How to automate client onboarding process

Step one: write it down and count it

List your steps and the documents you request. Count them. That count is the length of the checklist, and multiplied by your monthly volume it is the real cost of your onboarding in hours. The free worksheet on this site does this arithmetic. Firms routinely discover here that a third of their list is delivery work that drifted forward, and deleting it is the largest single improvement available.

Step two: move your setup in parallel

Do everything that does not need the client while you are waiting for the things that do. No software is required and it removes the client's response time from every step behind it. This is consistently the biggest calendar saving in the whole sequence and it costs nothing but the decision.

Step three: one request, one reminder schedule

Send everything you need at once with a due date, then remind on a fixed schedule rather than when someone remembers. Even done by hand with a calendar entry this eliminates the most common cause of a stalled onboarding, which is that nobody was sure whose turn it was.

Steps four and five: the record, then the rules

Only now does software earn its place: a record where every client's outstanding items are visible in one list, and after that, rules that fire the reminders themselves. In that order. A rule engine on top of an invisible process automates a thing nobody can see, which is how firms end up unable to explain why a client was never contacted.