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How to build a client onboarding workflow

A single form submission can trigger the entire client onboarding sequence: creating a contact, generating a project with tasks, sending a welcome email, and assigning work to your team. This guide walks through building that automation from scratch.

1. Create an intake form. From the Forms page, create a new form with the fields needed for onboarding: client name, email address, company, project details, and any custom questions. Field types include text inputs, dropdowns, checkboxes, file uploads, and signatures.
2. Build the automation. Go to Automations and create a new automation. choose "When Form is submitted" and select the intake form. The automation fires every time someone submits the form.
3. Add the "Create contact" action. As the first action, add "Create contact". Map the form fields to contact fields: the name field maps to the contact name, the email field to the contact email, and the company field to the company name. The contact is added to your CRM automatically.
4. Add the "Create project" action. Next, add "Create project". Select a project template to use as the base, so the new project arrives with task groups, tasks, and structure already in place. The project name can include dynamic values from the form submission, like the client's name.
5. Add a welcome email action. Add a "Send email" action to notify the client that onboarding is underway. The email body can pull in form field values, so the message is personalised with the client's name and project details.
6. Add task creation actions. Additional actions can create specific tasks inside the new project: "Schedule kickoff call", "Prepare project brief", or any onboarding steps your team follows. Each task can have an assignee, due date offset, and description pre-configured.
7. Test the workflow. Submit the form with test data and verify that the contact, project, tasks, and email all generate correctly. Check field mapping by confirming the contact record carries the right details from the form.
8. Share the form. Copy the form's public link or embed the form on your website. Every submission now triggers the full onboarding sequence automatically.

Because each automation action can reference form field data, the contact, project, and email are all personalised with the information the client provided, with no manual data entry in between.