The client has said yes. In the week that follows you do all the visible things: you open the project, you ask for the logo, you collect the copy, you book the first meeting. It is the moment with the most energy and the least friction, the moment when the client answers emails within the hour.
It is also the only moment when you can ask anything without it seeming odd. Six months later, when you need to know who registered the domain and under which account, the same question lands as an annoyance in the middle of other work, and the answer takes three days.
Almost every headache an agency carries for years starts with something that was not asked in that first week. It is worth having a list, and using the same one every time.
Onboarding is not collecting the material
Almost every onboarding process you come across talks about briefs, content and expectations. Those things help you do the job. But the job ends, and what remains is a recurring relationship: services that renew, invoices that come back every year, things that have to stay switched on.
The part of onboarding that deals with the recurring side is different, and it is nearly always skipped, because at signing it does not feel urgent: the site does not exist yet, nothing is expiring, there is nothing to renew. The problem is that the only moment when it is not urgent is also the only moment when it is easy.
The test for whether a question belongs now is simple: will I need this information at a time when the client is not available? If the answer is yes, ask it before you switch anything on.
Who owns what?
This is the most important part and the most neglected. Not “who has the passwords”, but who the registrant is: of the domain, the hosting space, the mailboxes, the registrar account, any advertising or analytics profile. All of these can sit with different parties, and often they do, for historical reasons nobody remembers any more.
Ask the question even when the client turns up with nothing, because “nothing” is almost never true: there is a domain a cousin bought three years ago, a mailbox on a provider nobody can name, an old hosting account still running. Every existing service goes on the list with its provider and the name of the account it lives on.
One honest clarification about credentials: passwords belong in a password manager, not in your deadline tracker and not in a shared sheet. What the operational list needs is something else — which provider, which account, who the account holder is — the information you need in order to renew, migrate or hand back a service.
The details you need in order to get paid
It sounds obvious and it is not. Exact registered company name, VAT number, the routing details electronic invoicing requires (in Italy, the recipient code or certified email address), registered address: at signing the client sends all of it in ten minutes, and in December, when you have to issue the renewal, it turns into a treasure hunt with an accountant in the middle.
It is also worth asking something almost nobody asks: who the invoice should go to. Even in small companies, the person who decided to work with you and the person who pays are often two people, and they talk less than you think. Having the right address from the start removes a good share of late payments, which are often not late at all — the email simply went to the wrong person.
Same category: how they prefer to pay, and on what terms. You do not need a contract, you need to know, because that is what tells you whether it makes sense to front the renewals for that client or ask for payment first.
The deadlines that existed before you
Every client who arrives brings running renewals you know nothing about and that, in many cases, they do not know much about either. A mailbox on a forgotten provider, an antispam filter someone once enabled, a plugin licence bought directly on their own card, a backup on a cloud service.
The fact that you do not manage them does not protect you: when they lapse, the site stops working and the phone call still comes to you. So the right onboarding question is not “what do you want us to manage”, but “what do you have running today, even if you pay for it yourself”. Items the client bought on their own go on the list anyway, marked as such. We wrote about this in the deadlines an agency forgets.
If the client is coming from another agency, do this part with even more care, because it is likely nobody ever handed them a list. In practice you rebuild it yourself, by looking at the DNS records, the email headers and the invoices from the last twelve months.
What do you put in writing?
Three points, and you do not need a long document. What the recurring fee covers and what it does not: if maintenance covers updates but not rebuilding a page, you are both better off knowing now. Who pays the renewals and when: if you front them, saying so explicitly avoids half the future arguments. What happens if a renewal is not paid: which services stay on, for how long, and what gets switched off.
The last point is the one nobody writes down, and it is the one you need at the worst possible moment. It is not a threat, it is a rule known in advance: when the situation arrives, you are not improvising and you are not treating anyone unfairly.
When can onboarding be lighter?
Worth saying, because a twenty-point checklist sent to the wrong person does more harm than good. If the job is a piece of consultancy that ends in three weeks, with nothing to renew afterwards, the whole recurring section is beside the point: billing details and a contact are enough.
The same goes for a client who arrives with a setup that is already theirs and well kept — domain registered correctly, hosting on a company account, everything documented. In that case the question comes down to one: what do we manage and what stays with you. Two lines in writing are worth more than a form.
The full checklist is for the normal case, which is the third one: a small client, a muddled history behind them, services scattered across different providers and nobody able to say who registered what. That is where fifteen minutes spent now save a great deal later.
What are the most common onboarding mistakes?
- Putting off the boring questions until after delivery. After delivery the client has already stopped replying within the hour.
- Registering the domain in your own name without saying so. It works for years and becomes a serious problem at exactly the point the relationship ends.
- Not asking what the client already has running, and finding out on the day it lapses.
- Keeping billing details only inside the accounting software, where whoever handles renewals cannot see them.
- Running a different onboarding every time, from memory. The things you forget are not random: they are always the same ones.
Where do you start with a new client?
- Write the list once and use it unchanged for everyone: company details and billing details, the technical contact and the contact who pays, services already running with provider and account holder, what the recurring fee covers.
- Send it as a single request, not in instalments. Three separate emails have three chances of going unanswered.
- Open the client record before you switch on any service, even if it is empty. The first renewal needs somewhere to land.
- Enter the known deadlines straight away, including the ones the client pays for: date, type, provider, amount.
- Decide where this list lives. A spreadsheet holds up while you have few clients, and we covered the point where it stops holding up in the comparison with a real deadline tracker; the operational setup is in how to organise an agency’s client deadline tracker.
How do we onboard clients ourselves?
At EnneStudio, onboarding was a shared folder and a good memory for years. It worked with ten clients; it stopped working once there were enough of them that we could not hold them all in our heads, and the first symptom was not a big mistake, it was spending half an hour looking for which account a domain was on.
Dotify is the deadline tracker we built afterwards, and it is ours. The part we needed for onboarding is plain, which is why it works: a client record with company and billing details, and underneath it their deadlines, each with the provider, the type, the amount and the cost. When a client comes in, you fill it in once, and from then on the first renewal already has somewhere to sit.
You can see how client records are built in the documentation on client management. The free plan holds five clients with three deadlines each: enough to onboard one real client and see whether the approach suits you.
