A new client form is the first work you ask a client to do, and it is almost always longer than it needs to be, because fields are added by whoever needs one and removed by nobody. This page is about which fields earn their place, how to price the rest in the client's own minutes rather than arguing about them, and where the form should sit once it is short. It is written for the person who owns the form, not the person who built it.
The fields that earn their place
Anything you cannot start without, anything you are required to hold, and anything whose absence would mean asking later at a worse moment. That is usually identity and entity details, billing and contact routing, and the two or three answers specific to the work. Everything else is convenience, and convenience should be asked for when it is needed rather than at the front door.
Pricing the rest instead of arguing about it
Count the fields, count the required ones, put your own seconds per field in, and the optional half has a price in the client's minutes. The free intake worksheet on this site does exactly that and adds the minutes each requested document costs them to find. Field-cutting conversations that go nowhere in the abstract usually resolve in one meeting once the number is on the page.
Where the form should sit
Wherever the client already is, which for most firms means a link they can open without an account. A form behind a login is a second thing to onboard them into before they have received anything, and it is a common reason first submissions arrive late or half finished.
What happens to the answers
They should land somewhere structured, against the client record, so nobody retypes them into a second system. The retyping is invisible in a demo and expensive in practice: it is where transcription errors enter, and it is the reason a form that saves the client ten minutes can cost your firm twenty.
Questions people ask about new client form
How many fields is too many?
There is no universal number, which is why the worksheet prices yours instead of quoting one. What matters is the minutes the form costs a client and how many of those minutes come from fields you could ask for later.
Should the form be required before work starts?
The required half should be. Blocking a start on optional fields is the most common self-inflicted onboarding delay there is.
Can we reuse the form for vendors and contractors?
Partly. The identity and payment half is nearly identical; the work-specific half is not. Most firms keep one form with a section that swaps.