The first month with a new client
The contract is signed and the start date is a Monday. The onboarding engineer has a checklist in a Word document from the last onboarding. They send the client a questionnaire asking for a list of devices, users, software, internet provider, domain registrar, printers and anything else they can think of. The office manager fills in what they know.
Then reality starts. The RMM agent goes onto twenty PCs, but the questionnaire said twenty-six. A server in a cupboard turns out to be running an old accounts package. The domain is registered to a former director's personal email. Two laptops belong to people who work from home and never come in. By week four, the service desk is taking tickets for devices the onboarding team still has not found.
Why onboarding drags on
The new client does not know their own estate, and the questionnaire relies on them knowing it. Discovery is then done one surprise at a time, with no single record of what has been found and what remains.
- Device lists from the client are incomplete or out of date.
- Admin access to cloud services and registrars sits with people outside the business.
- Software and licences are discovered as users raise tickets.
- The onboarding checklist is a document, so progress lives in one engineer's head.
- There is no agreed baseline of what you took over and in what state.
What a slow onboarding costs
| Onboarding gap | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Devices not found | Unmanaged, unpatched machines on the client's network |
| Admin access missing | Changes blocked until someone tracks down credentials |
| No documented baseline | Arguments later about problems that predate you |
| Onboarding time unbilled | The first months of the contract run at a loss |
| Service desk confused | Tickets arrive for systems nobody has documented |
The first months set the client's view of you. A tidy, visible onboarding helps as much as good support later.
The onboarding workflow we build
- An onboarding template per contract type in your PSA or a project tool, with tasks, owners and dependencies.
- Discovery data pulled from your RMM (devices, operating systems, software), Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace (users, licences, mailboxes) and network scans where you run them.
- A comparison between discovered items and the client's questionnaire, listing anything found but not declared and anything declared but not found.
- An access checklist for each critical service (domain registrar, DNS, firewall, cloud tenant, line-of-business vendors) with status and who holds the keys.
- Automatic creation of documentation records in IT Glue, Hudu or your documentation tool from the discovery data.
- A baseline report for the client to sign off: what you found, what state it is in, what you recommend, and what is outside your contract.
Onboarding, visible to everyone
On day one, the engineer starts the onboarding template. Discovery runs, and by the end of the first day there is a list of twenty-six devices from the tenant's sign-ins against twenty agents deployed, so the six gaps are known and chased. The access checklist shows the domain registrar as blocked, owner unknown, and the account manager raises it with the client in the first week rather than the fourth.
The service desk sees documentation appear as onboarding progresses. When the baseline is signed off, it becomes the reference for any later disagreement about what was already broken.
The template improves with each onboarding, too. If three clients in a row turn out to have an unmanaged server in a cupboard or a registrar held by a former director, those checks move to the first day of the template. Onboarding time is logged against the onboarding project rather than the managed contract, so you can see what each onboarding really took and whether your onboarding fee, if you charge one, reflects it.
Is your onboarding like this?
- New clients fill in a questionnaire that turns out to be incomplete.
- Devices are still being found weeks after go-live.
- Admin credentials for key services arrive late or never.
- Onboarding progress lives in one engineer's notes.
- You have no signed baseline of the estate you took on.