The client book: what to record for every client site
A client book is one record per client: the sites you look after, every service behind them (domain, DNS, hosting, SSL, email, licences), who manages each one, who pays, and when it renews. It is not a password store or a project board. Here is the field list I use, and a free template that imports into Yven.
By Darren Harkness, founder of Yven. Published 13 October 2026. Last reviewed 13 October 2026.
I make Yven (Your View of Everything Necessary), a tool built around this idea, so I have a stake in it. Everything below works with a plain spreadsheet too, and I say where other tools do a job better. If you only want the layout, skip to building one in an afternoon.
The call that starts at 4:50 on a Friday
Here is a call you may recognise. A client’s site is showing a security warning and their owner wants it fixed before the weekend. To fix it you need to answer five questions quickly. Who holds the domain? Where is the DNS? Who runs the hosting? Is the certificate yours to renew, or does the host handle it? Who is paying for each of those?
If the answers live in six email threads, two dashboards and your memory, the next hour goes to finding them. A client book is the cure for that hour. It is the one place that says where each thing lives, who controls it, who pays for it and when it comes up again. You do not read it every day. You read it on the Friday when you need it.
Client, site, service
The book has three levels, and keeping them separate is most of the work.
A client is a person or company you do work for. Record a name, a company, a contact email, and any rate or currency that differs from your defaults. A site is the thing you tend: a primary URL, the platform it runs on (WordPress, Shopify, a custom build), and a status of live, staging or retired. Sites also earn four optional links, to the style guide, the documentation, the code repository and the contract, so the handover material is where you will look for it.
A service is anything behind a client that has an owner, a cost or a renewal: the domain, the DNS, the hosting, the certificate, email, a plugin licence, an analytics account, a payment processor. A single site usually has several services across different providers.
A service can hang off a site or sit with the client. A domain that serves two sites belongs to the client. So does the client’s email, which has nothing to do with any one website. A retired site can leave its domain behind, still renewing. If you only ever list sites, those services have nowhere honest to live, and they are exactly the ones that lapse.
The fields for every service
Each service gets the same ten fields. The list is short on purpose: every field answers a question you have asked on a bad day.
| Field | What to record | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Domain and DNS, hosting, certificate, email, plugin licence, and so on | What is this thing, and how should it be treated? |
| Provider | The company it is with, and the web address where you manage the account | Where do I log in to deal with it? |
| Managed by | You, the client, or a third party | Whose job is it when something breaks? |
| Paid by | You rebill it, you absorb it, or the client pays the provider directly | Who gets the invoice, and who gets the bill? |
| Renewal date | The next date it renews or expires | When will this bite me? |
| Period | Monthly, annual, or a number of years; blank if it never renews | What happens after that date? |
| Cost | What the provider charges for one period | What did I commit the client to? |
| Login pointer | The name of the entry in your password manager, never the password | Where is the secret kept? |
| Account identifier | The login email or username the service is registered under | Which account is this under? |
| Status | Active, lapsed, transferred or cancelled | Is this still live? |
Status is the field people skip. Resist deleting things that end: retire the site, archive the client, mark the service cancelled or transferred. Two years later someone asks whether you ever paid for that domain, and the history is the only thing that can answer.
Two of the other fields deserve a closer look because they cause most of the confusion: managed by, and paid by.
Managed by and paid by are two questions
Most sheets have one column called something like “owner”. It hides the two things that actually differ. Managing a service means you are the person who logs in when it needs attention. Paying for it means a card is charged. The same service can be any combination, and each combination changes what you do when the renewal arrives. Here are three cases. The clients are fictional.
Case 1: you manage it and the client pays directly
Harbor Dental registered their own domain at Namecheap on their own card, then asked you to handle the DNS. You are the one who makes changes, but the renewal notice goes to their inbox. Your job is to know the date, and to nudge them two weeks ahead so the notice does not sit unread. You record: managed by you, paid by the client directly.
