Professional Services Templates
Agencies, consultancies and accounting firms sell expertise, but clients judge them on the experience around it: how quickly the work starts, whether the monthly report arrives when promised, whether anyone noticed the retainer hours running out, and how gracefully the relationship ends. In most firms those processes depend on who happens to be running the account. The partner who onboards clients brilliantly does it from memory, and the new account manager has nothing to follow.
CheckFlow’s professional services templates turn the client lifecycle of a services firm into checklists that run the same way for every client: qualifying and winning the work, taking the client on, delivering the engagement or the monthly retainer, reporting on it, and handing the client over cleanly at the end. Each step goes to a named owner with a due date, approvals stop work until the right person signs off, and every completed run is kept as a record. Every template is fully editable, so you can rebuild it around your own methodology.
Explore Our Professional Services Checklist Templates
Each template includes a detailed process guide covering why the process matters, what every phase involves and who should own it. Each one also comes with a live example you can open before you sign up.
Agency New Business Pitch Checklist
Qualify the opportunity before committing a team to it, then run the pitch from chemistry meeting to presentation day. It covers the brief Q&A, strategy, any speculative creative and who owns it, the commercial proposal, rehearsal and the follow-up. A win/loss debrief closes every pitch, won or lost.
Consulting Client Onboarding Checklist
From signed proposal to a team working at the client. Engagement acceptance and conflict checks, the MSA, SOW and data processing terms, supplier registration and purchase orders, consultant access and security induction, stakeholder interviews and the governance cadence.
Accounting Firm Client Onboarding Checklist
Take on a new accounting, bookkeeping or tax client properly. Client acceptance and AML due diligence, the engagement letter, professional clearance and handover from the previous accountant, authority to act with the tax authority, software and bank feeds, and a deadlines calendar. UK and US tasks appear by jurisdiction.
Consulting Engagement Delivery Checklist
Your delivery methodology as a repeatable checklist: mobilisation, discovery, analysis, recommendations, a quality review before anything reaches the client, the final presentation and acceptance, then knowledge capture and follow-on work. Every engagement runs the same way, whoever leads it.
Monthly Retainer Delivery Checklist
Run each month of a retainer so that the client sees the value and the agency keeps its margin. Plan the month against the agreed scope, track hours or deliverables against the plan, handle out-of-scope requests in writing, close the month and invoice. A quarterly health review appears in quarter-end months.
Agency Monthly Client Reporting Checklist
Produce a monthly marketing report a client will read: collect the data, check tracking and attribution before trusting it, compare results with targets, write the narrative and recommendations, and have the account director review it before it goes out.
Tax Season Client Intake Checklist
The firm-wide workflow for every returning client in filing season: engagement letter and organizer, document requests and chasing, identity checks, triage, the extension decision, preparation and review, e-file authorisation, filing and acknowledgement, then delivery and archiving.
Client Offboarding Checklist
End a client relationship cleanly, whoever ends it. Confirm the notice terms, finish or hand over work in progress, return client-owned accounts and files, remove access both ways, hand over to a successor firm, settle the final invoice and close the records.
Why Services Firms Use CheckFlow
The same standard for every client
Build the process once and run it for every client, with the client name, the engagement lead and the team filled in when it starts. Conditional logic adds the extra steps for a successor handover, a paid-media account or a quarter-end review, so one template covers every variation without a copy per client.
Sign-off before anything reaches the client
Approvals halt the checklist until a named person signs off: the go/no-go on a pitch, client acceptance before the engagement letter, the reviewer on a tax return, the account director on a monthly report. The audit trail shows who approved what and when.
Recurring work that starts itself
Monthly retainers and reports, and every client’s filing season, are scheduled once and then created and assigned automatically. Read CheckFlow for professional services firms or client onboarding software for how it fits around your practice management tools.
Professional Services Templates: Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the professional services templates for?
Firms that sell expertise by the hour, the project or the month: marketing, creative and digital agencies, management, IT and specialist consultancies, and accounting, bookkeeping and tax practices. They are written for the people who run client relationships and delivery: partners and directors, account and engagement managers, practice managers and the new business team. Law firms will find matter closing and case intake under Legal & Contract Management.
Does CheckFlow replace our practice management, CRM or time-tracking software?
No. Those systems hold your clients, time, invoices and documents. CheckFlow runs the multi-step human processes around them, such as taking on a client, closing a month of a retainer or handing a client to another firm, and keeps a record of who did each step and when. It connects to other tools through Zapier, the REST API and the MCP server.
Can we turn our own methodology into a template?
Yes, and that is what most firms end up doing. Start from the closest template, rename the phases to match your methodology, add your own tasks and guidance, and use role fields so each step is assigned to the partner, manager or specialist on that engagement. Conditional logic shows the extra steps only when they apply, such as a successor handover or a paid-media section, so one template covers every variation.
Can clients see their checklists?
Yes. You can share a live, read-only view of a checklist, such as onboarding progress or the month’s retainer work, through a secure link with your own branding and subdomain. The client sees progress without needing an account in your systems. Read white label checklist software for how firms deliver their process under their own brand.