It started at a kitchen table

Every board has that week. The one where the papers are due, the inbox fills with "final_v3_FINAL.pdf", and someone is up well past midnight wrestling a board pack into shape.

For years, in our house, that someone was James. He'd pulled together thousands of board papers across local and state government, corporate and not-for-profit boards — and the week before every meeting looked the same. Dinner cut short. The laptop reopened after the kids were down. The kitchen light still on at midnight, chasing the latest version of a document and reformatting spreadsheets that should never have needed reformatting.

Pip watched this happen, meeting after meeting, and finally said what plenty of board partners have thought: surely there's a better way than this. The tools James was using were either built for giant US enterprises and priced to match, or they were a tangle of email attachments, shared drives and good intentions. None of them gave a board its evenings back.

So we did. BoardTable is the tool we wished James had all those years: one calm, secure place for meetings, papers, minutes, decisions and compliance — so the busywork shrinks and the governing gets the attention it deserves. Pip brought two decades of change management and a habit of asking "but is this actually any good for the person using it?" to every screen. James brought the scar tissue of a thousand board packs.

We built it for the organisations we know best — not-for-profits, charities, associations and small-to-medium boards — the ones doing important work without an enterprise budget or an IT department. That's why the pricing is one flat fee with unlimited users, why not-for-profits get half price, and why we set every single organisation up personally rather than leaving you to a cold sign-up screen.

Because good governance shouldn't cost you your evenings. And great decisions deserve a better table to be made at.