Repeatable Customer Onboarding Checklists (Without the Tool Chaos)

Whether you’re a design agency, a SaaS company, a bookkeeping firm, or a solo consultant, the pattern is the same:

A new client says “yes”
Everyone’s excited
Then… someone has to figure out what happens next

If your team doesn’t have a clear, repeatable customer onboarding checklist, you get:

A different experience for every client
Lost details (“Did anyone send them the intake form?”)
Work stuck on their side or your side with no visibility
A lot of “just checking in on this…” emails

The good news: you don’t need a heavy project management system or a full-blown “client portal” to fix this. You just need repeatable onboarding steps and a simple way to share them.

In this post we’ll cover:

What a customer onboarding checklist actually is (for any client-facing business)
Why repeatability matters more than perfection
The common challenges teams hit (including “do we really have to add them to our org?”)
How to turn your onboarding into a lightweight, shareable experience

What is a customer onboarding checklist?

A customer onboarding checklist is a set of steps that every new client or customer goes through so they can:

Understand how you work
Give you what you need
Reach the first meaningful outcome as quickly as possible

It usually includes a mix of:

Admin tasks
- Contracts, invoices, setting up billing
Discovery / intake
- Questionnaires, kickoff calls, access to existing assets or systems
Setup / implementation
- Creating accounts, migrating content, connecting tools
First win
- The first deliverable, first campaign, first report, first version of the thing they’ve bought

You can think of it as “the minimum steps that must happen for this relationship to actually start working.”

Why you need repeatable steps (even if every client is “different”)

It’s easy to say:

“Our clients are unique; we can’t standardise this.”

But even highly bespoke work has repeatable bones.

For example:

Design agencies always:
- Sign an agreement
- Collect brand assets
- Agree on timelines and feedback channels
SaaS companies always:
- Add the primary contact
- Configure basic settings
- Do some flavour of “first training” or “first login”
Consultants always:
- Clarify scope
- Gather existing documents
- Book initial working sessions

The details change, but the shape is the same.

Making those steps explicit in a customer onboarding checklist gives you:

Consistency
Every client gets a minimum standard of experience, regardless of which team member is running things.
Speed
You don’t waste time reinventing “what do we need from them?” every project.
Fewer dropped balls
When tasks are visible and owned, they’re more likely to get done.
Better handovers
If someone goes on holiday or leaves, another team member can see exactly where each client is.

The hidden challenges of client onboarding (that checklists alone don’t fix)

You can write the best customer onboarding checklist in the world… and still get stuck on the logistics of using it.

Here are a few recurring issues teams run into.

1. Your checklist is trapped in your internal tools

Maybe your onboarding steps live in:

Your project management tool
A Notion page
A spreadsheet
Someone’s head 🙃

Internally, that might be fine. But your clients:

Don’t see what’s expected of them
Don’t know what’s blocking progress
Have no sense of progress (“Are we almost done?”)

So your team ends up copying tasks into emails and chat threads manually.

2. Adding clients to your org creates friction

A common “solution” is:

“We’ll just add the client to our project management tool / workspace and assign them tasks there.”

That sounds great until you hit reality:

You have to invite them to your org
They have to create yet another account
Permissions and visibility get messy
You might be paying for extra seats for one-off collaboration
Some clients are simply not willing (or allowed) to join external tools

For smaller projects or early engagements, this is overkill. Clients want to:

See what they need to do
Do it
Move on

…without feeling like they’ve been forced into a whole new system.

3. Multiple clients, slightly different variants

If you work with more than a handful of clients:

You probably have a “core” checklist
But each client type or package needs slightly different steps

Without a good way to reuse and tweak your customer onboarding checklist, you end up with:

Many copies of “Onboarding – Client X”
No clear template to improve over time
Inconsistent experiences between clients

4. No shared sense of progress

Internally, you might know how many tasks are done.

But if your client doesn’t:

They can’t see that they are holding things up
They don’t understand why you’re waiting
They might feel frustrated (“We signed weeks ago and nothing has happened!”)

A good onboarding experience makes progress obvious to everyone involved.

Principles of a good, reusable onboarding checklist

Whatever tools you use, your customer onboarding checklist should aim for:

1. Clear ownership

Each task should answer:

Who owns this? (you vs client)
By when?
What does “done” look like?

“Client: Upload brand assets (logo, fonts, colours) before kickoff call.”

“Us: Create project space and invite stakeholders.”

2. Minimal, not maximal

Start with the fewest steps required to get the client to a meaningful milestone:

The first successful campaign
The first deliverable draft
The first report or insight

Everything else is post-onboarding.

If your checklist is too big, nobody finishes it. And nobody feels onboarded.

3. Reusable templates

Instead of rewriting steps each time:

Have a template per client type/package
Duplicate and lightly edit per client

This makes it easier to improve your process over time:

“Add this step for all new retainer clients.”
“We always forget to ask for X; let’s add it to the template.”

4. Shared, not hidden

The checklist should:

Be visible to both your team and the client
Make it obvious what’s next and what’s blocked
Be easy for the client to access (no hunting through old emails)

A simple, cross-industry customer onboarding checklist

Here’s a generic structure you can adapt for almost any client-facing business.

Phase 1 – Welcome & admin

[ ] Send welcome email with overview and expectations
[ ] Share key contact details and communication channels
[ ] Finalise contract / agreement
[ ] Set up billing and payment method

Phase 2 – Discovery & access

[ ] Send intake questionnaire (goals, context, constraints)
[ ] Schedule kickoff call
[ ] Collect relevant existing assets (docs, files, accounts)
[ ] Request necessary access or permissions

Phase 3 – Plan & setup

[ ] Define scope and first milestone
[ ] Agree on timeline and working cadence
[ ] Create project space (internal)
[ ] Set up any tools or systems needed to deliver

Phase 4 – First delivery / first win

[ ] Deliver first version / pilot / campaign
[ ] Collect feedback
[ ] Make adjustments based on feedback
[ ] Confirm that the client understands what will happen next

Phase 5 – Ongoing collaboration

[ ] Agree on recurring check-ins or reports
[ ] Share how to request changes or raise issues
[ ] Capture learnings to improve the checklist for next time

For your specific context, you’d replace generic items like “assets” or “tools” with the things your work requires.

How TasksLink helps you share onboarding steps without adding clients to your org

You might already have a customer onboarding checklist in your internal docs.

The real challenge is making it:

Reusable across clients
Shareable without dragging people into your internal tools
Trackable so you know what’s done and what’s blocked

That’s where TasksLink comes in.

Instead of inviting clients into your project management system or shared workspace, TasksLink lets you:

Create a reusable onboarding template
- Define your phases and tasks once
- Mark which ones are for you and which are for the client
Generate a unique checklist link for each client
- No login required for recipients
- No “join our org” friction
- Just a clean list of tasks they can see and work through
Track progress without chasing email threads
- See which tasks your client has completed
- Spot blockers early (“waiting on logo files,” “waiting on access”)
- Keep everything in one place instead of scattered across docs and messages

You still use whatever tools you love internally. TasksLink just handles the client-facing side of your customer onboarding checklist:

“Onboarding steps, packaged as a link, handed off with one click.”

If you’d like to turn your existing onboarding steps into something your clients can follow easily—without asking them to join yet another platform—you can try it at taskslink.com.

Repeatable Customer Onboarding Checklists: Why They Matter for Every Client-Facing Business