How to create condominium assembly minutes from a recording

The assembly ends at 10:40 p.m. The condominium manager (síndico) promises to send the minutes “by the end of the week.” Three weeks later, they still haven’t come out. When they finally do, someone claims they weren’t there, that the quorum didn’t hold, or that the item was never on the agenda.

The minutes are the document that proves the condominium’s decisions. It’s what the bank asks for to recognize who represents the building, what supports collection of the approved fee, and what keeps the assembly from being redone because nobody remembers what was decided. Writing it from memory, days after a two-hour meeting, is the classic recipe for contested minutes.

There’s a better path: record the assembly, turn the audio into text, and build the draft from the transcript. This post covers what the minutes must contain by law, what the law says about recording, and the complete workflow for leaving the meeting with the document nearly done.

What the law requires of your minutes

The Brazilian Civil Code doesn’t provide a “minutes template,” but the pieces that make a deliberation valid are scattered across its articles. Put together, the minutes must record:

Two duties come before the minutes: the ordinary general meeting takes place once a year to approve the budget, the contributions and the financial report (art. 1.350), and no unit owner can be left out of the call. If a unit owner isn’t called, the assembly cannot deliberate (art. 1.354). That’s not formality: it’s the easiest defect to claim later.

Quorum in two sentences

At the first call, deliberations require a majority of the votes of those present that represent at least half of the ideal fractions (art. 1.352). At the second call, a majority of those present is enough, unless a special quorum applies (art. 1.353).

The special quorum that always shows up: changing the bylaws or the building’s purpose depends on 2/3 of the votes (art. 1.351). The practical rule for your minutes: if the document doesn’t show where the number that validates each decision came from, that decision becomes indefensible at the first challenge.

Why writing minutes live almost always fails

Whoever takes notes live doesn’t participate. Whoever participates doesn’t take notes. And the condominium assembly has an aggravating factor the work meeting doesn’t: a drawn-out argument between neighbors over the fee amount, construction in the garage and the election of a council member produces dozens of statements per minute, with interruptions, named votes and requests that statements be recorded in the minutes.

The solution is the same one that already works for in-person meeting minutes with AI: record the conversation, turn the audio into a transcript, and only then write the minutes from the full text, not from memory.

The workflow: record, transcribe, build the draft

1. Announce that you’re recording, and record. The recording isn’t the official document; it’s your source. Put the phone in the middle of the table, on speaker, with a charged battery. The practical details of recording an in-person meeting on your phone are in this guide.

2. Send the audio to Sintesy. You upload the file and the Portuguese transcription comes out ready, along with a summary of the conversation. If the assembly was online on Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom, the Sintesy bot can join the meeting and do the work without you touching your phone.

About limits, so there are no surprises: on the free plan, each file can be up to 20MB and daily processing is 60 minutes of audio. A two-hour assembly usually exceeds that even compressed, so the real math is to split the file into parts or use the Pro plan, which accepts files up to 2GB and unlimited transcriptions.

3. Turn the transcript into a draft. Open the summary to reconstruct the structure of the discussion and work decision by decision: the topic, what was voted, the result, the fractions in favor. When the conversation produces concrete decisions and tasks, Sintesy also builds a checklist of items with owners, which serves as the skeleton for the executive part of the minutes: who took each open item.

4. Close the document the same day. Fill in the items from the table above, collect signatures from those present while everyone is still in the room (collecting signatures weeks later is the classic mistake), and file the document in the minutes book. To send it to the council or the property management company, you can export to PDF or DOCX straight from the platform.

Can you record the assembly? Yes, with two precautions

There’s nothing in Brazilian legislation prohibiting you from recording a condominium assembly you take part in. In practice, the recording is legitimate documentary self-defense covering what everyone said, including those who later disagree. The precautions:

• Announce at the start of the session that the meeting is being recorded. It creates transparency and disarms anyone who might later claim surprise.
• Don’t publish the recording. A voice is personal data protected by the LGPD (Lei 13.709/2018). Using the audio to draft the internal minutes is one thing; posting the audio in a group chat or on social media is another, and that one requires consent from the people recorded.

