For an MSP, the first 30 days of a new client relationship are the most dangerous.
You’ve just signed a promising contract, but now you’re stepping into a digital minefield. You’re inheriting years of technical debt, undocumented “fixes,” and users who are skeptical of their new IT provider. If you nail the onboarding, you’ve built a foundation for a profitable, long-term partnership. If you stumble, you’ll be trapped in a cycle of reactive firefighting that kills your margins.
A successful onboarding isn’t just about moving tickets; it’s about total information capture. To help you standardize your process, we’ve built the ultimate MSP onboarding checklist. Use this to ensure no server, license, or “weird” legacy quirk is missed.
Phase 1: The Administrative Handover
Before a single password is changed, you need the “keys to the kingdom.”
- Existing Vendor List: Get a list of all 3rd-party vendors (ISPs, VoIP providers, Line-of-Business software) and Letter of Agency (LOA) forms signed.
- Contract Review: Confirm what is “In-Scope” vs. “Out-of-Scope” to prevent immediate scope creep.
- Point of Contact (POC) Roles: Identify the “Internal Champion” and the authorized decision-makers for emergency spending.
Phase 2: The “Deep Discovery” Technical Audit
You cannot support what you don’t know exists. This is the most labor-intensive part of the project.
- Network Mapping: Run a network discovery scan to identify every switch, firewall, and AP. (See our guide on Documenting a Network for specifics).
- Domain & DNS: Capture registrar logins, DNS hosting providers, and current MX records.
- Infrastructure Inventory: Document all physical and virtual servers, including OS versions, RAM/CPU specs, and storage health.
- Backup & DR Audit: Verify the current backup solution actually works. Test a file restore before you take official ownership.
Phase 3: Security & Identity Access
Securing the environment is your #1 priority on Day One.
- Administrative Password Reset: Change all “Domain Admin” and “Global Admin” passwords if authorized. Rotate local admin passwords via LAPS or similar.
- MFA Audit: Identify which critical accounts (email, VPN, etc) do not have MFA enabled and move them to the top of the “To-Do” list.
- Firewall Lockdown: Audit current NAT rules and open ports. Close anything that isn’t mission-critical.
Phase 4: The End-User Experience
This phase determines how the client’s employees perceive your value.
- RMM & Security Agent Deployment: Push your monitoring and antivirus agents to all workstations.
- Standardize Support Access: Install your helpdesk icon on every desktop and provide clear instructions on how to submit a ticket.
- User Training: Introduce the new IT team and provide guides for common transitions (like moving from an old VPN to your new solution).
The MSP Margin Killer: Documentation Debt
As an MSP, your profitability depends on Standardization.
Every hour a Level 2 tech spends explaining “How to set up email on an iPhone” to a new client’s employee is an hour of high-value labor that you can never get back.
But here is the catch: You know you need to document the client’s specific network, their custom ERP software, and their unique firewall rules. These are the “Internal” documents that only you can provide.
However, many MSPs get bogged down trying to also maintain a library of “Standard” guides for their clients—things like Microsoft 365, Slack, and Zoom.
This is a mistake. Keeping user-facing guides updated for every major software vendor is a full-time job. When Microsoft changes an interface, your client’s users get frustrated, your guides become “wrong,” and your helpdesk gets flooded with avoidable tickets.
How to Scale Your MSP Faster
The most successful MSPs don’t write their own generic software guides. They offload them.
Kandbe acts as your outsourced documentation department for user-facing business software. We provide a managed library of professional guides that are always up-to-date. When a vendor pushes an update, we handle the updates and the rewrite.
By using Kandbe to handle the “generic” support guides, your team can focus 100% of their onboarding energy on the Internal documentation that actually matters—the network maps, the server configs, and the client-specific SOPs.
Stop paying your techs to be technical writers. Let Kandbe handle the user guides so you can focus on scaling your MSP.
Ready to reclaim your techs’ time?
See how Kandbe handles all the user-facing documentation for your clients, letting you focus on the high-value work that grows your MRR.