When you need to roll out a year (or two, or three) of regular meetings — every monthly City Council, every quarterly Planning Commission, every weekly committee meeting — the Meetings Scheduler is the right tool. Instead of creating each meeting individually through the New Meeting dialog, you pick a body, describe its cadence, set a duration, and the Scheduler generates the full set of suggested dates for you to review and confirm.

This article walks through the Scheduler from end to end: picking a body, setting the cadence (including the "custom frequency" escape hatch for irregular patterns), reviewing the upcoming-meetings list to avoid duplicates, and working through the Suggested Meeting Events that come back from the generator.

In the navigation, open Admin → Meetings Scheduler. The page header reads Meetings Scheduler with the subtitle "Schedule meetings for your meeting bodies."

[IMAGE: The Meetings Scheduler page showing Body Selection at the top]

The Scheduler is also reachable from a meeting body's edit page — there's a "Schedule Meetings" link on each meeting body card that opens the Scheduler with that body pre-selected via a querystring (?meetingBodyId=...). Same flow either way.

The page is built as four sequential blocks that appear one after the other as you complete each step. You don't have to click "next" — they just unfold as you go.

The first card asks "Select the Meeting Body" with a single search-select dropdown.

[IMAGE: The Body Selection card with the dropdown open showing meeting bodies and joint meeting bodies]

The dropdown searches across:

Pick one. As soon as you do, the cadence card and the upcoming-meetings list both appear below.

If you've been deep-linked from a specific body's page, the dropdown comes pre-selected.

Now the meat of the work. The Meeting Schedule card has fields covering frequency, day, time, location, first date, duration, and template. Most of these auto-populate from the meeting body's saved defaults (configured on the body's edit page), so for most bodies you'll be confirming what's already there rather than entering from scratch.

[IMAGE: The Meeting Schedule cadence form with Frequency, Day, Time, Location, First Meeting Date, Schedule Duration, and Agenda Template]

Three short fields side by side:

The defaults come from the meeting body's saved cadence settings. If you set those once on the body, the Scheduler will use them every time — change here only if you're scheduling an unusual cycle.

For irregularities that don't fit the structured Frequency + Day + Time fields, check the "Enter custom frequency" box. The three fields collapse into a single Custom Frequency Description text box where you describe the pattern in your own words.

[IMAGE: The Custom Frequency Description field replacing Frequency/Day/Time after checkbox is checked]

Examples:

The custom-frequency mode is essentially a free-text escape hatch — Govinity won't auto-parse your description into a date pattern. You'll still see Suggested Meeting Events generated based on what you wrote (the backend interprets common patterns reasonably well), but for highly unusual schedules you may need to manually adjust the suggestions before accepting them.

Same Location block as the New Meeting dialog — pick a saved location or type a free-text address. The default comes from the meeting body's saved location.

The starting date for the schedule. Defaults to today. Use the calendar picker (with month/year dropdowns for quick year jumping). Govinity caps the date picker at one year out — if you need to schedule further into the future for a specific first date, contact Govinity support.

How far into the future to project the schedule. Options:

Pick a horizon that matches how you actually plan. Most governments find 12 months is enough — going out 2 or 3 years generates meetings that will probably be moved or canceled before they happen.

The default agenda template for each generated meeting. Auto-fills with the body's default if one is set; you can override or pick None (the resulting meetings will have no agenda assigned at creation time, which you can fix later).

Click the Generate Schedule button (calendar-plus icon). The Scheduler runs the cadence against your duration and pops up the Suggested Meeting Events list below.

Between the cadence card and the Suggested Meeting Events, an accordion shows the existing upcoming meetings for the selected body. This is a sanity check — if you've already scheduled the next six months and you're about to generate another six months that overlap, you'll want to see what's there first.

[IMAGE: The Upcoming Meetings accordion expanded showing existing meeting cards]

Each upcoming meeting renders as a card with date, title, and edit/delete affordances. Click the pencil to reopen the full New Meeting dialog and edit; click the trash to delete. The list scrolls with paging if there are many.

