Consultant Client Intake Checklist
Five documents and three sheets, including the request list that separates what never arrived from what arrived and does not reach.
Free download · No account needed
Intake Summary
What the client sent, and what they did not
1. What we can answer today
One line per engagement question the material in hand can answer, with the documents that answer it. Nothing else in this section: no caveats, no preview of the findings.
2. What nothing in the folder answers
One line per question with no coverage, each carrying the named document, the period and the grain that would close it. Not more financial detail. A regional cost allocation for four quarters, as a workbook, one row per region per quarter. This is the section the sponsor reads.
3. What contradicts something else
The two documents, the figures that disagree, the person who can settle it, and what the disagreement blocks. No preference indicated.
4. What is out of date, and known to be
Documents whose own stated date falls outside the period, plus the ones the client has said are superseded by something not yet sent.
5. What cannot be placed in time at all
Files carrying no date of their own, and the questions they were going to support.
6. Requests outstanding
Open rows only, in the status vocabulary of the sheet, each with the date you committed to reviewing it by.
7. What the work now assumes
Every live assumption in one line, each traceable to the request that failed to close.
8. What we need agreed this week
Three items at most. Each one a decision or a document, with a named person and a date.
Search this and you get intake forms: forty questions the client answers about their goals, their stakeholders and their preferred meeting cadence. Useful, and it is not the week that costs you money. That week is the one spent reading the folder they handed over, and it looks like filing until you try to fill the two columns an index actually needs. A file carries up to five dates and one owner, and a shared drive is the worst possible witness to either.
The five dates are the one the document states about itself, the one in the filename, the file system modified time, the properties created date, and the upload date. Only the first says what period the content covers. A drive export rewrites the third on every file it touches, so a folder shares a date belonging to the export, and the fourth is inherited from whatever file was used as a template. The index carries the date next to where that date was found, and leaves both cells empty when the document says nothing.
Then the requests, written the way an organisation writes them when it has to defend each one. The IRS procedures for requesting documents put one issue on each request and require the draft to be discussed before it goes out. They also make the requester commit, in writing on the request, to a date by which they will say whether what arrived was enough. Send River the folder in whatever state it reached you, or take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank.
What's in the pack
Document Index
One row per file, with the date the document states about itself next to the part of the document that stated it, and a read priority the reading order for an unindexed folder expands into a ranked first pass.
Coverage Map
Keyed on the engagement question rather than the document, so the question nothing answers is a row instead of an absence, and a question four disagreeing copies of the numbers answer differently routes to orientation in the client's financials.
Gap and Request List
Six statuses, one thing per row, a format specification per ask, and both dates: theirs to respond, yours to confirm it landed, or handed whole to a pack that names the export mode and the count upfront.
Reading a Data Room
The five dates, the four wrong owners, what a spreadsheet printed to PDF costs you, and how to read the executed agreement's own deadlines first.
Request Discipline
One issue per request and a three step escalation ladder, adapted from the published rules a tax examination follows.
Intake Summary
The two page document you send the sponsor in week one, in the section order that leads with the gaps rather than the inventory.
Open Questions Register
For questions no document will ever answer, so they go to a person instead: as quotes carrying their timecode, or into an interview programme with a target per question.
Assumption Log
Every lapsed request converted into a dated position the client has been told about, with the deliverable that moves if it is wrong.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River and hand it the folder, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and fill them in yourself.
- 2
Send the folder as it arrived
A drive export, a data room download, forty attachments from a kickoff thread, three versions of one board pack. Every file gets a row, including the ones nobody can read yet.
- 3
Name what the engagement has to answer
Three to eight questions from the signed scope. The map is keyed on those, so the empty rows appear the moment they exist and the reading order falls out of them.
- 4
Work the request list, not the inbox
One ask per row with a format and an owner, a chase ladder that fires only on rows genuinely past their date, and a lapsed request that becomes a written assumption instead of your problem.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The zip is Word documents and CSV sheets, and it needs no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: the agent reads the folder you were handed, indexes it, and fills the registers. The other packs sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word (.docx) for the five documents, CSV (.csv) for the three sheets, zipped together. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open the registers off the download, and the documents open in Word or Pages. Nothing needs converting.
How is this different from a client intake form?
An intake form is the client answering questions about themselves. This is about the material they hand over, which arrives without an index and is where the first week actually goes. Use both: the form before kickoff, this from the day the folder lands.
Two spreadsheets disagree. Which one does it pick?
Neither, and that is deliberate. It records both figures, marks the question contested, and names who could settle it. Where you want the difference itself explained line by line, reconciling two exports that disagree is the run for that.
Can it date a document that has no date in it?
No, and it will not use the file system timestamp to fake one. A drive export overwrites that timestamp on every file it copies, so it records administration rather than content. The cell stays empty and the file appears in the summary section for material that cannot be placed in time.
What happens when the client just never sends something?
The ladder runs: a chase to the owner the working day after the agreed date, a sponsor copy three days later, then the row closes and becomes a dated entry in the Assumption Log with the sponsor told in writing. Open requests are your exposure; written assumptions are not.
What does 'Edit with AI' actually do?
It signs you up, installs this pack as a private workspace of your own, and puts the agent in front of an empty Document Index. Then you send the folder and tell it what the engagement has to answer, and the gap list comes back before the reading does.
Find out what the client did not send
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or open this exact pack in River and hand it the folder you were given on Monday.
Edit with AI