How to Onboard a Client as a Virtual Assistant (Checklist + Questionnaire)

Practice Runbook · updated 2026-09-22

The first two weeks of a retainer decide the next two years of it. Not because of the work you do, but because of the expectations you either set or quietly allow to form.

Most virtual assistants onboard by starting. The client says "great, can you jump on the inbox?", you jump on the inbox, and eleven months later you are doing four things nobody agreed to, on a fee that assumed one.

What follows is the sequence that prevents that. It takes about ninety minutes of your time and it is the highest-paid ninety minutes in the engagement.

Before you say yes

Onboarding starts before the contract. Three things have to be true, and you can establish all of them in one call:

• The work fits the hours. Ask what they expect you to do, then estimate it honestly against the package they want. If a client describes fifteen hours of work and wants a ten-hour retainer, that gap does not close by itself — it closes by you working free.
• You can actually get access. A client who will not grant delegated access to the systems you must work in is a client you cannot serve.
• There is one decision-maker. "Run it past my business partner" during onboarding becomes "my partner disagrees" during month three.

The onboarding questionnaire

Send this before the kickoff call, not during it. You want their answers written down, and you want to have read them.

About the business

• What does the business do, in one sentence, for someone outside it?
• Who are the customers, and how do they usually arrive?
• What is the busiest period of your year?
• Who else works in the business, and who do I need to know?

About the work

• What are the three tasks you most want off your plate?
• What is currently falling through the cracks?
• Which of these is urgent, and which is merely annoying?
• Is there anything you have tried to delegate before that did not work? What happened?

That last question is the most useful one on the sheet. The answer tells you whether you are the second VA, what the first one hit, and whether the problem was them or the client.

About working together

• How do you prefer to communicate — email, Slack, voice notes?
• What response time do you actually need, as opposed to want?
• What should I never do without asking you first?
• Who can give me instructions besides you?

About the money

• Will I ever spend money on your behalf, and up to what limit?
• Who approves invoices, and on what cycle?
• Which subscriptions will be in my name versus yours?

Access: delegated, never shared

Never accept a shared password. Not once, not "just for now". If a client emails you their login, you have inherited their security problem and every future dispute about what happened in that account.

Ask for proper delegated access instead:

Two rules that save you later: enable two-factor on every account you can, and keep a written inventory of every system you were given access to. That inventory is your offboarding list on the day the engagement ends — and being the VA who hands back a clean, complete list is worth more in referrals than any marketing you will do.

Scope, written down, before the first task

Your scope document does not need to be long. It needs to answer six questions unambiguously:

1. What is included — the actual list of recurring work.
2. What is not — name the adjacent things clients assume. Other businesses they own. Personal admin. Anything needing a licence you do not hold.
3. Hours included, and what happens to unused ones. Usually they expire monthly. Say so.
4. The overage rate — agreed now, not negotiated in the heat of a busy month.
5. Response times and working days — including what happens when you are on holiday.
6. Notice period, both directions.

The first week

Resist the urge to be impressive. The goal of week one is not output, it is calibration.

• Day 1 — kickoff call. Walk through their questionnaire answers. Confirm the three priority tasks. Agree how you will report.
• Day 2 — access audit. Log into everything you were given. Find the gaps now, not during something urgent.
• Days 3–5 — do the smallest complete task end to end. Something finishable. It proves the pipeline works and gives the client an early, visible win.
• End of week 1 — short written update: what you did, what you found, what you need. Set the rhythm you intend to keep.

Track hours from the first day, not the first problem

Log everything from day one, billable and not. Two reasons, and the second is the important one.

The obvious reason is invoicing. The real reason is that onboarding is when unbillable work is invisible — setup, learning their systems, chasing access. If you only start tracking once a client feels heavy, you will have no baseline to compare against and no evidence for the conversation.

A client at 40% of their retainer in week one and 95% by week three is telling you something you can still act on. You just have to be counting.

The check-in that prevents the hard conversation

Put a thirty-day review in the calendar during onboarding, while everyone is enthusiastic. Three questions:

• Is the work what you expected?
• Is the volume what we agreed? (Bring your actual hours.)
• What is still on your plate that should be on mine?

If the hours are running over, this is where you say so — at 30 days, with data, while goodwill is high. That conversation ends with an adjusted retainer. The same conversation at month eight, after you have absorbed the overage in silence, ends with a client who thinks you are changing the deal.

Make it repeatable

Every client after the first should cost you less onboarding effort than the last. That only happens if the questionnaire, the access checklist and the scope document exist as documents you reuse rather than emails you rewrite.