

A member register that's more than a spreadsheet. Once your club gets past about 80 members, maintaining a manual register becomes unreliable. You need something that tracks membership status, financial status, contact details, and history. TidyHQ handles this well - it's what a lot of Australian clubs use - and it also manages meeting agendas, minutes, communications, and compliance tracking in the same place. But whatever you use, the principle is the same: one source of truth for member data, accessible to the people who need it, with an audit trail.

A compliance calendar with reminders. This can be as simple as a shared Google Calendar with alerts set two weeks before each deadline. The point is that compliance deadlines shouldn't live in your head.

Templates. Agenda template, minutes template, correspondence template, nomination form, proxy form. Create them once at the start of your term and use them every time. Consistency saves time, reduces errors, and makes your successor's life easier.

The key principle with all of this: whatever system you set up, it needs to outlast you. If it depends on your personal accounts, your personal devices, or your personal knowledge of where things are, it's not a system - it's a dependency on you. And the whole point of good systems is that the club keeps running regardless of which individual is in the chair.

This is also, by the way, where having your essential policies documented properly makes a real difference. When someone asks "what's our policy on X?", you shouldn't have to dig through five years of minutes to find the answer. It should be in a policy register, dated, and accessible.

Where to go from here

Being a club secretary is one of those roles that looks intimidating from the outside but becomes manageable once you have the systems in place. The first month will be the hardest - you're learning the role, understanding the club's specific quirks, and probably cleaning up whatever your predecessor left behind. After that, it settles into a rhythm.

A few parting thoughts:

It's okay to say no. You're a volunteer. If someone asks you to take on something that isn't secretary work, it's legitimate to say "that's not part of this role, but let's find someone who can help." Protecting your time isn't selfish - it's how you stay in the role long enough to be effective.

Ask for help. Your state sporting body almost certainly has a governance support person or a club development officer. They've seen every problem your club has, probably last week. Call them. They want to help - it's literally their job.

Document as you go. Every time you figure out how to do something - lodge the annual return, update the member register, navigate the state regulator's terrible website - write it down. Not for you. For the person who comes after you. The secretary's survival guide on our blog has more on building these kinds of reference documents.

Remember why you're doing this. The club exists because people care about what it does - the sport, the craft, the community, whatever it is. The paperwork and compliance and meetings are not the point. They're the scaffolding that lets the actual purpose of the club happen. When you keep the administration running cleanly, you're giving every other volunteer, every coach, every player, every member the freedom to focus on the thing they actually showed up for.

That's worth a few hours a week.

In the UK, much of this advice translates directly - the UK Sport Code for Sports Governance and the Charities Act 2011 set similar expectations for record-keeping and governance. In New Zealand, the new Incorporated Societies Act 2022 brought NZ requirements much closer to Australian standards, so if you're running a club across the Tasman, the principles here apply with only minor statutory differences.

Whatever country you're in, whatever sport or activity your club is about - the job is the same. Keep the records clean. Keep the meetings purposeful. Keep the compliance current. And when your term is up, hand it over properly.

You've got this.