Free templates
Four templates that stop work from stalling
The documents an agency needs in the first week of a client relationship and at the end of every month. Vendor-neutral, written to be edited, and released under CC0 — use them with any client portal, or with none, and republish them if you like.
Client onboarding checklist
Everything that has to be true before work starts, in the order it has to be true. Most onboarding goes wrong in the gap between "they signed" and "we have what we need" — this list closes it.
Project kickoff questionnaire
Fifteen questions that between them prevent most revision rounds. Send it with the kickoff invitation, not after the call — a client who has answered question 12 in writing is a different client on the call.
Agency SOP: client communication
One page your account managers can actually follow, so every client gets the same experience whoever is handling them. Adjust the response times to your own SLA before you publish it — the numbers here are a starting point, not a standard.
Monthly client report outline
Eight sections, in the order a client reads them. The summary goes first because for many clients it is the only part they read — which is also why sections 5 and 7 have to be in it.
How to use them
These are not meant to be filed. Each one is written to be pasted into whatever your team already works in — a portal checklist, a project template, an intake form, a wiki page — and then cut down to the lines your service actually needs. A checklist nobody ticks stops being read within a month.
If you run ClientOS, three of the four map onto something it already has: the onboarding checklist onto a per-service checklist that attaches itself to new orders, the kickoff questionnaire onto the requirements form a client answers right after paying, and the monthly report onto the client report it writes every month. The communication SOP stays a document wherever you work, because it is about people rather than software.
Licence
Released under CC0 1.0 — to the extent possible under law, the contributors have waived all copyright in them. Use them commercially, change them, put your own logo on them, sell the service you deliver with them. No attribution required, though a link back is always welcome.
Disclosure: these are published by the ClientOS team. They are deliberately tool-agnostic and there is no sign-up wall — if you never look at ClientOS, the templates still work.
Where these templates live inside a portal
In ClientOS, the onboarding checklist becomes a per-service checklist on every new order and the kickoff questionnaire becomes the brief a client fills in right after paying. The instant demo shows both with sample data — read-only, 3 days, no card.