Turn a messy WhatsApp planning thread into professional meeting minutes with attendees, decisions, action items, and open questions.
Jan 31, 20265 min read
Your team had a planning session on WhatsApp. Now someone needs to write up the meeting minutes. Nobody wants to scroll through 300 messages and piece together what was discussed.
Here is how to generate professional meeting minutes from a WhatsApp thread.
Why WhatsApp threads need meeting minutes
Many teams use WhatsApp for real-time coordination. The conversation is fast, informal, and effective in the moment. But a week later, nobody remembers:
What was decided
Who is responsible for what
What deadlines were set
What questions are still open
Meeting minutes solve this. They create a permanent, structured record.
The manual way
Open the chat
Scroll to the beginning of the discussion
Read every message
Identify decisions, action items, and open questions
Write them up in a document
Share with the team
For a 200-message thread, this takes 30-60 minutes. For a 500-message thread with voice notes, much longer.
The ThreadRecap way
Export the WhatsApp group chat (include media if there are voice notes)
Action items — Who committed to what, with deadlines
Open questions — Unresolved issues needing follow-up
Voice notes are the hidden content
In a typical work WhatsApp thread, critical information lives in voice notes:
"I talked to the client this morning. They're okay with pushing the deadline to Friday but they need the design mockups by Wednesday. I told them we could do that. Sarah, can you prioritize the mockups?"
That one voice note contains a decision, a deadline change, a commitment to the client, and an action item. Without transcription, it is just a play button in the chat.
ThreadRecap transcribes every voice note and includes the content in the meeting minutes.
Formatting the output
ThreadRecap's meeting recap output is structured but plain text. You can paste it into:
Email — Send to all participants and stakeholders
Google Docs / Notion — Add to your project documentation
Slack / Teams — Post in the relevant channel
Project management tools — Create tasks from action items
Tips for better meeting minutes
Set clear date ranges
If the WhatsApp group is used for ongoing communication, limit the date range to the specific meeting or discussion period. A recap of "Tuesday's planning call" should only include Tuesday's messages.
Filter participants
In a group of 15, maybe 5 people were active in the planning discussion. Filter to those 5 to remove noise and produce cleaner minutes.
Run Action Items separately
After generating the meeting recap, run the same date range with the Action Items goal. This gives you a focused list of tasks that you can paste directly into your task tracker.
Compared to a real meeting
WhatsApp "meetings" are messy — messages arrive out of order, people respond hours later, side conversations happen in between. But they also capture something that formal meetings miss: the informal back-and-forth where real decisions happen.
Good meeting minutes from a WhatsApp thread capture both the decisions and the context behind them.