The transcript comes in as working material; it doesn’t replace the minutes. The official document remains the approved and signed draft.

Online or hybrid assembly

Since 2022, the law has recognized the electronic assembly (art. 1.354-A, added by Lei 14.309/2022). The call, the session and the deliberation can all be electronic, including in hybrid format, with physical and virtual presence at the same time, as long as the bylaws don’t forbid it and voice, debate and vote are preserved. The detail that matters here: in this format, the minutes are electronic too, drawn up only after the votes are counted.

And there’s a new point in favor of transcribing: if the deliberation requires a special quorum and it isn’t reached, the assembly can convert itself into a permanent session (art. 1.353, §1º). The Civil Code then requires a partial minutes document with “detailed transcriptions of all the arguments” presented up to that point, sent to the absent unit owners. In other words: in at least one situation, the law itself demands a detailed record of the discussion, not just the result. Keeping a searchable transcript of the meeting gets that work done before the problem exists.

When the minutes need to go to the notary office

The rule that circulates among managers (“condominium assembly minutes must be registered at a notary office”) is a half-truth. There’s no general obligation, under federal law, to register every condominium minutes document. Registration at the notary office that runs the Registro de Títulos e Documentos (RTD), the Brazilian registry of titles and documents, shows up in practice for two reasons: your condominium’s bylaws may require it, and third parties like banks and suppliers usually ask for the registered election minutes to recognize who represents the condominium as manager. Lei 14.382/2022 modernized the electronic workflow of notary offices, and recent state regulations (like Provimento 39/2024 from the Rio Grande do Sul state judiciary) have been standardizing the registration of these minutes in Book B of the RTD.

The practical decision: if the agenda included an election of manager or a change that affects third parties, register it. If it was an ordinary assembly with no election, registration rarely adds anything. And remember the notification deadline: the manager must inform the unit owners of what was decided within the eight days following the assembly (Lei 4.591/1964, art. 24, §2º). Minutes finished the same day make that deadline achievable.

Mistakes that void (or nearly void) an assembly

• Deliberating on an item outside the call. The record turns into discussion, not deliberation. If the topic came up mid-session, mark it as “agenda for the next assembly.”
• Not recording the quorum of each vote. The deliberation is valid because the majority was reached. A number that isn’t in the minutes doesn’t exist.
• Forgetting to call a unit owner. The assembly cannot deliberate if not everyone was called (art. 1.354). A saved proof of the call is worth more than memory.
• Collecting signatures later. Whoever disagrees with the result simply doesn’t come back to sign.
• Minutes missing the term dates for the election. A term longer than 2 years violates art. 1.347.

Frequently asked questions

Does the recording of the assembly count as minutes? No. The minutes are the draft written, approved and signed. The recording and the transcript are the source that guarantees nothing said was left out.

Who can write the minutes? Whoever chairs the session, usually the manager or the secretary appointed during it. The transcript doesn’t change who signs; it only eliminates the work of reconstructing the discussion from memory.

Does a virtual assembly also need minutes? Yes, and they can be electronic too, drawn up after the votes are counted and published (art. 1.354-A, §3º).

Can the free plan handle an assembly? For short assemblies, yes: 60 minutes of audio per day, files up to 20MB and 10 summaries per day. For the typical two-hour assembly, the clean path is to split the audio into parts or use the Pro plan (R$ 39.90/month or R$ 149.90/year), with files up to 2GB and unlimited transcriptions.

A good assembly ends with the document ready

The end of an assembly isn’t the vote; it’s the signed minutes. When the path between the two is the memory of whoever chaired, the document comes out late, incomplete and open to challenge. When the path is a transcribed recording, the draft is ready the same day and the discussion becomes a record.

Record the next assembly, announce the recording at the start, upload the audio, and write the draft from the full text. Eight days later, when the law expects notification to the unit owners, your document is already in the minutes book, signed.