# Onboard a client in one sentence

> The onboarding page takes one sentence — name, contact, address, the work, how often, the price — and drafts the whole setup: client, site, billing contact, service line, and the first visit. You review an editable form, correct anything it misheard, and confirm. Nothing is written until you do. The extraction is deterministic pattern-matching against your own service catalogue, not an AI call, so what you see is exactly what gets stored.

URL: https://biloh.com.au/docs/how-to/onboard-a-client-in-one-sentence
Category: How-to guides | Audience: operator | Updated: 2026-08-19

Setting a client up by hand across menus is where onboarding data quality goes to die: a first-name-only client, no phone, an unassigned job, a blocked checklist. The one-sentence intake exists so the fastest path is also the complete one.

## How do I use it?

Open the onboarding page and type one sentence into **"Tell us about the client"** — the work, the client's name, the address, an email, the cadence, the price. Tap **Draft the setup**. The platform parses your words and shows a review form: client details, site address, the service matched from your own catalogue, the price in dollars, and the cadence — a one-off with its date, or a recurring frequency. Fix anything it misheard (a select per field — no hunting through menus), then tap **Confirm & create**.

One confirm creates the lot: the client (with type-appropriate defaults, each one declared on screen — nothing silent), the site, a billing contact from the email, the contract service line, and the visit itself, booked on its date. The onboarding checklist — billing contact, site, service, first job — reflects it immediately.

## What's actually doing the reading?

Deterministic extraction, on purpose. Emails, phone numbers, street addresses, dollar amounts, dates ("on 24 Aug" resolves forward — a date already past this year lands next year), one-off versus cadence words, and a token match of the work description against *your* service catalogue. No AI call, no invention: anything the parser can't place is shown back under **"Couldn't place these"** rather than guessed at. The review form is the contract — what you confirm is exactly what's stored.

## What does the parse cost if I abandon it?

Nothing. The draft step writes zero records — it's read-only against your catalogue. Only **Confirm & create** commits, and it drives the same onboarding engine the MCP `onboard_client` tool uses, so a client set up from a sentence is indistinguishable from one an agent set up in conversation.

## Can I turn it off?

Yes — it's a per-tenant setting (`onboard.narrative_intake_enabled`), editable from settings or by your agent. Off, the onboarding page simply offers the standard forms.

## Related

- [What a field-service scheduling engine should be able to express](/docs/explanation/what-a-scheduling-engine-should-express)
- [Migrate a client book from another system](/docs/how-to/migrate-a-client-book-from-another-system)
- [Send a proposal](/docs/how-to/send-a-proposal)