How do you keep track of what you agreed with a client?

Most client agreements at an agency are never written down in one place. The scope sits in a signed SOW, the exceptions in an email thread, the real decisions on a call, and the context in the head of the account lead who ran that call. That works until someone asks, three months later, whether the second round of revisions was included, and the only person who knows is on holiday or has left.

The cost shows up in two places. Scope: in PMI's 2018 Pulse of the Profession survey, 52% of projects completed in the previous 12 months experienced scope creep, which PMI defines as scope growing without matching changes to time, cost and resources. Memory: in a 2018 Panopto survey of 1,001 US employees, respondents estimated that 42% of the knowledge in their role was unique to them. When that person leaves, the record of what the client agreed to often leaves too.

Not every comment on a call is a commitment. These are the ones worth writing down, because they are the ones a client will quote back to you:

• Scope: the deliverables, how many rounds of revisions and what is explicitly out.
• Approvals: who on the client side signs off, and on what.
• Money: the fee, what triggers a change order and who on your side can agree to one.
• Dates: the ones the client can hold you to, and the ones that depend on them.
• Brand rules: claims you may not make, words to avoid, competitors you may not name.
• The starting point: how the brand performs before the work begins, so results have something to be measured against. A free brand scan gives you a dated read of whether an AI assistant knows the brand, which you can file with the rest.

A decision log is a running list, one line per decision, kept per client rather than per person. It needs five fields and one habit.

Keep it where the rest of the client's material lives, not in a personal notebook or a chat thread. A shared document works; a spreadsheet with one tab per client works. What doesn't work is a log only one person can open, because that person is exactly the one who might leave.

1. Date of the decision.
2. What was decided, in one sentence a stranger could read.
3. Who decided, by name, on the client side and on yours.
4. The source: the call, the email or the document where it happened.
5. What it changes: scope, budget, date or nothing.

The habit: within a day, every decision that changes scope, budget or a date goes back to the client in writing ("as agreed on today's call"). A reply, or the absence of an objection, turns a verbal agreement into one you can point to. Agencies need this more than most: the Agency Management Institute reports some of its member agencies weathering turnover of 35% or more a year.

Then run a handoff test once a quarter. Pick a client and ask someone who has never worked on it to answer three questions from the record alone: what is in scope, what changed since the SOW and who approved it. If they need to ask a colleague, the record is incomplete, and it costs less to find out now than during a dispute.

The written follow-up is the step teams skip, because it feels like admin. Keep it short enough that nobody can claim they had no time. Three lines do it: what was decided, what it changes and what happens next. For example: "As agreed on today's call: the launch moves to 14 November; the third round of revisions on the video is added at the change-order rate; we'll send the revised timeline by Friday."

Send it to the person on the client side who made the decision, copy whoever approves budget, and file it in the client's record the same day. If the client replies with a correction, the correction goes in the log too. It's the most cost-effective insurance an agency can buy.

In , a client's documents, meetings, briefs and notes sit in one record. Record a call or upload it and you get a transcript with speakers, a summary and action items. Ask in plain language ("what did we agree about revisions in May?") and every claim in the answer names the meeting, document or person it came from. When the record is silent, says so instead of guessing.

Two limits to know: there is no email connector, so an agreement that lives in an email has to be pasted in or saved as a document; and a watched Google Drive folder must be shared with anyone who has the link. Approved briefs and documents for the same client join the record without retyping.