Advice on how to automate a client onboarding process usually assumes you will finish, and most firms should not. This is a sequence of five steps ordered so that stopping after any one of them leaves you better off than before, with the cheapest and most reliable wins first. None of the first three requires buying anything, which is deliberate: a firm that automates the free parts first buys a much smaller tool afterwards.
Step one: write it down and count it
List your steps and the documents you request. Count them. That count is the length of the checklist, and multiplied by your monthly volume it is the real cost of your onboarding in hours. The free worksheet on this site does this arithmetic. Firms routinely discover here that a third of their list is delivery work that drifted forward, and deleting it is the largest single improvement available.
Step two: move your setup in parallel
Do everything that does not need the client while you are waiting for the things that do. No software is required and it removes the client's response time from every step behind it. This is consistently the biggest calendar saving in the whole sequence and it costs nothing but the decision.
Step three: one request, one reminder schedule
Send everything you need at once with a due date, then remind on a fixed schedule rather than when someone remembers. Even done by hand with a calendar entry this eliminates the most common cause of a stalled onboarding, which is that nobody was sure whose turn it was.
Steps four and five: the record, then the rules
Only now does software earn its place: a record where every client's outstanding items are visible in one list, and after that, rules that fire the reminders themselves. In that order. A rule engine on top of an invisible process automates a thing nobody can see, which is how firms end up unable to explain why a client was never contacted.
Questions people ask about how to automate client onboarding process
Do we need a platform?
Not for the first three steps, which is where most of the return is. Buy after those, when you know what is left.
What if we only onboard two clients a month?
Steps one to three still pay. Steps four and five probably do not until the number of live onboardings exceeds what one person can hold in their head.
How long does this take?
The first step is an afternoon. The second is a decision. The third is a template and a recurring calendar entry.