Most service providers do their very best organizing for their clients, and then they run their own business work on whatever they have left over.

One person in my community said it perfectly. She has ADHD, and she said she has a hard time setting up her own business systems, even though she can do it for others.

If you're a VA, an OBM, a coach or a consultant, I bet that one hits home a little. And here's why it matters. One dropped deliverable, one follow-up that quietly slips, and that's a client who doesn't rebook. They don't refer you, and they never tell you why.

So here's the client setup I would build for a service business with recurring client work: the client project template, the onboarding list, the recurring tasks for your monthly deliverables, and where client communication actually lands, so nothing is just sitting in your inbox. Build it once, and every new client after that takes minutes instead of an hour.

Either keep reading or watch the full video:

If you haven't set up your teams in Asana yet, start with my Asana tutorial for freelancers. This one picks up right where that one leaves off.

And honestly, I'm not immune to this either. My sticking point is SOPs. I am awful at creating SOPs for my own business, at least regularly. I should have way more done, but I put them off all the time, even though I know how valuable they are. So if you're feeling a little called out, same. We're in this together.

Step 1: Build one client project template

Not all clients are the same

First, a really quick question, because it changes everything else. Not all clients are the same, right? So your setup shouldn't treat them like they are.

• If it's an ongoing retainer client, someone you work with every month, they get their own project.

• If it's a one-off client, like an audit or a VIP day, they don't get their own project. They become a task inside a project for that service.

Think of your teams as the big buckets holding all of it. The client is almost never a team. They go inside the teams. (I go deeper on this in Should Each Client Be a Team or a Project in Asana?)

We're building the retainer one here, because that's where the recurring work lives.

My real retainer template: just four sections

This is the actual template I use for my Back-Pocket Support clients. That's my ongoing async support, so it's a retainer. It only has four sections: Important Info & Dates, Onboarding, Recurring Tasks, and Post Project Completion.

Important info and dates aren't really tasks. It's the stuff you want to see at a glance every time you open the project. I put the start date, the end date and their current rate right in the task name, so you see it the second you open it. Then a task for client information (their email, the contract, their Instagram, their website), one for important documents, and two that I think a lot of people skip: their goals and their priorities.

So all of that is right at the top every time I open their project, and I get reminded what they actually hired me for.

Next is onboarding, then recurring tasks, then post project completion, which is really just my name for offboarding. I came up with that name before I even knew a lot about systems and processes. I should probably just change it to offboarding, but I haven't. I keep recurring tasks in their own section. You don't have to, that's just how my brain works.

Build it once, then turn it into a template

Here's the most important part. I want you to build this only once, and then turn it into a template.

If you're on a paid Asana plan, you can save the project as a template and even set relative due dates. So when you use it, all you have to do is pick a start date and Asana fills in every other little due date for you.

If you're on the free plan, no worries. You build a template project and duplicate it every time. You'll have to set the dates yourself, but the process is already there, so you're not thinking through the steps. You're just adding the dates. I was on the free plan for the first four years of my business, and it's fine. It still saves a lot of the mental work, because you don't have to remember every single little step.

A couple of things make a template much easier to reuse:

• Use placeholders where things change, like "Send a welcome email to [client name]." That little bracket reminds you what to customize for the next client.

• Write things down inside the tasks too. My rule is, if I had to explain the process to someone else, everything I would say out loud should be written or linked inside the template.

The goal is that you can get a new client started in under 10 minutes.

The mistake I see in audits

In one audit I did, new client projects were being made by duplicating a real client's project. So each new client got someone else's completed tasks and old details carried over, and every new setup took about an hour.

With a clean template, it should only be 10 minutes or less. That's close to an hour of unpaid setup for every single new client, and it adds up fast. They had over a hundred clients.

Honestly, I've been there. When I first started my business, I probably redid the same onboarding work at least five times before I finally made it a proper template. Once I did, I never thought about it again, unless something in my process changes.

If you know exactly what you'd build for a client but just don't have the time and energy to build it for you, that's exactly why I made Asana System Templates. It's the client setup I'm walking you through (onboarding, tracking, offboarding) already built and ready to put into your Asana account, plus templates for the whole rest of your business too. And if you'd rather have someone in your corner while you build it, you can join the Simply Supported waitlist. No pressure ever.

Step 2: The onboarding task list

Say a new client just said yes. What goes in Asana? For a lot of people right now, everything is kind of going everywhere. The yes comes in by email, the contract is in one place, the invoice is in another, and your kickoff notes are in a Google Doc you'll never open again.

That is not the vibe. Someone in my community described it as "Asana, Google Drive, emails, texts... just a mess."

