Onboarding a new account to signed go-live

How the SaaS pack runs onboarding from kick-off through set-up and training to a go-live acceptance the customer signs electronically.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.

The order form is signed and the sales team has moved on to the next deal. For the customer, though, nothing has happened yet. They are paying for software their staff cannot use, and every week of set-up that drifts is a week in which they wonder whether they chose the right supplier.

Onboarding is where many software companies lose accounts they have only just won. Not through a dramatic failure, but through slow, unclear handovers: nobody chased the customer for their user list, the integration waited on a key that was never sent, and "go-live" happened without anyone agreeing that it had.

The SaaS pack in Achekam's Industry CRM gives onboarding a fixed shape, from kick-off to a go-live acceptance the customer signs.

Kick-off and collecting the details you need

In the SaaS pack, projects are called onboarding projects, and the onboarding workflow starts with a kick-off. Use the kick-off call to agree the go-live date, the customer's project lead and what "live" will mean for them.

Straight after kick-off, the workflow collects onboarding details by request. A workflow step can send the customer a request for documents, and the customer's answer moves the task on. That replaces the familiar chain of e-mails asking for the same spreadsheet three times.

What you ask for depends on your product, but a typical request covers:

• the list of users, with their e-mail addresses and roles;
• the administrators who will be trained;
• details for each integration the customer wants connected;
• the data the customer wants brought across from their old system.

Ask for everything at once, with a due date. A customer who can see the whole list understands why go-live depends on them as much as on you.

Configuring users, integrations and data as tasks

Once the details arrive, the workflow moves on to configuration: setting up users, integrations and data. Each becomes a task on the onboarding project.

Tasks in the Industry CRM can have subtasks up to three levels deep. That suits configuration, which rarely fits in one line. "Integrations" might break down into each system the customer uses, and each of those into the steps of connecting and testing it.

The workflow creates its tasks stage by stage, so later tasks appear as earlier stages finish. The team sees what is due now, not a list of everything that will ever be due, and a stalled stage is easy to spot because nothing after it has started.

Training administrators

The pack's onboarding trains the customer's administrators before go-live. Administrators are the people who will add users, answer colleagues' questions and call your support desk, so they are the ones who need to understand the product properly.

Keep the training practical. Work in the customer's own configured workspace, using their own data where you can, and finish with the tasks they will do in their first month: adding a user, changing a role, checking an integration.

Go-live acceptance signed electronically

The onboarding workflow ends with a go-live acceptance that the customer signs electronically. That signature is the line between onboarding and normal service.

A good acceptance document is short and specific. It should say:

• what was set up: users, integrations and data;
• anything still outstanding, with an owner and a date;
• the date from which the customer considers the service live.

The signing uses Achekam's e-signing. You place signature and initials fields, choose whether people sign in order or all at once, set an expiry and reminders, and the signed PDF and its completion certificate are filed back into Documents. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures sets reliability criteria for treating an electronic signature as equivalent to a handwritten one, and is a basis for many national e-signature laws.

Why bother with a signature rather than a friendly "looks good" e-mail? Because go-live is the moment disputes later point back to. If the customer complains in month three that an integration never worked, a signed acceptance listing it as done, or as outstanding with a date, settles the conversation quickly.

Spotting an onboarding that has stalled

The Industry CRM's home-page counts come from records, tasks or the ledger, never from figures typed in by hand. Overdue tasks and tasks due today are among them. For an onboarding team, that is the early warning: a project whose configuration tasks are overdue is drifting, whatever the last status e-mail said. Look at the overdue count every morning, open anything that has slipped, and decide whether the hold-up is on your side or the customer's. If it is the customer's, tell them plainly what you are waiting for and what it does to the go-live date.

Who owns each step

The workflow lays out the steps; people still have to own them. Agree this table at kick-off and keep it with the onboarding project:

One name per cell is the goal. Where a cell says "the team", nobody owns it.

Onboarding begins where the sales process ends, so make sure the order form itself was right; see order forms: internal approval, then the customer signs. If a customer reduces seats during onboarding, credit notes when a customer reduces seats explains the correction. And if your own books still sit in a spreadsheet, moving a young company's books off spreadsheets is the place to start.

Before your next kick-off, draft the go-live acceptance first. Knowing exactly what the customer will be asked to sign makes every step before it easier to plan.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.