A client intake process is only real if it survives a busy week: five steps, each with an owner and a normal turnaround, visible enough that anyone can say where a given enquiry stands. The steps are capture, questions out, review and chase, decision, paperwork and handoff. Written down they look obvious; run under pressure they are anything but, because intake is the work most easily displaced by everything already on the books. The version below is deliberately small, sized for a practice where intake is one desk's job among many rather than a department.
Steps one and two: capture, then questions out
Capture means every enquiry becomes a structured record the day it arrives: who, what they need in a sentence, how they found you, urgency. From capture, the questions go out the same day, answerable at home, with the required fields enforced. Turnarounds: capture same day, questions out same day. Owner: whoever fronts the practice. These two steps cost minutes and prevent the classic loss, the enquiry that existed only in someone's head.
Step three: review what returns, chase what does not
Each returned questionnaire is checked within a day or two: complete, credible, inside what the practice does. Whatever is missing gets one chase naming exactly what is needed. Unanswered questionnaires get one reminder after a set number of days, then a polite close. The discipline here is the chase being a daily pass over a visible list rather than a memory exercise, because incomplete intakes discovered at the deadline are the process's most expensive failure.
Steps four and five: decide on the record, then the paperwork
The decision, take this client or not, on what terms, belongs to the practice's principal and gets recorded with a date whichever way it goes. Acceptance triggers the paperwork: the engagement's terms rendered from what intake captured, signed before work starts, and the client handed off to delivery with the file complete. Declination triggers a short written no. Five steps, two owners at most, one queue: small enough to keep, complete enough to protect.
Questions people ask about client intake process
How fast should the client intake process run end to end?
For most service practices: captured today, questions back within days with one chase, decision inside the week, paperwork immediately on acceptance. Publish your own turnarounds internally; the numbers create the accountability.
What ends the intake process?
A signed engagement with the file handed to delivery, or a written declination. Anything else, silence, a verbal maybe, an unanswered questionnaire left open forever, means the process has a leak at that step.
How do we keep the process running when things get busy?
A visible queue and a daily ten-minute pass. Busy weeks are precisely when intake pays: the enquiries arriving during your best month are the engagements of the next one, and they are lost by displacement, not decision.