# MSP client onboarding checklist

Use this tool-neutral template in a PSA, project board, or client runbook. Assign an owner, due date, status, and evidence link to each item.

## Ten-step checklist

- [ ] Confirm scope, exclusions, approval rights, escalation paths, and an authorized successor or incapacity contact.
- [ ] Reconcile client assets across discovery, identity, network, and purchasing records.
- [ ] Create named technician identities with MFA and client-scoped least privilege.
- [ ] Assign one accountable owner to patching, security, backup, and remote access.
- [ ] Export the original configuration and prove at least one recovery path.
- [ ] Enroll a representative group of authorized, noncritical pilot endpoints.
- [ ] Test alert delivery, escalation, ownership, and closure evidence.
- [ ] Promote automation through observe, pilot, broad, and exception rings.
- [ ] Reconcile every managed, excluded, offline, retired, and failed asset.
- [ ] Record client acceptance, open risks, owners, due dates, and the first review.

## Sixteen client discovery questions

1. Which business workflows, locations, teams, and operating hours are most important to protect?
2. Who can approve access, changes, outages, purchases, exceptions, and after-hours work?
3. If the owner or primary approver is incapacitated or dies, who is legally authorized to direct the MSP, and where is that authority documented?
4. Which users, devices, servers, networks, cloud services, applications, and vendors are in or out of scope?
5. How many active, spare, shared, remote, offline, unsupported, and retired endpoints should exist?
6. Which identity tenants, domains, directories, MFA methods, and emergency accounts are currently used?
7. Which line-of-business applications are critical, and who owns their vendor relationship and support contract?
8. How are offices, network segments, Wi-Fi, VPN, internet circuits, and remote locations connected?
9. Which RMM, MDM, patching, endpoint-security, backup, and remote-access tools have management authority today?
10. Where are administrator, service, vendor, encryption, and recovery credentials stored and reviewed?
11. Which compliance, cyber-insurance, data-residency, logging, retention, and notification requirements apply?
12. What is backed up, who owns recovery, what are the required RPO and RTO, and when was the last restore proven?
13. Which maintenance windows, blackout periods, reboot rules, and change-approval paths must technicians follow?
14. How should incidents, security events, outages, and missed response targets be routed and escalated?
15. Which known failures, unsupported systems, recurring alerts, vendor disputes, and technical-debt items already exist?
16. What evidence and success criteria will the client use to accept onboarding and begin the first service review?

Source and full process: https://nizlo.com/guides/msp-client-onboarding-checklist