Correcting a wrong number in a board paper after the meeting

If a wrong number is discovered in a board paper after the meeting, never silently overwrite the document. Instead, use a structured triage protocol to determine if the error changes the board's decision, issue a documented change note, and formally record the correction.

If a figure in a circulated board paper turns out to be wrong after the meeting, the right response is a triage of the error, prompt written notification to the chair and company secretary, and a documented correction issued alongside the original. What you should never do is quietly overwrite the paper in the next version. The answer to every downstream question, including whether the board must revisit the decision, depends on one test: could the error have changed the decision the board took?

A silent fix looks like the low-drama option, but it creates a record that contradicts itself. Board papers that informed a decision are normally retained alongside the minutes, so a silently replaced paper leaves directors who read the original holding a document that no longer exists anywhere. Poor quality papers and inadequate information are predictable risk factors for poor board decisions^[1]; an uncorrected wrong number sits squarely in that category, and so does a record that has been quietly doctored.

• The board is protected because it stops acting, and stops others acting, on a false premise; every director who took the decision learns what was wrong and what the correct figure is.
• The author is protected because a documented correction, with a change note recording who checked it and when, shows the error was found, owned and fixed rather than concealed.
• The organisation is protected because its records stay consistent: the original paper, the correction and the minutes tell one coherent story.
• The next decision is protected because the root cause, the review step that let the error through, is identified and repaired.

Correcting a paper after the meeting is a different exercise from defending an analysis in the room while the meeting is still running; the in-meeting challenge is covered separately in presenting AI-assisted analysis to a sceptical board. Once the room has emptied and a decision has been taken, the correction has to work through governance channels, not through live debate. The protocol below is designed for exactly that situation.

Run the protocol in order. The triage in step two drives everything that follows, so resist the temptation to start with the notification or the corrected page until you know what class of error you are dealing with.

1. Confirm and scope the error from the source trail. Establish precisely what is wrong, what the correct figure is, and where the wrong figure appears: the slide, the paper, the appendix, any pack derived from it, and any covering summary. Check the source the figure came from before you accept that it is wrong.
2. Triage its effect. Class A: the error changes, or could reasonably have changed, the decision or the vote. Class B: it changes supporting analysis but not the decision. Class C: it is presentational, a typo or a rounding artefact.
3. Notify the chair and the company secretary in writing, promptly, attaching the triage and the corrected figure. For a Class A error, all directors who took the decision are told at the same time; this is not a message that travels by corridor conversation.
4. Issue a corrected page with a change note stating what changed, why, who checked it and on what date. Never overwrite the originally circulated version; the corrected page is issued in addition to it.
5. Record the correction in the minutes of the next meeting. The approved record of the earlier meeting is not rewritten; the correction enters the record as a new matter.
6. For Class A errors, put the decision back on the agenda, or confirm it through the board's normal decision procedure, so the board can re-take or expressly reaffirm it on the corrected figures.
7. Amend the reproducibility pack and trace the root cause to the review step that missed the error, then fix that step. The record you keep at sign-off determines whether the analysis can be reconstructed later, as set out in reproducing an AI strategy analysis six months later, and the review effort a deck needs before sign-off is the subject of how much human review an AI strategy deck needs.

Two habits make the protocol work. First, the notification is written even when the first conversation happens in person, because the written record is what protects everyone involved. Second, the corrected page travels with a change note on every occasion, including for Class C errors; the discipline costs minutes and is what makes the paper trail credible when a larger error arrives.

The following is an illustrative hypothetical, not a real case, and the figures in it are examples rather than data. Suppose a board approved a market-entry paper in which the addressable market was stated by converting a source figure between currencies, and the conversion used the wrong base, overstating the market. Two weeks after approval, the finance analyst who prepared the appendix notices the discrepancy while updating a model.

Working through the protocol, the error is scoped and triaged as follows.

The change note is the load-bearing artefact. It reads as a short block: the figure as circulated, the corrected figure, the source of the correction, the name of the person who checked it against the source, and the date. Because the original circulated version was not overwritten, the pack still shows what the board actually saw when it decided, which is the point of keeping the original intact. Had the triage landed on Class A, for instance if the corrected market no longer cleared the threshold, step six would apply and the decision would return to the board on the corrected numbers.

For UK companies, the statutory frame for board minutes sits in the Companies Act 2006. Section 248 requires every company to cause minutes of all proceedings at meetings of its directors to be recorded and to keep those records for at least ten years from the date of the meeting.^[2] Section 249 provides that minutes recorded in accordance with section 248, if authenticated by the chairman of the meeting or of the next meeting, are evidence of the proceedings, and in Scotland sufficient evidence; until the contrary is proved, the meeting is deemed duly held and convened and its proceedings deemed to have duly taken place.^[3]

Professional governance guidance explains why this matters for corrections: once approved, minutes become the definitive record of what happened at the meeting and who attended, and the rewriting of history is not permitted.^[4] A discovered error in a board paper is therefore not repaired by going back into the approved minutes or the paper; it is recorded forward.

