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.