The fix is one clear front door. Every new client starts from the same place, and your onboarding section is the same steps every single time:

• Send the invoice and contract

• Confirm it's paid and signed

• Send the welcome packet and the onboarding questionnaire

• Send the email with your kickoff call scheduler

• Review the questionnaire when it comes back

• Host your kickoff call

Every one of those gets assigned to you with a due date, so it shows up in My Tasks and you don't have to remember it.

What's in my own onboarding list

Yours should match how you really work. Here's mine for Back-Pocket Support: create their project in Asana, update the questions and confirm they've finished the questionnaire, get their phone number and add them to WhatsApp (that's where my Back-Pocket Support happens), get the invitation into their Asana account, review the questionnaire and make a plan, and send off a kickoff message.

I have the welcome message written right inside the WhatsApp task, so I just copy it and send it. And then a few little things I'd otherwise forget: join their email list, follow them on social media, and tag them as a client in my own email list.

None of that is fancy. But every one of those is a thing I'd have to remember otherwise, and now I don't, because Asana remembers for me.

Here's a tip for the kickoff call, if you do those. (I don't, but you might.) Take your notes right inside the kickoff call task, and as things come up on the call, add them as tasks in your sections. That way you're not coming back later trying to remember what you talked about. The first task is already sitting there, ready to go.

One-off clients

For one-off clients, the ones who live as a task in a service project, I do something a little different. When someone books, they fill out my onboarding form, and Asana creates a task for them right in the project, with all the subtasks I need and the due dates already worked out. So I don't have to set anything up by hand. The tasks just show up on the right day.

That one needs a paid plan, but even on free, having your steps written out to copy is a huge time and mental energy saver.

The reason this matters so much is the first impression. A smooth onboarding tells the client they're in good hands. A chaotic one tells them the opposite, and that's before you've done any of your actual good work for them.

Step 3: Recurring tasks for your monthly deliverables

This is the part that makes retainer work feel calm instead of constant. Anything you do for a client on a schedule goes in that recurring section as a recurring task. You set it to repeat weekly, monthly, whatever fits, and every time you complete it, a new one automatically appears for the next cycle.

So what goes in here?

• For a VA: reviewing analytics every week, or sending a report.

• For an OBM: planning the weekly meeting or creating the monthly report. If you're managing your client's team, a recurring check-in with their VA, with notes in the description on what they're working on.

• For a coach: a weekly check-in with your client.

And then there's the business side of a retainer that's really easy to forget:

• A payment reminder before you charge them, so they're not caught off guard

• Sending a receipt, if your payment processor doesn't do it for you

• Asking for feedback every three months, good and bad, because so much changes

• A yearly reminder to raise your rates, because if that one isn't written down somewhere, it probably doesn't happen

For my own Back-Pocket Support clients, the recurring section is really simple: check WhatsApp daily, a weekly check-in, mapping out a plan and their top priorities, and getting feedback on how things are going so far. That daily WhatsApp task is a big one for me, because it means checking in with clients is never something I'm holding in my head.

All of these, from every client, come together in My Tasks, sorted by due date. So instead of clicking into each client project, you get to see just today's work, or this week's work, across every client in one view. That's how you work across multiple clients without losing track of who needs what by when.

Step 4: Where client communication lands

This is the one that keeps client communication from living in your email. When you're waiting on something from a client, like a file, an answer or an approval, don't leave it in your inbox hoping you'll remember to check back.

Add a Waiting on Client section to your project (or use a tag) and move that task there with a follow-up date. Then if you haven't heard back in a few days, or a week, or whatever your timeline is, Asana is the one keeping track, not your memory. Because memories fail us, especially when we're burnt out from life stuff.

Here's the mistake I see all the time: people put things in Waiting on Client and never follow up, and it becomes a graveyard of stuff you're still waiting on six months later. The follow-up date is what really makes it work.

If your client is working with you inside Asana, their comments and questions show up in your Asana inbox too. I check mine twice a day, once in the morning and once at the end of my work session, about five minutes each. Read it, reply right there, archive it. What's left is only the stuff that needs you.

Offboarding

When the work is done, your offboarding section takes over. You send the final deliverable and the wrap-up note, then ask for a testimonial and a referral. Build that ask right into the template, so it happens every time.

What's next

Now every new client has a home, and every retainer runs on its own. But once you've got five or six clients going at once, the day-to-day juggling gets to be its own kind of chaos, and that needs a slightly different setup. I walk you through it in How to Manage Multiple Clients in Asana (Without Losing Your Mind).

And if you're not sure where the gaps are in your own business, my free Systems Audit Tool will help you find them.