Organization Setup Guide

Configure your organization settings to customize Boardwise for your board's needs. Only administrators can access these settings.

Accessing Organization Settings

1. Navigate to your organization dashboard
2. Click Settings in the organization menu
3. Update any settings and click Save

Basic Information

Organization Name

Your organization name appears throughout Boardwise and in communications sent to board members. Choose a name that your members will recognize.

Industry

Optionally specify your organization's industry. This helps contextualize certain features and may be used for benchmarking in future updates.

Address

Add your organization's primary address. This can be used as a default location for in-person meetings.

Fiscal Year Configuration

Set your fiscal year end month to align Boardwise reporting with your organization's financial calendar. By default, the fiscal year ends in December.

1. Select your Fiscal Year End Month from the dropdown
2. Click Save

This setting affects how fiscal quarters and years are calculated when organizing meetings and documents.

Language

Choose English or Français from the Language dropdown. When you create an organization, it starts in your own language.

Boardwise uses this language for email to people who haven't chosen one themselves, such as invitations to people who don't have an account yet. Anyone with an account reads Boardwise in the language set in their own profile. See Profile Settings.

Organization Logo

Upload your organization's logo to personalize the Boardwise experience:

1. Click Choose File in the Logo field
2. Select an image file (PNG or JPG recommended)
3. Click Save

Your logo appears in the organization header and helps members quickly identify which organization they're viewing.

Welcome Message

Create a welcome message that new board members see when they first access Boardwise:

1. Enter your message in the Welcome Note field
2. Use the rich text editor to format your message
3. Click Save

Consider including:
- A brief introduction to how your organization uses Boardwise
- Key contacts for questions
- Links to important documents or resources

Configuration Settings

Meeting, email, document, and retention settings are located on the Configuration tab.

Meeting Settings

Calendar Invites

Control whether meeting emails include calendar (.ics) files:

• Enabled (default) - Meeting invitations and updates include calendar files that members can add to their calendars
• Disabled - Only email notifications are sent, without calendar attachments

Disable this setting if your organization manages meeting invites through a separate calendar system.

Email Settings

Subject Lines

Every subject begins with your organization's name in brackets:

[HealthFirst] Response Requested: Annual COI Declaration

A director who sits on several boards can then tell which board an email concerns at a glance — including on a phone, where often only the first few words are visible before the subject is cut off. If you have set a Common name on the General tab, that is what appears here, which is why keeping it short is worth doing.

Name Shown in Invitations and Notices

Email sent because someone in your organization acted (an invitation, a meeting notice, a request to sign or respond, or a reminder you send with Send Reminders) comes from your organization, not from an individual. A director sees "HealthFirst via Boardwise" in the From line — your common name if you have set one, otherwise your legal name. The person who acted is named in the subject and the body: "Jane Smith has invited you to the Q3 Board Meeting."

We do this deliberately. Every Boardwise email is sent from the same address, so putting an individual's name on it would fill your directors' address books with entries that all point to the same place. A director who later types "Jane" into a new email could pick that entry without noticing, and the message would never reach her.

Automatic notices come from "Boardwise", because nobody in your organization sent them. These include a consent resolution being completed, declined or awaiting certification; someone accepting an invitation; a change to a person's access; the regular reminder of outstanding items; RSVPs and replies passed on to a meeting's organizer; and messages about your Boardwise account itself, such as sign-in links, your trial, and an organization's departure from Boardwise. A notice about your organization still has its name at the start of the subject.

If your organization has several administrators, you may prefer one consistent voice. Enter a name such as Board Office or Office of the Corporate Secretary, and invitations will read "Board Office has invited you" no matter which administrator acted.

This changes only the name inside the message. Email still comes from your organization — the From line is how a director tells which of their boards an email concerns, and names like "Board Office" would look identical across every organization that chose one.

Leave the field blank to use each person's own name.

A preview under the field shows exactly what board members will see.

What this does not change: who performed the action is still recorded on the underlying meeting or governance record, and still appears in the event log. This setting only changes the name shown on outgoing email — it does not hide anything from your audit trail. Where an email describes something a person authored, such as a group message or a shared annotation, the author is still named in the body of the email.

Document Settings

Allow Document Downloads

Control whether members can download documents or only view them in the browser:

• Enabled - Members with viewing permissions can download documents
• Disabled (default) - Documents can only be viewed in the browser

Restricting downloads can help maintain tighter control over sensitive board materials.

This setting does not turn off Save for offline. A director can still keep a meeting's PDFs in the Boardwise app to read without a connection. Those copies stay inside the app, each is marked with the director's name, and each save is recorded.

Retention Policy

Set how long documents and meeting records are retained before automatic deletion:

1. Select a retention period from the dropdown:
   • Preset options (1 year, 3 years, 7 years, etc.)
   • Indefinite retention (documents are never automatically deleted)
2. Click Save

The default retention period is 3 years. Individual documents and meetings can have their own retention settings that override the organization default.

Changes to retention policy that shorten the retention period may result in documents being deleted sooner than originally expected. A warning will appear if you select a shorter retention period.