Microsoft Teams DIY Minutes vs. ClerkMinutes: Which Is Right for Your Municipality?

Microsoft Teams is everywhere. With over 320 million monthly active users, it's become the default meeting platform for organizations of all sizes, including many local governments, school boards, and municipalities across the country. And with built-in transcription and AI-powered Intelligent Recap features, it seems like everything you need to produce meeting minutes is already sitting in your Microsoft 365 subscription.

So why would you pay for anything else?

But, here's the question worth asking. Was Teams built for you, the municipal Clerk who needs to produce compliant, publish-ready minutes that meet state open meeting laws, ADA accessibility requirements, and FOIA obligations? Or was it built for corporate teams who need to recap a project standup?

The answer matters more than the price tag.

Quick Comparison: Teams DIY vs. ClerkMinutes

What Is Microsoft Teams Transcription?

Microsoft Teams includes transcription capabilities that convert spoken dialogue into written text during or after meetings. The basic transcription feature is available in most Microsoft 365 Business plans, while advanced AI features require Teams Premium ($10/user/month).

What Teams transcription does well

Teams excels at what it was designed for, which is capturing corporate meetings. The platform provides real-time transcription with speaker attribution, timestamps, and the ability to search through meeting content. Teams Premium adds Intelligent Recap, which uses AI to generate summaries, identify action items, and organize content into chapters.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, Teams functionality out of the gate includes:

• Live transcription during meetings with real-time display

• Speaker identification based on voice recognition (with noted limitations)

• Searchable transcripts stored alongside recordings

• AI-generated summaries and action items (Teams Premium required)

• Chapter organization by topic (Teams Premium required)

• Audio recap summaries (Teams Premium required)

• Integration with Microsoft 365 ecosystem (OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook)

• Support for multiple languages with translation options

• Screen share and presentation capture

• Meeting chat integration

For a sales team recapping a client call or a project manager reviewing a sprint planning session, these features work as designed. The transcript integrates with other Microsoft 365 tools, recordings are stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, and the AI can pull out key discussion points. If someone missed a meeting, they can review the recap, watch key moments, and get up to speed quickly.

The Intelligent Recap feature deserves credit for what it does. It can identify when someone said "Let's follow up on that" or "John will handle this," and surface those as action items. It breaks long meetings into chapters by topic. It even offers audio recaps, which are essentially a podcast-style summary of your meeting. For the corporate use case it was designed for, it works well enough, even as more and more corporate Teams users continue to bolt on another AI notetaker like Fathom.ai, Otter.ai, or Fireflies.ai on top of Teams’ functionality.

The real cost of "free"

Basic transcription comes with Microsoft 365 Business Basic ($6/user/month) or higher. And the AI-powered features like summaries starts at $10/user/month. But here's what both most corporations and most municipalities discover. The basic transcription produces a raw transcript. And if you need special formatting (ahem minutes) or any kind of detailed analysis, you are either going to need to pay for another tool or spend a lot of time doing it manually.

And even with Premium, you're still getting a transcript, not minutes. The difference matters for compliance purposes.

Teams Simply Wasn't Built for Municipal Clerks

Picture this scenario: It's 10 PM on a Tuesday. The city council meeting wrapped up two hours ago. A marathon session with a contentious rezoning vote, three public comment periods, and a procedural dispute about whether a motion was properly seconded. Your Teams recording captured all of it.

Now what? You pull up the transcript. It's there. Thousands of words, timestamped, with speaker labels. But "Speaker 4" said the thing about the variance request, and you're pretty sure that was Councilmember Rodriguez, but the AI heard "council member raw degrees" and you'll need to fix that. The motion to approve the consent agenda is buried somewhere around minute 47, but Teams didn't flag it as a motion because it doesn't know what a motion is.

You start scrolling through the transcript, control-F searching for "move" and "motion" to find the official actions. You find 23 instances. Most of them are false positives like, "We need to move on to the next item." or "There's been a lot of movement on this issue." The actual motion to approve the variance? It's worded as "I make a motion that we accept the planning commission's recommendation regarding case number 2024-ZV-0847." Teams didn't catch that as anything special.

Three hours later at 1 AM, you're still cross-referencing the transcript against your agenda, manually extracting every vote, reformatting everything into your municipality's required minute structure, and hoping you didn't miss the exact wording of the amendment to item 7B.

This is the hidden cost of free.

Sure, you could shave off an hour or so by throwing your transcript into ChatGPT or Claude, but it is still DIY and will still take a couple of hours.

Plus, this scenario repeats, every council meeting, every planning commission meeting, and every board meeting. The time compounds. The frustration builds. And the risk of an error in the official record never goes away.

