If a client pays on Monday and you are still chasing a usable brief the following week, onboarding is doing admin instead of its job. This guide covers what to collect once, who at the client gets access, and the three checks a new account passes before its first request goes active.
Paid, set up and ready are three different checks
Most onboarding stalls because one event gets treated as the finish line. Stripe says paid, so the team assumes the client is ready. They are not. Paid means billing has confirmed the plan and the start date. Set up means the client can reach their board, the asset folder and the brief form, and you hold their brand files. Ready means a delivery lead has read the first brief and found nothing missing that would stop a designer.
Give each check one owner. In a six-person studio that might be you for paid, your account lead for set up and your senior designer for ready. If one person owns all three, still write them as separate items on the account card. That way a paid invoice never gets mistaken for a brief you can start.
As a rough target to aim for, not a benchmark we have measured: brief-ready within two working days of payment. When you miss it, the blocker almost always sits under one of the three checks, and the card tells you which.
Collect account details once
Some information belongs to the account and does not change between requests. Ask for it once, at setup, and keep it where every designer can find it. A pinned card at the top of the client's Trello board works, or the top of a shared Notion page.
- Requester: the person who submits briefs and answers questions within the working day.
- Approver: the person whose yes ends a revision round. Often not the requester.
- Billing contact: who gets invoices and failed-payment emails. Keep them out of creative threads.
- Brand files: logo files, fonts, colour values, the style guide and any templates they already use. One Google Drive folder per client, shared with the requester.
- Access limits: which of their systems you may work in, and how that access is granted and removed. For regulated or confidential work, also agree storage, retention and who may see files before anything is uploaded.
Everything else travels with the request: audience, intended use, approved copy, deliverables, sizes and deadline context. Mixing the two is how a first brief turns into a long back-and-forth thread about fonts and invoice addresses. The design request brief template splits an account section from a per-request section, so the first part gets filled in once and then left alone.
Two rules for assets. Do not request passwords in a brief; arrange appropriate account access through the relevant system. If you need to work in their Webflow or Canva, they invite your studio account and can remove it when you part ways. And ask who may use licensed material and who can authorise its use, rather than treating an uploaded file as permission. A stock photo sitting in their Drive folder may have been licensed to a previous agency, not to them.
Decide who at the client gets access
A new client will happily add six colleagues to your board. Each extra person is another source of requests and another voice in feedback. Decide the number before the invite goes out, and put it in the agreement.
DesignJoy is a good reference point. Its Monthly Club plan at $4,995 a month lists "Up to 2 users" per subscription (DesignJoy homepage). Two is enough for one requester and one approver, and that split is the one that matters.
Here is what that looks like on a Tuesday. The marketing manager submits a brief for a webinar banner. Your designer delivers a draft on Wednesday. The head of marketing approves it or sends one consolidated round of changes. Nobody from sales adds opinions in Slack, because nobody from sales has access.
Name a substitute approver as well. A request sitting in review for a week or more while the approver is on holiday eats the client's month and makes your queue look slow. Ask at setup: "If Priya is away, who can sign off?" Write the answer on the account card.
Tool costs point the same way if you share a Notion page per client. Notion guests are free but limited to the pages you invite them to. Members on Plus cost €9.50 (about $10.81) each a month (Notion pricing). Clients belong on the guest side of that line.
Run the first request as the tour
Skip the feature tour. Clients forget which button does what within a day. Book a 30-minute welcome call instead, and have the requester submit their real first brief while you watch.
- Share your screen on their board or form, then hand over. Fill in the account section together if it is still empty.
- Let them write the first brief themselves. Stay quiet unless they get stuck; where they hesitate is where your form is unclear.
- Read it back with your delivery lead on the call. Ask the missing questions there and then: sizes, where it will run, who approves, what finished looks like.
- Move the card and name each state out loud. Show it landing in received, say what makes it ready, and say when it will go active.
- Walk through one revision round on a past example: feedback consolidated in one comment, then the approver signs off.
- Send a recorded Loom walkthrough of your board afterwards, so the approver who skipped the call sees the same thing.
Give the client a clear distinction between received, ready and active so receipt does not look like a delivery commitment. The limit on active work only makes sense once they see it happen, and the one active request rule in practice is worth sending straight after the call.
Loom Starter costs $0 (Loom pricing), so that walkthrough costs you ten minutes and no money. Record it once for your standard board and reuse it for every new client until the board changes. For the order of everything from payment to first brief, follow the first 72 hours onboarding workflow.
Board, form or portal for onboarding
You do not need a portal to onboard well. A Trello board per client, with a card template holding your brief questions, plus a form for new requests, covers onboarding for a small studio. Trello Free is $0 for up to 10 collaborators per Workspace (Trello pricing). An Airtable form suits the intake side because form viewers are not charged. You only pay for people with edit access to a base, and the Free plan is $0 (Airtable pricing).
A portal earns its place when clients keep asking where their files are, or when access boundaries get complicated. ManyRequests builds intake forms and onboarding into a branded client portal, from $59 a month billed monthly (ManyRequests pricing). Zendo offers request forms and a client portal, with a free Essential plan for up to 3 clients (Zendo pricing). Compare both in client portals for design subscriptions before you pay for either.
When the brief is not ready
Sometimes the first brief arrives and a designer cannot start from it. Do not trickle questions back one Slack message at a time. Return one list, put an owner against every blocker, and say what happens once it clears.
| Blocker | Owner | What clears it |
|---|---|---|
| No final headline copy | Client requester | Approved copy pasted into the brief |
| Approver not named | Client account contact | One name, plus a substitute |
| Logo supplied only as a JPEG | Client requester | SVG or EPS file in the brand folder |
| Stock image licence unclear | Client approver | Written confirmation of who holds the licence |
| Output sizes missing | Your account lead | Sizes added to the brief, and the question added to your template |
Keep the card in received, not ready, until the list is empty. Tell the client plainly that the request has not started and is not using their active slot. When the last blocker clears, move it to ready and give a start day. From that point the request follows your requests and delivery process like any other.