How ClearDays works
Everything you need to know to run your council’s meeting paperwork here — five minutes to read, no jargon.
1. Setting up your council
Go to Start free, enter your council’s name and your own name as it should appear on documents. That’s the whole signup — no account, no password, no card. You’ll land on your management page.
2. Your private link — the most important thing on this page
Your management page has a long, unguessable web address. That address is your key: anyone who has it can manage your council’s documents, and without it you can’t get back in. So:
- Bookmark it in your browser the moment you arrive, and consider saving it somewhere safe your council can find it (e.g. with the council’s records — useful for your successor too)
- Don’t publish it or email it around — councillors and residents never need it; they use the public page instead
- Lost it? Email contact@cleardays.org.uk from your council email address and we’ll verify and re-issue it
There is deliberately no password to forget, leak or reuse — this “private link” approach is the same model as a private Google Docs link.
3. Creating a meeting
On your management page, fill in the meeting type, date, time, place and items of business (one per line — add detail after a dash). Tick the box to include the standard items and ClearDays wraps your business in apologies, declarations of interest, minutes of the previous meeting, public participation and date of next meeting, all correctly numbered.
The result is a single Notice of Meeting and Summons to Attend with the statutory wording, your signature block, and — at the top of the page — the computed “publish by” date under the 3-clear-days rule (Sundays and bank holidays disregarded).
4. The noticeboard and the website duty, together
The document is published instantly on your council’s public page (satisfying the online-publication requirement, on a page built to the accessibility standard). For the physical noticeboard, open the document and click Print / save as PDF — it prints as a clean statutory notice with no website furniture.
5. After the meeting: minutes
Back on your management page, each meeting has an Add minutes section. Paste or type the minutes, save, and they’re published alongside the agenda on the public page — formatted as a printable document with your signature block.
6. The public page and calendar feed
Your council’s public page lists upcoming and past meetings with every notice, agenda and set of minutes. Share that address freely — put it on your council website, in the newsletter, anywhere. Councillors and residents can also subscribe to your calendar feed (linked from the public page): every meeting plus the statutory deadlines appears in their own Outlook, Google or Apple calendar automatically.
7. What it costs
Free while we’re in early access, and early councils keep founding terms for life. The published price afterwards is £19/month for parish councils and £39/month for town councils — no contract, cancel anytime. Whatever happens to a subscription, documents already published stay published: we will never take a council’s statutory record offline.
Questions, problems, ideas
Email contact@cleardays.org.uk — replies come from a human. For the statutory rules themselves, see the guides for clerks.