Client intake questionnaire template (20 questions)

A client intake questionnaire is a short form you send before you quote. It records the goal, the budget, the deadline, who approves the work and what is out of scope while everyone is still agreeable. Twenty questions in five sections is enough for most projects. The template is below.

Why the intake form is worth an hour of your time

Skip the questionnaire and you start half-blind. You guess the budget, assume the timeline, and learn in week three that the person approving your work is not the person who hired you.

The numbers on how often this goes wrong are not flattering. In a Wellingtone survey cited by monday.com, only 55% of organisations mostly or always create a scoping document as part of project planning, and only 36% mostly or always finish projects on budget. The page does not give the survey year, so read them as a rough picture and not a measurement.

Even teams with dedicated tools struggle to keep information in one place. In Rocketlane's State of Customer Onboarding 2025, 45% of the 950-plus onboarding professionals surveyed said their teams still grapple with siloed tools and information. If that is true of funded teams, a one-person business working from email threads has it worse.

Most disputes are not about money. They come from a gap between what the client pictured and what you built. An intake form closes that gap before you commit to a price, and it costs the client fifteen minutes.

It also gives you something to point to. "Here is what you told me on the fourth of March" is a calmer sentence than "I thought we agreed."

The five things every intake form must capture

Every strong intake covers the outcome, the budget, the timeline, the approval chain and the limits. Miss one and that is the bucket your project drowns in.

The outcome, in the client's words

Ask for the result behind the deliverable. Nobody wants a logo for its own sake. They want to look credible to investors next month. Nobody wants a website. They want more booked calls.

When you know the real goal, you can tell whether your proposal serves it and you can push back on a request that does not. A good question is: "When this project is finished and working well, what changes for your business?"

The budget, asked as a range

People dodge this question and then resent the number when it lands. Ask for a range and explain that it helps you scope the work to fit. If a client cannot name any range, you have learned something before spending a day on a proposal. Our guide to setting freelance pricing helps you decide what to say back.

The timeline and what is driving it

"As soon as possible" is not a date. Find the real one and the reason behind it: a launch, a trade show, a board meeting, a lapsing contract. The reason tells you how firm the date is and what a slip would cost.

The decision-maker and the approval chain

Who signs off on the work? Who else has to weigh in? A project approved by five people takes longer and changes shape more often than one approved by one. If you do not know the chain, you cannot price the revision rounds.

The limits

Ask what is out of scope, what they tried before that failed, and what a bad version of this project would look like. The negative space tells you as much as the request, and gives you a written line to point at when scope starts to grow.

A habit from user research helps here. The Nielsen Norman Group advises asking about specific past events and not about general processes, because a concrete memory brings back detail that an abstract question does not (NN/g on user interviews). So "Tell me about the last time you hired someone for this" will teach you more than "What do you look for in a designer?"

The template: 20 questions you can copy

Copy this, remove what does not fit your service, and send it as a form or a shared document. Keep it under twenty questions. A forty-question form gets abandoned halfway, and a half-finished form is worse than none.

Section A: about the business

1. What is the company or project name, and what do you do in one line?
2. Who is my main contact, and what is the best way to reach you?
3. Who else will review or approve the work? Please name everyone in the chain.
4. Who has final sign-off on deliverables and on the invoice?

Section B: the goal

1. In one or two sentences, what does this project need to achieve?
2. When it is finished and working well, what changes for your business?
3. How will you tell whether it worked? Sales, leads, time saved, an event that goes well.
4. Have you tried to solve this before? What happened?

Section C: scope and specifics

1. What do you expect to receive? Please list the deliverables.
2. What is out of scope? Is there anything you are not asking me to do?
3. Which examples, competitors or references do you like, and why?
4. Is there anything you definitely do not want? Styles, approaches, past mistakes.

Section D: budget and timeline

1. What budget range have you set aside for this work?
2. What is your ideal completion date, and what is driving it?
3. Is the deadline firm or flexible? What happens if it slips by a week?
4. How many rounds of revisions do you expect?

Section E: logistics and access

1. Which assets do you already have? Brand files, copy, logins, earlier work.
2. What do you need from me to get started, and when can you give me the items above?
3. How do you prefer to communicate, and how often? Email, calls, a shared portal, weekly updates.
4. Is there anything I have not asked that I should know before we start?

Keep the last question. Clients use it to raise the thing they assumed you already knew, which is usually the thing that would have caused trouble in week three.

What to do with the answers

Send a short written summary within a day: "Here is what I understood." Then check it against the template.

A few patterns to look for:

• The budget is far below what the stated deliverables cost. Say so now and offer a smaller scope. Do not quietly cut quality.
• The approval chain has more than two names. Build extra review time into the schedule and put a limit on revision rounds in the contract.
• The deadline has a hard external reason. That is a reason to charge for priority.
• Two answers contradict each other, such as "keep it simple" and a fifteen-item feature list. Ask which one wins.
• The out-of-scope answer is blank. Write your own list and send it back for agreement.

If the form raises more questions than it answers, book a call. A structured conversation is a good second step, and our discovery call guide gives you a script. Once the scope is clear, turn the answers into a written brief, as described in how to write a project brief.

For the discovery side, the Nielsen Norman Group describes discovery as the early phase where a team researches the problem and builds a shared view of the outcomes the project should achieve, and says it comes first so the team does not build a solution to an assumed or minor issue (NN/g on the discovery phase). Your intake form is the small-business version of that.

Put the agreement in writing

The intake answers should flow into the contract. New York City's Freelance Isn't Free Act, for example, gives freelance workers the right to a written contract, as the city's consumer and worker protection page states. Rules differ by place, so check yours with a lawyer, but the habit is useful everywhere: what was agreed should exist as a document both sides can read.

Practically, the answers feed four parts of a contract: the scope (questions 9 and 10), the schedule (14 and 15), the revisions (16) and the payment terms based on the budget (13). Copying the client's own wording into those clauses makes them hard to dispute.

How Delivvo turns the questionnaire into a form and a project

Delivvo gives you the questionnaire as a live form, and what clients type feeds the rest of the job.

Here is the flow:

1. Build the form in the inquiry form builder. It has 26 field types and takes up to 40 fields. Your 20 questions fit with room to spare.
2. Add a file field so clients can attach brand files and references. It accepts five files, 10 MB each by default and 25 MB at most.
3. Share the link (delivvo.io/f/yourname), a QR code or a snippet for your website. The form can also take submissions from WordPress, Wix, Webflow and Framer through webhooks.
4. Each submission lands on your lead board as a card with every answer attached, in the New column.
5. An automation can send an instant reply with your price list and a booking link, so the client is not waiting for you.
6. Build a quote from your packages and add-ons. When the client accepts, signs and pays the deposit, Delivvo creates the client, the project, the contract, the invoice and the payment schedule.

The detail a document template does not give you is that the client's answers stay attached to the lead and the project, so you do not copy them from an inbox into a brief. When the client pays, the money goes through your own gateway and Delivvo takes 0%.

You can start on the free plan with no card. See how the inquiry form works, or how the lead board holds each answer.

Read more about the lead board, or start with the CRM and client portal.

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