Onboarding checklist

Before you start

Make sure you have the following to hand:

• Your council's committee structure (from your constitution or standing orders)
• A list of current councillors with their ward details
• Your council's meeting schedule for the year

Step 1 — Check your council details

Your council's core information was entered during setup, but it is worth checking it is correct before you do anything else.

Go to Council in the left-hand menu and verify your council's name, address, contact details, and office hours. If anything needs correcting, you can update it here.

See Council details and branding.

Step 2 — Add a meeting venue

A meeting needs a venue, so this is one of the two things you must set up before you can create any meetings. Go to Council → Meeting Venues and add the place (or places) your council meets.

Step 3 — Set up your council cycle

A council cycle groups your meetings together, usually matching your current election period (for example 2023–2027). Every meeting must fall within a cycle, so this is the second required item — once your venue and cycle are both in place, you can create meetings. Go to Council → Council Cycles and add your cycle with a name, a minute-numbering abbreviation, and its start and end dates.

With just your venue and cycle in place you can already create your first meeting. The remaining steps make the meeting fuller, but none of them blocks you from getting started.

Step 4 — Create your committees

Your Full Council committee is already set up. You now need to create any additional committees your council operates — Planning Committee, Finance Committee, and so on.

Go to Committees in the left-hand menu and use the Create New Committee button for each one.

If you are not sure whether something should be set up as a separate committee, see When to create a new committee.

See Creating a committee.

Step 5 — Add your councillors

Go to People in the left-hand menu and add each of your current councillors. You will need their name, ward, and any contact details or other information your council publishes.

You do not need to assign councillors to committees at this stage — that comes next. If you have a list of councillors to hand, you can import them from a spreadsheet instead of adding them one at a time.

See Adding a councillor.

Step 6 — Set up committee membership

Once your councillors are added, assign them to their committees. Go to Committees, open each committee in turn, and add the relevant councillors as members.

See Managing committee membership.

Step 7 — Set default meeting content

For each committee, set up the standard agenda items that should appear automatically whenever you create a new meeting. This typically includes standing items such as Apologies for Absence, Declarations of Interest, and Minutes of the Previous Meeting.

The quickest way to do this is to load a model agenda — a ready-made set of items based on NALC or One Voice Wales guidance. Go to Committees, open each committee, and use Load a Model Agenda on the Default Content for Agendas page. You can edit the loaded items afterwards to match your council's exact practice.

See Model agendas and Setting default meeting content.

Step 8 — Add your meetings

Add your council's upcoming meetings. Most councils will have a schedule already agreed for the year, so you can enter all of them at once.

Go to Meetings in the left-hand menu and use the Add Meeting button for each one.

See Creating a meeting.

You are ready

Once you have completed these steps your council is set up and ready to run its first meeting in CouncilPapers. When a meeting date approaches, the next task is to build and commit the agenda.

See Building an agenda.