Filing agendas and minutes in Laserfiche automatically

Publishing an agenda is only half the job. The clerk's office also has to file it in the records system: the right folder, the right name, the right fields. Then the same again when the minutes are approved. Across a council and a dozen boards and commissions, that is a lot of downloading and uploading.

It is also exactly the kind of work that slips. A busy week means filing waits, and filing that waits gets forgotten.

What "filed correctly" means

Before automating anything, agree with your records manager on the rules. For most agencies they look like this:

• One folder per board. City Council, Planning Commission, Parks and Recreation Commission, and so on.
• A consistent name. For example, 2026-10-14 City Council Agenda.pdf.
• Metadata on each document. Board, meeting date and document type, mapped to your Laserfiche template fields.
• Both documents. The agenda when it's published, the minutes when they're ready.

Write these down. They become the settings of the flow.

The flow, step by step

• On a schedule, every hour. Reads CivicCA meetings that changed since the last good run.
• Filter: agenda published. Keeps meetings whose agenda is published and has a PDF link.
• Apply rules: find the board's folder. Copies the board name, looks it up in a value map of boards to Laserfiche folders, and formats the meeting date.
• Transfer file: the agenda. Downloads the agenda PDF and uploads it to the board's folder, with meeting metadata.
• If / else: minutes ready? If the minutes PDF exists, it is filed the same way.

The value map is the important part

The list of boards and folders is a value map, a small code table. Each municipality's workspace sets its own, so a city and a county using the same flow file into their own repositories.

City Council              -> Clerk/Agendas/City Council
Planning Commission       -> Clerk/Agendas/Planning Commission
Parks & Recreation        -> Clerk/Agendas/Parks

What happens when a new board appears that isn't in the map yet? The flow does not guess. The meeting fails the rule, goes out of the Invalid output, and is handed to a data-quality sub-flow that emails the records team. Someone adds the folder to the map, and the next run files it. Nothing is misfiled.

The documents never stop in the middle

Moving files between systems usually means a download folder somewhere. That folder fills up with agendas, packets and minutes, and nobody cleans it.

SentraBridge's Transfer file step downloads the document into memory and uploads it straight to Laserfiche as a form upload with a metadata part. The bytes are never written to disk or a database. Run history records which meeting was filed and the new document's ID, not the document.

Things to check before going live

• Which documents are public. File what your policy says to file. Closed-session material should be handled under its own rules.
• Folder IDs vs folder paths. Laserfiche's API files into a folder by ID. Your value map holds whatever your repository needs.
• Template fields. Match field names exactly, including spaces and case.
• Back catalog. Decide whether to file past meetings once, or only new ones from today.
• Who gets the alert. The data-quality email should go to someone who can fix the folder map.

Why hourly is usually enough

Agendas are typically published days before a meeting, and minutes after approval. An hourly check files each document well within any reasonable records timeline, and it only reads meetings that changed since the last good run. If a run fails, for example because the records system is down for maintenance, the next run picks up everything the failed one missed.

Setting it up

In SentraBridge, this is a ready-made template. Connect CivicCA and your Laserfiche repository, fill in the boards-to-folders value map, and preview: the data inspector shows which meetings would be filed, in which folder, under which name. Then turn it on.

The same approach works for permits. A companion template creates a Laserfiche folder for each new Accela building record, named with the record number and address. See records management for both.