Customer Stories
The Bank of Charlotte County
A Virginia community bank replaced six 100+ page board books per meeting with a simpler digital process that saves administrative time and gives directors earlier access to meeting materials.
Customer Stories
A Virginia community bank replaced six 100+ page board books per meeting with a simpler digital process that saves administrative time and gives directors earlier access to meeting materials.
Industry: Banks
Headquarters: Phenix, Virginia
Board Management Goals
Results
OnBoard Capabilities Utilised
Dana Clark
Executive Secretary
Bank of Charlotte County
Founded in 1912, The Bank of Charlotte County is an independent community bank headquartered in Phenix, Virginia. The bank serves communities across Southside Virginia.
Dana Clark has been with the bank for 26 years, serving in roles across retail banking, compliance, and human resources. Since 2021, she has served as the board’s primary secretary. Her responsibilities include preparing reports, sending meeting reminders, building the board packet, supporting directors, and producing final meeting minutes.
For years, that work depended on a familiar but time-consuming paper process.
Before OnBoard, Dana prepared six three-ring binders for each monthly board meeting. Each binder typically contained more than 100 pages.
“Before we went to OnBoard, I was compiling six three-ring binders that usually contained more than 100 pages each,” Dana says. “So printing it, copying it, hole-punching it to put it into the binder.”
After the meeting, the bank retained one copy and shredded the other five. In addition to the administrative time involved, the process required a recurring investment in paper and ink.
Last-minute changes created even more work. Adding or replacing a document meant revisiting page numbers, the table of contents, and every individual binder to ensure each director had the correct version.
The process worked in the sense that directors received their materials and meetings continued as planned. Making it work, however, required a significant amount of manual effort from one person.
“For a one-person team, the move was a great decision,” Dana says. “Not having to stand at the copier making six copies, hole-punching them, and putting all that into binders, just to shred it later. Time and cost savings.”
The immediate catalyst for change was the COVID-19. When directors could no longer rely on gathering around a table with physical binders, the bank needed a way to make board materials available electronically.
Moving to a digital process also created an opportunity to give directors more time with the information they would discuss at the meeting.
Today, the bank distributes its board packet on Thursday ahead of its Monday meeting. Directors have four days to review the materials and an opportunity to raise questions before the meeting.
“They have their board packet four days ahead,” Dana says. “That gives them an opportunity to review the documents, ask any leading questions ahead of meeting time.”
For The Bank of Charlotte County, the hardest part of moving online was not implementing OnBoard. It was helping people become comfortable with a different way of working.
At the time, several directors had limited experience with digital board tools. The bank provided iPads, while Dana helped with setup, passwords, multifactor authentication, email notifications, and navigation.
Dana also had to adjust personally after spending years managing physical books.
“Leaving binders behind was hard for me to do because it was like my baby,” she says. “After a couple of months with OnBoard, I was fine leaving those binders in the cabinet.”
Dana served as the bank’s primary point of contact with the OnBoard implementation team. She describes the setup and training process as straightforward and well supported.
“The whole process was very smooth,” she says. “My implementation team was on target. Training was exceptional.”
As directors became familiar with the platform, the technical questions decreased. Dana said newer directors have been comfortable navigating documents, moving between agenda sections, and making annotations.
Dana continues to own the meeting preparation process, but the work looks different today.
Documents can be added as they arrive rather than printed and assembled in a fixed sequence. Dana can drag and drop files into the appropriate agenda sections and rearrange them without rebuilding the entire packet.
“The drag-and-drop feature from my file on my computer, you just drag and drop the document from there into the platform,” she says. “You can rearrange the order of the documents.”
Agenda Import reduces another repetitive part of the process. Dana uploads it to OnBoard, which creates the corresponding agenda items.
“It reads the agenda that I drop in as a Word document,” Dana says. “Then I just drop my documents into each one of those bulleted items. It’s super simple.”
The result is not simply the replacement of a paper binder with an electronic version. It is a more flexible preparation process that Dana can manage according to her own schedule.
“I can work through the process according to my own schedule,” Dana says. “I can input documents randomly without worry of them being placed out of order.”
And, most importantly for a lean board support team, the process requires substantially less time.
“It takes me way less time to generate the book itself,” Dana says.
OnBoard also gives the bank a centralized place to retain and retrieve prior meeting materials.
If Dana needs to find an older report, document, or board packet, she can return to the relevant meeting and navigate through its materials.
“It’s very easy just to log back into OnBoard and navigate through the document packet to see what item I’m looking for,” Dana says. “The OnBoard system maintains month after month after month of the documents in there.”
The bank continues to keep certain paper minute records separately, but its digital meeting packets provide an accessible history of the materials presented to the board.
Dana’s experience reflects a common challenge for community banks: a substantial amount of board administration can fall to a very small team.
Moving away from paper did not change Dana’s responsibility for preparing materials, assisting directors, and documenting meetings. It gave her a more efficient way to manage those responsibilities.
Her advice to other community banks is to consider the full administrative effort required to maintain the current process.
“Moving away from paper and PDFs toward true digital data is a major milestone,” Dana says. “It will increase operational efficiency and data usability.”
And for teams where board preparation falls primarily to one person, her advice is even more direct:
“If your board support team is small and spending hours of a day or days compiling a paper binder, give this significant thought.”
For The Bank of Charlotte County, modernization did not mean disrupting a process that worked. It meant reducing the manual work required to keep it working.
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