Case 2: you manage it and rebill it
Northside Bakery’s hosting is in your account at your cost of $35 a month, and you add a 20% markup. You invoice $42 a month, pay the host $35, and keep $7. Over a year that is $504 billed, $420 paid out and $84 left over, which is a small piece of recurring income for keeping the account current and answering the phone when it breaks. You record: managed by you, paid by you and rebilled, with the markup kept private from the client. When you mark that service renewed, the charge belongs on the client’s next invoice, and it is far easier to remember that when the book says “rebilled” on the line.
Case 3: a third party manages it and the client pays
Riverside Law’s DNS is still held by the agency that built the site three years ago. The firm pays the agency’s bill. You do neither, but when the site goes dark on a Friday, the only useful fact in your book is the name of the person at that agency to call. You record: managed by a third party, paid by the client directly, and the provider and account identifier so you can ask for the right thing. A fourth combination, where you absorb the cost yourself, is common for small licences you decide to cover inside a monthly care plan.
None of these cases needs a clever tool. They need two separate columns and the habit of filling both in.
Pointers, never secrets
Every service has a login. The client book records where that login lives and which account it belongs to, and nothing more. The pointer is the name of the item in your password manager, for example “1Password › Bakery vault”. The account identifier is the email or username the service is registered under.
The reason is practical. A sheet or a database that holds client passwords becomes a target, and it makes you responsible for a secret you could have left in a tool built to hold it. A password manager is better at that job than any client book, and it should stay the home of the secret. Yven follows the same rule: it stores the pointer and the account identifier, and it does not store passwords.
What does not belong in a client book
A client book is a record of where things are, not a place to do the work, so a few things are better left out.
- Passwords and keys. Use a password manager.
- Uptime. A book can tell you who to call; it cannot tell you the site is down. Use a monitor for that.
- Tasks and project plans. Use a project board. The book only holds the facts the tasks depend on.
- The documents themselves. Store a link to the contract, the style guide or the handover notes against the site, and keep the files where they already live.
Keeping it true
A book that is wrong is worse than no book, because you will trust it on the Friday you most need it. Two habits keep it honest.
First, put a renewal date on everything that has one. A service with no date is invisible to any reminder, however good, and the ones that lapse are the ones nobody dated. If you manage domains, let the registry tell you the date where it can: Yven can look up a domain’s registration expiry, and when a domain does not publish one you type the date yourself.
Second, leave a dated line when you check. Once a month, or when you finish a job on a site, write a short note in your own words, such as “Checked DNS and renewals for Northside, all current”. In Yven the natural home for that is the work log, which also gives you a record of the checking. In a sheet, a notes column does the same job. The wording matters less than the date.
Third, leave a gap visible instead of guessing. If you do not know who pays for a service, say so in the book and find out on the next call. A guessed “client pays” is how an invoice never gets sent or a renewal never gets paid.
Build one in an afternoon
You do not need software to start. Pick your five most important clients and give each service one row. The free client asset tracking template has a Client Book tab laid out for exactly this, with the columns Client Name, Company, Email, Website, Asset Type, Label, Provider, Account, Renewal Date, Renewal Cost, Paid By and Managed By. Repeat the client on every row. Its Renewal radar tab sorts by what expires soonest.
A good first row looks like this, with a fictional client: Northside Bakery, type domain and DNS, label northsidebakery.ca, provider Namecheap, renews 14 March 2027, annual, cost $18, paid by the client directly, managed by you, login pointer “1Password › Bakery vault”. Ten seconds to write, and it answers the Friday call.
Do the clients with the most services first, because that is where the missing answers hide. Then add the rest as you touch them. An afternoon gets the five clients you would hate to lose a domain for into the book, and the habit of adding a row whenever you set something up does the rest.
When the sheet starts to feel like a chore, or you have missed a renewal, there is a way across. Export the Client Book tab as CSV and use the importer, which has four steps: upload, map columns, preview and import. The preview shows what will be created and which rows will be skipped before anything is written. If you are weighing the two, Yven vs a spreadsheet sets out when to keep the sheet and when to move.
Where to go next
- The free template, if you want to start today.
- The registry in the help centre, for how Yven records clients, sites and services.
- Renewals, for how dates become reminders.
- The Yven homepage, for the whole picture.