Client intake is the process a practice or firm runs to take someone on properly: capture who is asking, gather what the work needs to know, review it, and accept or decline with the file already made. The phrase gets used loosely for the form alone, but the form is one artefact inside a process that exists for a reason: work started on an incomplete file gets done twice, and clients taken on without review become the engagements everyone regrets. This page defines intake from the practice's side, walks its stages, and names where it usually breaks.
Why intake is a process and not a form
The form gathers answers; intake decides. Between the answers arriving and the client being accepted sit the steps that protect the practice: completeness checked, anything odd queried, the fit and terms decided, the paperwork issued. A practice that treats the submitted form as an accepted client has skipped its own decision, and finds out later, at the first invoice dispute or the first mismatch of expectations, what the review stage was for.
The stages, whatever the trade
Capture the enquiry in structured fields the day it arrives. Send the questions and let them be answered at home. Review what returns: complete, credible, inside what the practice does. Decide, and record the decision. Accept with the engagement's paperwork rendered, or decline politely in writing. Clinics, law firms, accountants and consultancies dress these stages differently, but every trade that vets its clients runs some version of all five, well or badly.
Where intake breaks, in order of frequency
First, capture: enquiries arriving by phone die on sticky notes. Second, the chase: incomplete answers sit unnoticed until the work is due to start. Third, the seam: answers gathered once get re-typed into the systems that actually run the engagement. Fourth, the record: decisions are made but written nowhere, so nobody can later say why a client was declined or what was promised. Each break has a cheap fix, and none of the fixes is a prettier form.
Questions people ask about client intake
Is client intake the same as onboarding?
Intake ends where the practice says yes: the client is accepted with a complete file. Onboarding is what follows the yes, accounts set up, kickoff held, access granted. They meet at acceptance, and this site deliberately stops there; onboarding is its own discipline.
How formal should intake be for a small practice?
As formal as a checklist and one owner: the stages fit on an index card. Formality is not paperwork volume; it is that every enquiry travels the same road and someone can see where each one stands.
What should we keep after intake ends?
The record: who enquired, what they answered, what was decided, what was sent. Declined enquiries included, because they return as repeat enquiries, references and, at law firms, conflict checks. Storage is cheap; reconstructing memory is not.