New client form

The fields that earn their place

Anything you cannot start without, anything you are required to hold, and anything whose absence would mean asking later at a worse moment. That is usually identity and entity details, billing and contact routing, and the two or three answers specific to the work. Everything else is convenience, and convenience should be asked for when it is needed rather than at the front door.

Pricing the rest instead of arguing about it

Count the fields, count the required ones, put your own seconds per field in, and the optional half has a price in the client's minutes. The free intake worksheet on this site does exactly that and adds the minutes each requested document costs them to find. Field-cutting conversations that go nowhere in the abstract usually resolve in one meeting once the number is on the page.

Where the form should sit

Wherever the client already is, which for most firms means a link they can open without an account. A form behind a login is a second thing to onboard them into before they have received anything, and it is a common reason first submissions arrive late or half finished.

What happens to the answers

They should land somewhere structured, against the client record, so nobody retypes them into a second system. The retyping is invisible in a demo and expensive in practice: it is where transcription errors enter, and it is the reason a form that saves the client ten minutes can cost your firm twenty.