Client onboarding is the controlled transition from a commercial agreement to real account access and delivery responsibility. The objective is not to collect every possible document. It is to remove the ambiguities most likely to cause missed deadlines, unsafe access, inconsistent brand decisions, unapproved content, and disputed scope.
Download the English client onboarding CSV or the Chinese client onboarding CSV. Store the completed record in the client’s approved system; do not place passwords, recovery codes, tokens, payment data, or other secrets in the template.
Confirm commercial scope and success
Record the signed service, start date, term, fee, billing owner, channels, accounts, locations, markets, languages, deliverables, volume, formats, response coverage, meetings, reporting, turnaround, revision rounds, and explicit exclusions.
Translate broad goals into decisions and evidence. “Grow awareness” is insufficient without audience, market, baseline, measurement window, source, and the action the team will take if results change.
Identify dependencies owned by the client: product facts, legal terms, offer availability, subject-matter experts, creative assets, customer permissions, crisis contacts, and final approvals.
Establish people, authority, and communication
Name executive sponsor, day-to-day client lead, final approver, specialists, legal or compliance contact, security contact, billing contact, community escalation owner, and agency owners. Record backups and absence coverage.
Define official communication channels, meeting cadence, response expectations, decision deadlines, escalation, and what constitutes approval. Separate discussion from formal decisions.
Document who can request work, change scope, approve content, authorize account access, pause publishing, respond during an incident, and accept additional cost.
Secure accounts and source materials
Inventory every social account, page, business manager, ad boundary, analytics property, website, link tool, asset library, creator agreement, location, and reporting source required. Use platform roles, OAuth, enterprise access, or an approved password manager; never ask clients to send passwords or authentication codes through the onboarding document.
Confirm account identity, ownership, recovery contacts, least-privilege roles, MFA expectations, former-user removal, credential rotation, and disconnect/offboarding procedure. Test access without publishing or changing settings unless explicitly authorized.
Collect current brand guidance, claims, terminology, visual assets, fonts, logos, disclosures, accessibility rules, rights evidence, prior performance, active campaigns, exclusions, and known sensitivities. Mark freshness and owner for every source.
Configure workflow and approval
Create the workspace, channel identities, content stages, calendar, naming rules, tags, templates, approval paths, reviewers, due dates, publishing permissions, community routing, reporting definitions, and incident contacts.
Run a dry cycle using representative content. Verify brief intake, creation, channel adaptation, review, revision, approval, scheduling, preflight, delivery evidence, community response, analytics capture, and recovery—without publishing externally unless the client has separately approved a controlled launch.
Material changes to claims, prices, dates, media, rights, disclosures, destinations, or account identity should invalidate approval according to the agreed rule.
Complete launch and the first review
Use a formal readiness decision. Open access gaps, missing rights, unapproved claims, unclear owners, broken analytics, or incomplete security requirements should have named owners and due dates; material gaps may block launch.
Confirm the first content window, approvers, publish owner, monitoring coverage, support path, analytics baseline, report date, and fallback. After the first delivery cycle, review actual effort, client response time, version changes, delivery reliability, community load, data quality, and scope assumptions.
Client onboarding checklist
- Contract scope, exclusions, fees, dates, deliverables, and dependencies recorded
- Client and agency owners, backups, authority, and escalation defined
- Accounts and data sources use secure least-privilege access
- Brand, claims, rights, disclosure, accessibility, and expiry rules collected
- Workflow, approval, publishing, community, reporting, and incidents configured
- Representative dry run completed with evidence and no unsafe external action
- Launch blockers, owners, due dates, first calendar, and fallback documented
- First-cycle review checks effort, margin, quality, reliability, and scope
Use one stable client ID across the onboarding record, content calendar, approvals, reports, and billing so the operating evidence remains connected.
