The Best Client Intake Form for Accounting Firms (With Free Template)

The client intake form is the most-used document in onboarding and the most overlooked. A good one collects everything you need in a single pass and makes your firm look organised from the first interaction. A poor one — or none at all — turns onboarding into a string of follow-up emails. Here's what the best intake forms include, and a free template to start from.

What a great intake form does

A great intake form does three jobs at once: it gathers the information you need to set the client up, it signals professionalism, and it reduces back-and-forth to near zero. The difference between a firm that feels organised and one that feels chaotic is often just whether the first request was complete. (You can download our free intake form and checklist to skip the blank-page problem.)

The fields every accounting intake form needs

Business details: legal and trading name, entity type, registration and tax IDs, registered address, and accounting year-end. These define who you're working with and shape the rest of onboarding.

Key contacts: primary contact and role, best email and phone, and — importantly — who approves payments and filings. Knowing who can authorise what prevents delays later.

Financial and systems: current accounting software and access, the bank, card, and loan accounts to be reconciled, payroll provider if relevant, and details of any previous accountant for handover.

Anything urgent: a simple open field for known issues or imminent deadlines. This one question surfaces the surprises that would otherwise derail the first month.

What separates good from great: relevance

Here's the limitation of a paper or PDF intake form: it asks every client every question. A sole trader doesn't need to answer questions about directors; a bookkeeping-only client doesn't need the advisory fields. Irrelevant questions lower completion rates and make your firm look like it's not paying attention.

The best intake experience adapts to the client. Ask the entity type first, and only show the fields that follow from the answer. A company sees director questions; a sole trader doesn't. This is hard to do on paper and simple in a form flow, where the questions branch based on previous answers — higher completion, no wasted effort, and a noticeably more professional experience.

Make it part of a system, not a standalone file

An intake form works best as the front door to a complete onboarding process, not an isolated document. Once the form is in, the answers should route the client down the right onboarding path — entity type deciding which steps follow, software deciding setup, service tier deciding scope. That's the difference between collecting information and actually using it.

The Client Onboarding System includes a complete intake form alongside the full onboarding process it feeds — and a branching version you can run in PathPilot, where the form adapts to each client and flows straight into a tracked workflow. Start free: download the intake form and checklist and send a clean, complete request to your next client.