Best practices for document management in customer onboarding

If you’ve led a customer onboarding or implementation project before, you know personally how important document management is to ensuring you wrap up on time and on budget. You also know that delays don’t usually happen all at once—they build quietly in the background. But there’s one milestone that’s more predictive of success (or delay) than any other:

Make a Document Management Plan in the first 30 days of a project.

Across hundreds of implementations, we’ve found that when customers submit key documents—business process overviews, compliance materials, data files, integrations—early, the implementation succeeds. When they don’t, the project almost always runs late. In the words of a leading Financial Services firm that we work extensively with, “we have a sh*t load of paperwork, and the customer hates it! Managing all the paperwork is the biggest time suck for every onboarding.”

How predictive is it to get documents on time? Our analysis shows across multiple mission critical industries and 100+ customers, a correlation coefficient of 0.84 between delays in document collection and late go-lives. That’s a stronger signal than almost anything else in your onboarding process. 

Why Document Collection Predicts Implementation Success

1. Customer Commitment Is Revealed Early
   When a customer quickly delivers business process documentation, it’s a strong signal they’ve prioritized your solution internally. It means they’re resourcing the project, carving out time, and ready to partner. If they lag—especially in the first 30 days—it’s often a sign of misalignment or competing priorities.
2. Process Discovery Gets Unblocked
   Without key documents, your implementation team is stuck in guessing mode. With them, you can align faster, configure more accurately, and eliminate scope creep. Early clarity prevents downstream rework.
3. Momentum Builds or Stalls Immediately
   Onboarding is a momentum game. Teams that hit early milestones keep moving. Those that stall often fall into a cycle of waiting, chasing, and resetting expectations—burning goodwill on both sides.

How to Stay Ahead: Make It Trackable, Visible, and Collaborative

To turn document collection into a strategic advantage, you need the right infrastructure. That’s where modern project tracking software, customer collaboration tools, and project status reminders come in:

• Clearly map your business process to ensure standardization across departments and teams that require documents in the onboarding process.
• Use project tracking tools (like TaskRay) to set clear milestones, assign owners, and track real-time progress on document-related tasks.
• Enable customer collaboration through shared onboarding workspaces or customer-facing portals where clients can upload docs, check their status, and see what’s coming next.
• Set automated project status reminders to nudge internal teams and customers on upcoming deadlines or overdue items—without having to chase manually.

These tools do more than create visibility—they change behavior by keeping momentum and accountability front and center.

Pro Tip: Build Document Collection Into Your First 30-Day Playbook

Don’t treat document collection as a passive step. Make it a formal go/no-go milestone in your methodology. Build it into your kickoff checklist. Highlight it in your customer onboarding guide. And reinforce it in every status call.

If you’re tracking implementation success today but not measuring this milestone explicitly, you’re missing your best early indicator. There are a number of powerful softwares that work well with both TaskRay and Salesforce. Below are the top 5 recommendations for businesses seeking to keep their document management process native to salesforce.

Recommended Document Management Software for Salesforce

Here are five top-rated document management tools that integrate well with Salesforce to streamline onboarding, compliance, and implementation:

1. Formstack Documents: Automate document generation directly from Salesforce data. Ideal for contracts, onboarding checklists, and process documentation. Drag-and-drop interface, with e-signature integrations.
2. Conga Composer: Popular for creating dynamic documents, presentations, and reports. Composer allows users to build templated output from Salesforce data while managing document workflows at scale.
3. DocuSign for Salesforce: The industry standard for secure digital signatures. Great for automating signed onboarding agreements and document tracking directly within Salesforce.
4. S-Docs: A 100% native Salesforce document generation solution. Useful for teams with strict data residency or compliance requirements.
5. Nintex Drawloop DocGen: Automates the creation and delivery of documents, contracts, and forms directly within Salesforce. Known for high configurability and scalability in enterprise environments.

Final Thought: Start with Certainty, Finish with Success

The best implementations don’t just “go well”—they’re set up to go well from the start. If your goal is on-time, high-impact onboarding, focus your team’s energy on getting the right documents and information from customers in the first 30 days.

Because once that milestone is hit, everything else flows faster.

Learn more about how to manage projects and documents in Salesforce:
TaskRay’s Salesforce Native Project Management App enables smarter and more effective document management in Salesforce. Learn more on our website at https://www.taskray.com.