How to create a board pack

This is the manual process: what a company secretary or executive assistant actually does with an agenda and eight PDFs. You can follow it with the PDF tools you already have.

The times are rough estimates, not measurements. They assume about eight papers and 50 to 100 pages, put together by someone who knows their PDF editor. A bigger pack, or your first go, will take longer.

The ten steps

1. Agree the agenda first · about 20 minutes

   Settle the agenda before you collect anything. It decides how many papers there are, what each is called and the order they go in. Assemble first and agree the agenda later, and you’ll do the work twice. The second time will be the evening before the meeting.

   Usually this is a five-minute email to the chair. It’s also the step people skip most often.

2. Collect the papers, with a deadline · about 30 minutes

   Give every author a date for their paper. Make it early enough for the pack to go out several working days before the meeting. Five clear working days is a common target: a board that gets its pack the night before hasn’t read it. If your articles, constitution or standing orders set a notice period, that wins.

   Two people will be late. Start with the papers you have and slot theirs in when they arrive. If you wait, the whole job ends up squeezed into one evening.

3. Convert everything to PDF · about 5 minutes

   Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers, Google Docs and Slides all export straight to PDF. You have to convert at some point anyway, and doing it now means you see the result while there’s still time to fix it.

   Spreadsheets are where it goes wrong. Check the page breaks and print area before exporting, or you’ll find out at the meeting that column K is on a page of its own.

4. Put them in the order of the agenda · about 10 minutes

   Put a number at the front of each filename (01_minutes.pdf, 02_ceo-report.pdf) and the folder and the merge will both follow the agenda. Decide now whether you’re using sub-numbers like 3.1. Changing your mind later means renumbering everything.

5. Decide each paper’s title · about 10 minutes

   Use the same words for a paper on the contents page, its divider and its bookmark. If it’s “Q3 Financials” in one place and “Management Accounts” in another, anyone skimming will think there are two papers.

6. Merge into one document · about 20 minutes

   Combine them into one file, in order, with a divider page before each paper. Acrobat can do it, Preview on a Mac can do it, and so can plenty of online tools. Before you put confidential board papers through an online tool, find out whether it uploads them and what it does with them afterwards.

   Don’t scale anything to fit. A landscape financial statement squashed onto a portrait page can’t be read, and mixed page sizes in a board pack are perfectly normal.

7. Add a cover page · about 10 minutes

   Organisation, meeting title, date, and a confidentiality label if you use one. That’s all. The cover is the first thing anyone sees, and a plain one looks far more professional than one with clip art and three fonts.

8. Number every page continuously · about 40 minutes

   This one takes longest, and it’s where most people give up. Every page gets a number running from the cover to the last appendix (Page 17 of 48), whatever the original document called it. Directors refer to pages out loud in the meeting, and that only works if there’s exactly one page 31.

   Watch for two things. A number stamped bottom right on a landscape page can end up in a different corner from the portrait pages around it, because of how the page is stored. And some pages already have a footer in that spot, so the new number lands on top of it.

9. Write the contents page from the merged numbers · about 15 minutes

   Do this last. Take the page numbers from the merged document. The most common mistake in a hand-made pack is a contents page built from each paper’s own numbering. It’s fine until the first paper gains a page, and then every reference in the meeting is off.

   Once it’s written, stop editing. Insert one page anywhere and every number below it moves.

10. Add bookmarks, then check it · about 20 minutes

    One bookmark for the contents page and one per paper. Bookmarks are what make a 200-page pack usable on a tablet. Most hand-made packs don’t have them, mainly because it’s the last job and everyone’s tired by then.

    Then open the finished file, click every bookmark, and check three contents entries against the pages they point to. These five minutes save more embarrassment than any other step.

What that adds up to

On those assumptions, a typical pack is around 3 hours of focused work. A third of it goes on two steps: numbering the pages and writing the contents page from the merged numbers. Both are purely mechanical. There are no decisions in them, just the risk of an arithmetic slip at nine in the evening.

The first five steps are judgement calls, and no tool can make them for you: what goes on the agenda, whose paper is missing, whether the finance report actually answers what the board asked last time. That’s the part of the job worth your time.

A checklist before you send it

• Every agenda item has its paper, or the agenda says it’s to follow.
• The papers are in agenda order, and each has the same title everywhere.
• Every page has one continuous number, landscape pages included.
• You’ve checked three contents entries against the pages they name.
• Every bookmark opens the right paper.
• Nothing has been added since you wrote the contents page.

Doing the mechanical half automatically

Board Pack Factory does steps six to ten for you. Add the PDFs, drag them into agenda order and fill in the meeting details. You get a cover, section dividers, page numbers that sit correctly on landscape pages, a contents page with the right numbers, and a bookmark for every paper. A typical pack takes a few minutes. It all runs in your browser, so your papers are never uploaded.

See what it produces on the example pack page, or grab the free template if you’d rather do it by hand this time.