Use this section to:

After Generate Schedule runs successfully, a new section appears below titled Suggested Meeting Events with a list of cards — one card per proposed meeting date.

[IMAGE: The Suggested Meeting Events list with cards for each proposed date, showing per-card Edit/Skip/Add buttons and the Add All button at the top]

Each card shows:

Three buttons on every card:

At the top of the Suggested Meeting Events list, an Add All button creates every remaining card at once. This is the usual workflow once you've reviewed the list and adjusted the few cards that needed it — one click and the whole schedule lands.

Once the list is empty (every card has been Added or Skipped), a green success card appears: "Schedule Generation Complete!"

[IMAGE: The Schedule Generation Complete card with a green checkmark]

From there, the new meetings appear immediately in the Live & Upcoming Meetings list and on the Calendar. You can navigate to any of them to start building agendas.

The Scheduler is most useful as part of an annual planning cycle. A pattern that works for most clerks' offices:

Doing the planning at the start of each cycle (rather than month-by-month) means citizens see a complete calendar of meetings on the public portal earlier, which is generally a good thing.

A few patterns that come up:

Holidays. Govinity flags federal holidays automatically — but not state holidays, religious observances, or your government's specific blackout dates. Scan the list and Edit or Skip any cards that should move.

Weekends. Most bodies don't meet on weekends — the flag is your hint, but watch for cadences like "Every Saturday at 10:00 AM" that intentionally do. If the weekend flag appears on a meeting that should be on a Saturday, just Add it — the flag is a notice, not a block.

Duplicate meetings. The Scheduler doesn't actively prevent duplicates — if you generate the same range twice, you'll get two cards for each date. The Upcoming Meetings section above is your hedge against this. Check it before generating.

Joint meetings. If you select a joint meeting body, the Scheduler uses that joint body's cadence and assigns the resulting meetings to the joint body (not to its component bodies individually). Joint meetings still show on each component body's calendar.

Agenda templates change. If you change the body's default agenda template after generating a schedule, the already-generated meetings keep their original template. Edit individual meetings to update if needed.

Custom frequency reasonableness. The backend interprets custom-frequency descriptions in plain English, but it's not infallible. Highly unusual patterns (e.g., "First Monday of each month except in months that contain the 13th, in which case the second Monday") may produce a Suggested Meeting Events list that doesn't quite match your intent. Review carefully, edit individual cards as needed.

A quick reference:

Both paths create meetings that look identical once they're in. Pick whichever matches your task.

Can I undo "Add All" if I accidentally created a lot of meetings? Not in bulk. Each meeting becomes a real record once created — to remove them, you'd delete them individually from the Live & Upcoming Meetings list. Or you can leave them and edit them as needed; bulk deletion isn't currently supported.

Can I generate meetings for a date in the past? The First Meeting Date picker doesn't easily allow past dates — it defaults to today. If you genuinely need to backfill historical meetings, use the New Meeting dialog for each one individually.

What if my body has no saved cadence — Frequency, Day, Time, Location all blank? Fill them in on the Scheduler page each time, or save them on the meeting body's edit page (Admin → Meeting Bodies → [body]) so they auto-populate from now on.

Does the Scheduler check for room conflicts with other bodies? Not in the Suggested Meeting Events step. Once you Add a meeting, the overlapping-meetings detection (same as the New Meeting dialog) kicks in for that specific record. For pre-generation room conflict checking, the Calendar view is your best tool — generate the schedule, then look at the calendar to spot collisions.

If the Scheduler isn't generating dates that match your intent, double-check the Frequency + Day + Time combination — the structured fields are interpreted more strictly than the custom-frequency text. If a body isn't appearing in the dropdown, check that it's active under Admin → Meeting Bodies. For anything else, reach out to Govinity support.