The session, the minutes, and a record that outlasts the term.
A council's real output is a record: who sat, what was decided, where the money went. It's also the org type where the record is most likely to be questioned, and most likely to leave campus with the outgoing secretary's laptop. This setup optimizes for the record, and it is blunt about the two things you must not use it for.
A month of sessions, and what carries each part
Four things recur, and each one produces a document somebody will ask for later.
Every session
The roll and the minutes
Attendance is a record per member per session, so "were we quorate" has an answer with names attached. Minutes get an AI summary that pulls out the decisions and the action items, and both stay on the meeting.
Between sessions
Committee work that never gets done
Tasks target a role, not a person. Assign it to the chair's seat and the next chair inherits every open item the day they take the seat.
Every term
The budget, and the questions about it
A term budget with a ledger under it. Deleting a transaction marks it deleted and keeps the history, so a correction shows as a correction rather than as a gap.
Whenever it matters
"Who changed this?"
The activity log names the member, the action and the time — every meaningful change, including officers' own. It's the artifact that ends a dispute in about thirty seconds.
Every April
Turnover
Seats are roles. Reassign them and the record stays in place, with the previous holder's name still on everything they did.
What it builds you, and the two edits to make
There's no student-government template — a council starts from the club template, which is the right base. Two edits on day one make it fit: rename the nouns, and add a committee-chair seat below the executive ones.
Rank is the delegation rule
An officer can only grant or edit roles ranked strictly below their own. A committee chair at rank 40 can't promote themselves or a friend — the constraint is in the server, not in a norm.
The log is the point
Structured audit entries plus a readable activity feed, both naming who did what and when. For a body whose legitimacy depends on process, that record is worth more than any feature on the page.
Nothing is stored on someone's laptop
Minutes, the budget and the roll are org records with seats attached. The secretary graduating is a role reassignment, not a data migration.
Pages
Words worth renaming on day one
The club template ships no renames — these two are the recommendation, not the default. Settings → vocabulary, and it applies everywhere at once.
Seats
The first three are seeded. The fourth is the seat most councils discover they need in week three; at rank 40 an exec officer can hand it out and its holder can't hand out anything.
Tracked per member
Turn dues on only if you actually charge them. For most councils the money is a budget, not a per-member balance.
Timeline categories
Renamed from the three the template seeds — categories are editable from day one.
First term
Spring 2027 · Jan 12 – May 8
Every line is editable on this sheet before anything is built — and again in Settings next term, when the org has changed its mind.
Do these five things, in this order.
Each one is cheap now and expensive later — that's the whole reason they're in this order.
Build it signed out
At /create, name meetings, attendance and a budget as what happens in a normal month. Skip service and parties and their pages never appear.
Rename Member and Meetings before anyone joins
Senator and Session. It takes a minute, and every screen a senator ever sees reads in the language your constitution uses.
Add the committee-chair role at rank 40
One seat, tasks permission only. Then assign committee work to the seat rather than to the person sitting in it this year.
Decide where votes happen — and it isn't here
Read the limits below with your exec before the first session. This is the single thing about this product a council can get badly wrong.
Take the roll at session one and summarize the minutes
Both take under a minute and both are the artifacts you'll be asked for. Habit beats an accurate first month.
Three questions an org like yours actually types.
The assistant reads your real records and cites the rows it used. It drafts changes; a person with the right seat is what makes one happen.
Ask Chapt ⌘K
who's missed more than two sessions this term?
Straight off the roll records, per senator, for the active term.
Ask Chapt ⌘K
what's left in the budget?
The term budget against what the ledger has actually spent.
Ask Chapt ⌘K
what were the action items from last session?
Reads the minutes and their summary, and cites the meeting it came from.
Every draft is checked against your own seat before you see it. Without the permission the card is blocked rather than routed onward — and it names who does hold that authority.
What it won't do for you.
The section worth reading twice. Everything below is a real limit today, not a roadmap item dressed up as one — you should find this out here rather than in week three.
Do not run elections here
Every vote records who cast it. That's deliberate — it's how a vote survives a voter being unassigned — but it means a poll is the wrong instrument for an election, a judicial matter, or anything a member would expect to be anonymous.
No motions, amendments or parliamentary procedure
A poll is a question with two to ten options and one vote each. There's no seconding, no amending, no roll-call vote object. Robert's Rules stay in the room.
No quorum math
Attendance gives you the roll and the count. Applying your own quorum threshold to it is a human step.
Not a public minutes page
Everything here is internal to the org. There's no published record for your constituents and no read-only public view — if you publish minutes, you publish them somewhere else.
Allocations to other orgs aren't modelled
The ledger tracks your money. There's no application, review or award workflow for funding the clubs you fund, and each of those clubs has its own separate workspace.
Not sure this fits your org?
Describe what you run in a normal month and we'll tell you plainly whether this is the right tool — including when it isn't. One person reads these, and they'd rather say no early.