• Draft minutes, before approval, can be corrected in the ordinary way when directors review them at the succeeding meeting.
• Approved minutes are not silently rewritten; a correction is recorded as a new matter, typically under matters arising, at the next meeting.^[4]
• Board papers are retained, usually alongside rather than as part of the minutes, so the paper trail around a correction has a permanent home.
• A decision invalidated by a wrong figure is addressed as a fresh decision of the board, minuted on its own terms, not by editing the old record.

This article is not legal advice, and the position in other jurisdictions differs; directors and company secretaries should confirm the treatment of corrections with counsel, particularly where the company operates outside the UK or in a regulated sector.

The chair and the company secretary are the two offices a correction passes through. The chair ensures a timely flow of accurate, high-quality and clear information to the board^[1], and board papers themselves must be accurate, clear, comprehensive and up to date.^[1] A correction notice arriving on the chair's desk is that standard being applied after the fact, not an exception to it.

• The author, or engagement owner, delivers the written notification: the error, the triage, the corrected figure.
• The company secretary, who is responsible for ensuring board procedures are followed and for good information flows to the board^[1], advises on how the correction should be handled and minuted.
• The chair decides, with the company secretary's advice, whether the error is Class A in effect and therefore whether every director who took the decision must be told immediately.
• For Class A errors, the chair and secretary arrange the agenda item, or the written procedure, through which the board revisits the decision.
• The company secretary prepares the minute of the correction for approval at the next meeting.

Standard governance practice adds a division of responsibility that maps cleanly onto corrections: the company secretary is responsible to the chair for the preparation and retention of minutes, while the chair and the other members of the board are responsible for confirming their accuracy.^[4] In practice this means the author's job ends at the corrected page and the change note; from notification onward the correction belongs to the governance process, and the secretary and chair decide how it enters the record and whether the decision must be revisited. Authors who bypass that route, however well-intentioned, put themselves back in the position the protocol exists to prevent.

Not every wrong number unsettles a decision, and the triage test is deliberately about the decision, not about the error's size in isolation. The question for Class A is whether the error changes, or could reasonably have changed, what the board decided or how directors voted. A figure that merely decorates the argument, or a typo in a footnote, fails that test; a market size, a cost base, a valuation multiple or a risk exposure that sat at the centre of the case may well pass it. Two boundary points deserve care. First, when the triage is genuinely uncertain between A and B, treat it as A; the cost of an unnecessary agenda item is a few minutes of board time, while the cost of an unexamined decision resting on a wrong figure is not. Second, a Class B correction does not silence a director who disagrees: any director who thinks the decision would have gone differently on the correct figures can ask for the matter to be put back on the agenda, and the chair should accommodate that.

Every error in a board paper has an upstream cause: a figure that entered the deck without a checkable source, or a source that was superseded, misquoted or converted without verification. Triage and protocol contain the damage, but prevention means the evidence behind each number being findable at the moment of review, not two weeks later when a reader happens to go looking. A fact-checking pass before circulation, of the kind set out in how to fact-check an AI-generated strategy deck, and a back-test of the platform's output before it is trusted at scale, as described in piloting an AI strategy platform with a back-test, are the review steps that catch the unit errors and superseded sources this article has been correcting.

This is where persistent source-tracing helps. Every claim, number and recommendation in a source-traced deck is traceable to its source, with a full audit trail from conclusion back to evidence, and that source-tracing persists, so the original evidence behind a wrong figure can still be found months later and the correction checked against it. When the currency of a source figure needs verifying, the trail shows which source was used and when, which is exactly what steps one and seven of the protocol require.

• Claim-to-source traceability on every figure, so a reviewer can check the number against its origin before the paper is circulated
• An audit trail that persists after sign-off, so corrections can be verified against the original evidence rather than against memory
• Client documents are not used to train shared models
• Designed to align with the EU AI Act and engineered in line with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 control principles, with European data residency

For boards and the teams that serve them, the durable fix for the wrong number is not a faster correction, it is a paper in which the provenance of every figure is one click away from the start. Teams preparing board-ready decks with that standard in place will find the correction protocol of this article rarely needed, and when it is needed, the source trail behind it already exists. Decks and deliverables built on that principle are the subject of Decisity's decks and deliverables page.

Related reading:

• When Sources Disagree: What Your Strategy Deck Should Say
• Can We Reproduce an AI Strategy Analysis Six Months Later?

• Financial Reporting Council: Guidance on Board Effectiveness (July 2018)
• legislation.gov.uk: Companies Act 2006, section 248, Minutes of directors' meetings
• legislation.gov.uk: Companies Act 2006, section 249, Minutes as evidence
• ICSA: The Governance Institute (now The Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland): Minute taking, guidance note (April 2017)