What Belongs in a Client Record
Most practitioners keep session notes and nothing else, which means the practice's memory lives in one head. Here is the short list of fields that make a record useful to somebody other than the person who wrote it.
This one is useful whether or not you ever speak to me. It is the single change that costs the least and returns the most, and you can do it this week with whatever you already have.
Most practitioners keep session notes. Session notes are a record of what happened. They are not a record of what the practice knows about a person, and the difference decides whether anyone other than you can ever help.
The test
Here is how to tell whether your records are doing their job. Imagine you are unavailable for three weeks. Somebody trusted has to speak to a client on your behalf. Can they open one place and know enough not to embarrass you?
For almost everyone the answer is no, and the missing pieces are consistent. The notes describe sessions. They do not describe the relationship.
The fields that earn their place
Why they came. Not the presenting request, the actual one. People arrive asking for help with a decision and are usually dealing with something adjacent. Write the real thing, in their words where you can. This is the single most useful line in any record and it is the one most often missing, because at the time it seemed too obvious to write down.
What was happening in their life. The context that made this the moment. A merger. A new role. A parent getting older. Not gossip, and not everything they told you. The two or three facts that would make a message six months from now land as informed rather than generic.
What you agreed. Commitments in both directions, with dates. What they said they would do. What you said you would send, introduce them to, or think about. This is the field that most obviously separates a record from a diary, and I will come back to it.
Where they are in the arc. Beginning, middle, finishing, finished, dormant. One word. It is the field that lets you answer "who is drifting" without reading forty files.
What they have already had from you. Which program, which materials, which sessions, which recommendations. Nothing makes a practitioner look less attentive than offering somebody a thing they completed last year.
How they prefer to be reached, and what they have consented to. Channel, rough frequency, and anything they explicitly asked for or asked against. This is both a courtesy and, depending on your jurisdiction and your channel, a legal question worth taking seriously.
Who introduced them, and who they have introduced. Referral chains are the actual structure of most practices and almost nobody records them. You will want this eventually and you cannot reconstruct it later.
The commitment log is the important one
If you take one thing from this, take this.
A practice does not usually lose clients through bad work. It loses them through a promise made in a good conversation that then quietly did not happen. You said you would send the article. You said you would introduce them to someone. You said you would follow up in six weeks to see how the conversation with their board went.
At the time you meant all of it. Three clients later it is gone, and the loss is invisible to you and visible to them.
A commitment log fixes this and it needs exactly three fields: what was promised, by whom, by when. It does not need software. A single shared document works. What it needs is to be written during or immediately after the conversation, because a commitment recalled at the end of the week has already lost the details that made it specific.
What to leave out
Discipline here matters as much as the capture.
Leave out your private impressions of the person, unless they are clinically relevant and you are in a profession where that is the standard. Anything you would not want the client to read is a liability and, in many jurisdictions, a thing they may be entitled to read.
Leave out third-party details a client shared about somebody who is not your client. That is somebody else's information sitting in your file.
Leave out the transcript. A verbatim record of everything is not a memory system, it is a haystack. The purpose of the record is that somebody can be caught up in ninety seconds.
And be careful about where it lives. A record that is genuinely useful contains sensitive material by definition. Wherever you keep it should be somewhere you would be comfortable describing to the client.
Doing it without a project
Nobody has a free fortnight to backfill three hundred client records, so do not attempt that.
Start with the ones who are active now, and add the fields as you go rather than in one sitting. Then, when you have a quiet hour, work backwards through the people you would genuinely want to speak to again, and give each of them five minutes. You will find you remember more than you expect once there is a shape to put it in, and you will also discover which relationships you have lost the thread of entirely. That discovery is worth the hour on its own.
The point is not tidiness. The point is that the practice stops depending on one person's recall, which is the only version of a practice that can ever grow or take a holiday.