Client Notes: What to Write Down, and Where to Keep It
You hang up after forty minutes with a client. It's all in your head: what they want, what worries them, what you promised by Thursday. Three weeks later they call back — and you go looking. An email here, a line in a notebook, a document called "Call notes". Nothing says what was actually agreed.
You did take notes. The problem is almost never a lack of notes.
Most client notes record what was said. What you need later is what was decided, promised and preferred.
What people usually write, and why it doesn't help
The faithful transcript
Two pages that follow the call in order: the background, the tangents, the hesitations. Accurate, and unreadable a month on. Nobody rereads two pages before picking up the phone.
The keywords
"Budget", "redesign", "check with Claire". Crystal clear that evening, opaque a week later: which budget, checked what with Claire, and what did she say?
Anything you can find elsewhere
The address, the VAT number, the job title. All of it already sits in an email signature or on an invoice. Copying it out feels like keeping a tidy record, and adds nothing to what you know about the client.
The five lines that earn their place
A useful client note answers five questions. It usually fits in five lines.
- What was decided. "Going with the short version, delivery on the 14th." Not the discussion that led there — the conclusion.
- What you promised, and what they promised. "I send the revised quote Thursday. They send the logins." This is the line most often skipped, and the most expensive to lose.
- Numbers and names. The figure mentioned, the deadline, the first name of whoever signs off. These are the details memory bends first.
- Their preferences. They'd rather have a call than a long email. They hate being chased on Mondays. They decide quickly when shown two options, not five.
- The "unless". "Fine, unless the board says no in November." The caveat tacked onto the end of a sentence is the one that explains, two months later, why the project stopped.
Everything else can go without loss.
What to leave out
Client notes sometimes get reread in front of the client, shared with a partner, or requested by the client themselves. A simple rule covers it: write nothing you couldn't read aloud to them.
Judgements ("difficult", "doesn't get it") don't help you work with someone. The fact behind the judgement does: "asked for three rounds of changes on the last deliverable" tells you what to allow for in the next quote.
Leave out health, family and opinions too, whenever they have no bearing on the work. Keeping them isn't your job.
Where the note should live
A good note in the wrong place is a lost note. Three filing systems come up again and again, and two of them fail.
By date, in a notebook or one ever-growing document: to find the client, you have to remember which day you spoke.
By document, one file per meeting: by the tenth conversation there are ten files to open to piece the story together.
By person, every exchange in a row, most recent on top: the only system that matches the question you actually ask — "where are we with them?"
A client note belongs wherever you'll look right before you speak to them again: on their record, not in a folder.
If your client is a company where you deal with several people, the same logic applies one level up — covered in The best way to organize business contacts.
The right moment: the three minutes after
The five lines take three minutes on the way out of the meeting. The next day they take twenty, and half the numbers have gone soft. The full routine, from the preparation side, is in How to prepare for a client meeting; the short version is that the work happens at the end of one conversation, not at the start of the next.
Where Keepsake fits
In Keepsake, every contact has a profile with a timeline: each exchange is dated and typed (call, meeting, email), most recent first. A note or task written anywhere else lands on the profile as soon as you mention the person with @. Before a call, you open one page and find the decisions, the promises and the latest "unless". The details are in the contact profiles guide.
In short
Better client notes don't mean writing more. Five lines after each conversation — decided, promised, numbers and names, preferences, the "unless" — kept on the person's record, are enough to never again open a call with "remind me where we left off".
Try it on your next meeting: three minutes, five lines, straight afterwards.
Keepsake keeps your tasks, notes and contacts in one place, so everything has somewhere to go. Try it free for 30 days.