Client intake form: the fields that decide whether the work goes smoothly

A client intake form is the first structured thing that happens in a new relationship, and it quietly sets how the rest of it will go. Ask too little and someone spends the first week chasing basics by email; ask too much and half the fields come back empty or invented. The fields worth keeping are the ones that change what you do next.

What belongs on a client intake form

Group the fields by what they unlock, and be ready to justify each one.

• Identity: legal name of the client — the entity or person who will be billed — plus registration number where there is one.
• Contacts, with roles: who instructs, who approves, who pays. Three different people more often than not.
• What the client actually wants, in their words, before you translate it into your own.
• Deadlines and constraints, including anything already in motion.
• The other side or other parties, because that is what a conflicts check needs.
• Billing details: address, purchase order requirements, and the approval route for invoices.
• How they found you, which is the only field on the form that tells you where your work comes from.

Fields to drop

Anything you will not read, anything you can look up yourself, and anything you ask only because a previous form asked it. Every field you remove raises the completion rate of the ones that remain. Be particularly sceptical of free-text boxes labelled "additional information" — they collect either nothing or a wall of text nobody triages.

Collect personal data only where you can say what it is for. A client intake form is also a data collection notice in practice, so say plainly what you will do with what you are asking for.

Make the form structured, not a document

An intake questionnaire sent as an attachment comes back as an attachment: unsearchable, in three versions, with the crucial field left blank because nobody made it required. Sending it as a form solves the mechanical half — Ettex Forms makes fields required, validates what it can, and delivers the answers in one place with a timestamp, so an incomplete submission is visibly incomplete rather than discovered later.

What happens to the answers

1. Run the checks the answers enable — conflicts, identity, credit — before the work starts rather than in parallel with it.
2. Create the client record from the form fields, so the data is typed once.
3. Confirm scope back to the client in your own words, quoting what they wrote.
4. Issue the engagement letter with the agreed scope, fees and billing route.
5. File the submission itself, because it is evidence of what you were told at the outset.
6. Review the form quarterly: the fields nobody answers are telling you something.

Intake in a professional firm

Where intake feeds a regulated process, the form has to carry a little more: enough on the parties and related entities for a conflicts check, enough on ownership for client due diligence, and a clear statement of who the client is when the person in front of you is acting for someone else. A client onboarding sequence built on a thin intake form is where most of the later confusion comes from.