Client records

Whatever happens between somebody paying and their second session or meeting sets the tone for everything after it, and in most service businesses it is the least designed part of the work.

Probably not the one you are thinking of. The test is not what software you own, it is whether somebody other than you could find a client's history in the place they would naturally look.

Most service businesses keep notes on the work and nothing else, which means the business's memory lives in one or two heads. Here is the short list of fields that make a record useful to somebody other than the person who wrote it.

The moment a business takes on a second person, a new failure mode appears that a one-person operation never had. Things fall between people. The fix is boring, and the cost of not fixing it is not.