A new customer checklist competes with the work itself, and the work wins. That is why the compact version gets finished and the thorough one does not. This page is about deliberately cutting a list to the length your firm will complete every time, what to cut first, and how to know whether you have gone too far. It assumes you have already written a long one and watched people stop halfway.
Cut delivery work first
Most over-long lists are onboarding plus the first week of delivery. Anything that is the work you were hired to do belongs in the engagement plan, not the onboarding checklist, and moving it out typically removes a third of the rows without losing anything. The test is simple: would you still do this line if the customer had been with you a year?
Then cut requests you cannot justify
Go through the documents you ask for and, for each one, name what you would do differently if it were missing. Anything with no answer is a request inherited from a template or a former colleague. Each one you remove takes out a chase, a follow-up and a possible stall, which the worksheet on this site will price in your own minutes.
Keep everything that is a promise
Confirmations, dates, named contacts and anything you told the customer would happen stay, however small. These are the lines whose absence produces the specific failure where the customer believes work has started and your team believes it is still waiting, which costs far more than the minute the line takes.
Know when you have cut too far
You have gone too far when the same thing gets missed twice and the fix is a line you deleted. That is evidence, and it is the only reason to put a line back. Restoring lines on the strength of one bad week is how a short list becomes a long one again within a quarter.
Questions people ask about new customer checklist
How short is short enough?
Short enough that it is finished for every customer without anyone deciding which lines matter. The worksheet returns your row count and the minutes a month it costs, which usually settles the argument.
Does a small firm need one at all?
Yes, and for a different reason: it is what lets the founder hand the work to the first hire without a fortnight of shadowing.
Should it live in a spreadsheet?
It can, until you are running several at once. The point at which a spreadsheet fails is when you need to know which customer is stuck on which line without opening every tab.