How to Use the Meeting Miser Tool to Report Meeting Costs

Meeting Miser is a free internet-based tool that will help you report the approximate cost of your meetings based on the location of the meeting, the job category of the meeting attendees, and the start and end time entered by you. If a report of the cost and time data from Meeting Miser is desired, be sure the last step in “How to Use the Meeting Miser Tool to Track Meeting Costs” article included clicking the Save button.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. 
   Meeting Miser Menu

   After logging in and starting the Meeting Miser tool, click on the Menu button at the bottom of the screen to bring up the options.

2. If you have saved your meeting, but have not left the screen with the meeting data, you may email the meeting data from Meeting Miser for the meeting to the logged-in user by selecting the option Email Data. This will open your email tool and place body text into the email that includes date, length of meeting, cost of meeting, and who was there by job category. If sending summary data for a large meeting attendance to email, verify all necessary data was in email including who you wish to copy it to before having the email tool send. . If data is missing, you may need to go back to the meeting and select the View Meeting History option instead.

3. If you select the View Meeting History option, all saved meeting data will be displayed. From history, the user can choose to cut/paste the summary data from the screen into their records or export the detail data to an Excel file on their computer.
   
   OPTION A: Once the meeting list is displayed you may View participants, Start a meeting like this one which has the same participants, or Delete the meeting. You can also select the desired meeting data to Copy/Paste by Right-clicking the selection to choose Copy from Windows menu. Then open the document where you wish to copy it to and then Right-click to select Paste from Windows menu.
   
   OPTION B: Or you may choose to Export All Meetings To Excel from the bottom of screen. Selecting this will bring up a File Download window indicating where data will be sent. Choose Open to save the data in suggested file (MeetingHistory.csv) and open the file, choose Save to save the data in a file name and location of your choosing without opening it, or choose Cancel if you do not wish to save.

4. Be sure to Return to Menu to continue using Meeting Miser or Logout when done with the Meeting Miser session.

Tips & Warnings

• When considering reporting the cost of your meetings by utilizing the internet-based Meeting Miser tool, please remembers costs and time are not the only way to measure a meeting. The best value measurement for your meetings is always to review the written meeting records against the proposed agenda. This way you can see if valuable activities were accomplished and any future actions that were assigned to complete projects.

Resources

• Payscale.com-Calculators/Tools
• Meeting Tips
• Use the Meeting Miser Tool to Track Meeting Costs

[kkemp]

on 1/26/2009 Great article!