The speaker identification issues

Teams transcription relies on AI to identify who's speaking. In a typical corporate meeting—four people around a table, each with their own device—this works reasonably well. In a council chamber with multiple speakers, public comment periods, people not near microphones, and crosstalk during heated discussions? The accuracy drops significantly.

For example, When "Councilmember Krishnamurthy" becomes "council member Chris Murphy" in every instance, you're creating a correction project.

The problem compounds during public comment periods. When 15 different citizens approach the microphone to speak on a contentious issue, Teams has no way to identify them. You get "Speaker 7," "Speaker 8," "Speaker 9" and it's on you to match those back to the sign-in sheet, assuming people signed in with legible handwriting. If two speakers have similar voice characteristics, Teams may merge them into a single speaker ID, creating a garbled mess of misattributed statements.

And then there's the crosstalk. When a council member interrupts another, or when multiple people react to a statement simultaneously, Teams typically transcribes the dominant voice and drops the rest, or worse, creates a jumbled transcript that attributes one person's words to another. For an official record, this is a compliance nightmare.

The structure problem

Teams produces a transcript. Municipal minutes require a specific structure: call to order, roll call, approval of previous minutes, public hearings, old business, new business, motions with seconds, vote tallies by name, adjournment. Teams has no concept of this structure because it wasn't built for this use case.

Every council meeting, you're manually imposing structure on an unstructured transcript. You're hunting for motions, matching them to seconds, tallying votes, and formatting everything according to your municipality's standards.

The compliance landmines

Municipal minutes are legal records. State open meeting laws typically require minutes to be made publicly available within specific timeframes. Many states mandate that draft minutes be posted within 10 working days of a meeting, with final approved minutes posted within days of approval. FOIA (a.k.a. Freedom of Information Act) requests can demand meeting records at any time, and those records must be complete and accurate.

ADA compliance adds another layer. Meeting minutes published on government websites must be accessible to individuals with disabilities. This means proper document structure, readable fonts, adequate contrast, and compatibility with screen readers. A raw Teams transcript exported as a .VTT file meets none of these requirements.

Teams gives you a transcript file. Turning that into a compliant public record that’s properly formatted, accessible, structured according to your state's requirements, and published within the required timeframe is entirely on you.

And the stakes aren't abstract. Citizens have the right to access these records. Journalists use them. Lawyers cite them. Political opponents scrutinize them. An error in the official record like a misattributed vote, a missing motion, a garbled statement from public comment can create real problems for your municipality.

The hallucination risks

Teams transcription has an estimated accuracy rate of around 85% under good audio conditions. That drops with strong accents, technical jargon, poor audio quality, or multiple speakers talking over each other. For a casual corporate meeting recap, 80% might be fine.

For an official government record that may be cited in legal proceedings, 85% accuracy means 15% potential liability. And when a citizen files a FOIA request for the exact wording of a motion, "close enough" isn't compliant.

Some of those errors will be obvious like a garbled proper noun or a clearly nonsensical phrase. But others will be subtle like "the motion passed" when someone actually said "the motion passed narrowly," or "the council approved" when it was actually "the council approved with conditions."

These subtle errors are the dangerous ones. They sound right, they read smoothly, and they can slip past a tired Clerk reviewing a late-night transcript. But they can also change the meaning of an official record.

The “we've always done it this way" factor

For Clerks who've been producing minutes manually for years or decades, there's often pride in the craft. You know your council members' speaking patterns. You can tell from context who made a motion even when the audio is unclear. You've developed systems and shortcuts that work.

The question isn't whether your current process works. It's whether it's the best use of your expertise and time. The hours spent on transcription formatting are hours not spent on constituent services, records management, election preparation, or the dozens of other responsibilities on your plate.

What Is ClerkMinutes?

ClerkMinutes is purpose-built meeting minutes software designed specifically for municipalities that need to produce official, compliant minutes.

Unlike general-purpose transcription tools, ClerkMinutes understands the structure and requirements of government meetings. It produces formatted, publish-ready minutes that follow your municipality's specific requirements.

This domain-specific intelligence is why ClerkMinutes can produce draft minutes that need minimal editing, while generic transcription produces raw material that requires hours of processing.

How ClerkMinutes works

1. Upload your agenda. ClerkMinutes uses your meeting agenda to understand the structure and context of what's being discussed.

2. Upload your recording. The platform accepts most audio and video formats and integrates with common recording sources including YouTube and Zoom.

3. Review speaker identification. AI suggests speaker identities based on voice patterns, which you can quickly confirm or correct. This trained identification improves accuracy for your specific council members and regular meeting participants.

4. Generate formatted minutes. ClerkMinutes produces a draft structured according to your municipality's requirements, including motions, seconds, votes, and proper formatting. Use the built-in editor to make any necessary adjustments, then export as Word or PDF documents ready for publication.

Key capabilities

Here are the most popular ways Clerks use ClerkMinutes.

• Agenda integration: Minutes are automatically structured around your agenda items, eliminating manual organization. When you upload your agenda before processing, ClerkMinutes uses it as a roadmap, linking discussion, motions, and votes to the appropriate agenda items without manual sorting.

• Motion and second tracking: The system identifies motions and seconds automatically, capturing the exact language and attribution. No more hunting through transcripts for "I move that we..." phrasing.

• Roll call automation: Attendance is tracked and formatted according to your minute requirements. Late arrivals, early departures, and absences are captured accurately.

• Vote capture with attribution: Every vote is recorded with individual member attribution for transparency and compliance. When citizens want to know how their council member voted, the record is clear.

• Customizable formatting: Minutes follow your municipality's specific structure and style requirements. You set the template once, and every set of minutes follows your format automatically.

• Compliance-ready output: Documents are formatted for ADA accessibility and public records requirements. It’s all built-in.

• Collaborative features Invite a team member, Agenda building, subscriber notifications, and website publishing integration. Build your agenda in ClerkMinutes, and it flows through to minutes automatically.
  
  

Detailed Feature Comparison

When to Use Each Tool

Microsoft Teams DIY might work if:

• Your meetings are simple with few agenda items and straightforward discussion.

• You have a single speaker or very small group where speaker identification is trivial.

• Minutes requirements are informal or internal-only with no compliance obligations.

• You have significant staff time available for post-meeting processing and don't mind the manual work.

• Compliance requirements are minimal or non-existent.

• You're comfortable with 3-6+ hours of post-meeting formatting work for every meeting.

• Your municipality is very small with infrequent meetings (once a month or less).

• You're primarily creating internal notes rather than official public records.

ClerkMinutes is the better choice if:

• You need compliant, publish-ready minutes that meet state open meeting laws.

• Your meetings involve multiple speakers, public comment periods, or complex agendas.

• State law requires timely publication of minutes (as most do).

• You field FOIA requests for meeting records and need defensible documentation.

• ADA accessibility is required for published documents.

• You want to reduce post-meeting processing from hours to minutes.

• Your Clerk's time is better spent on higher-value work than transcript formatting.

• You manage multiple boards or commissions with different meeting schedules.

• Accuracy matters and you can't afford errors in the official record.

• You've been doing it manually for years and you're tired.

The real question is: What is your Clerk's time worth?

Consider a typical scenario: A 2-hour council meeting followed by 4 hours of post-meeting work to produce compliant minutes using Teams DIY. If your Clerk's fully-loaded labor cost is $35-50/hour (salary, benefits, overhead), that's $140-200 in labor for every set of minutes. With twice-monthly council meetings plus planning commission, zoning board, and other bodies, you're looking at hundreds of hours per year, potentially $10,000-15,000 or more in labor cost for minute production alone.

ClerkMinutes at $99/month ($1,188/year for the Starter plan) replaces most of that post-meeting work. Even if it cuts your processing time in half, the ROI is clear. And most users report time savings far greater than 50%.

The math isn't complicated. The free option isn't actually free. It's just hiding the cost in labor rather than showing it on an invoice.

Final Verdict

Microsoft Teams is an excellent meeting platform. Its transcription features serve corporate teams well for internal recaps, action item tracking, and meeting summaries. If your organization primarily needs to capture what was discussed for internal reference, Teams handles that capably. For project standups, sales calls, and team syncs, it does exactly what it was designed to do.

But municipal minutes aren't meeting notes. They're legal records with specific structural requirements, compliance obligations, and public accountability. They must capture motions verbatim, record votes by name, track attendance, and follow your state's open meeting laws. They must be accessible to citizens with disabilities and producible on demand for FOIA requests. They become part of the permanent public record.

Teams wasn't designed for this use case, and forcing it into that role creates hidden costs in time, accuracy risk, and compliance exposure. You can make it work. We know Clerks are resourceful people who've been making inadequate tools work for decades. But "can make it work" isn't the same as "should."

ClerkMinutes exists because municipal Clerks needed something different. That’s a tool that understands agendas, motions, votes, and the specific requirements of government transparency. It's purpose-built for the work you actually do, by people who understand the unique challenges of municipal government.

Ready to see the difference? Start a 14-day free trial of ClerkMinutes. Upload your next meeting recording and see how quickly you can produce compliant, publish-ready minutes.