An onboarding document is opened once by someone who has never seen your process before, then kept somewhere they can find it again.
Welcome to the Finance team
Accounts and access first, then a walk through the month-end close with whoever ran it last. Ask about anything that looks odd — it probably is.
Your first close alongside the team, then the handover of the two suppliers whose invoices arrive weekly.
A new client needs one place that says what to do first, second and third, without a call to explain what a step actually involves. An explanation that would slow down that first pass can wait behind its own line until someone needs it, and a copy that leaves the browser means the document survives being introduced once and referred back to for months. It has to work for the person arriving with no context, not the person who sold the relationship in the first place.
Steps that turn into a checklist, not a paragraph
Each step in the list can be ticked off as it is done, so what is finished and what is left shows item by item instead of being buried in a paragraph describing what should have happened by now.
A step that hides its own explanation until asked
What a step actually involves can fold shut beneath its own line, so a first pass through the document shows the run of steps without every explanation stacked underneath it.
A copy that leaves the browser when the handover is done
Export the finished document as a PDF, so it can be saved, forwarded as an attachment, or kept somewhere outside a link that could later be revoked.
Whether it got opened again once handover was "done"
You see whether the document was opened again after the first day, and which heading pulled them back for a second look — a clearer sign of where the handover did not fully stick than asking on a call.
An example — not your document. Sections are the document’s own headings.
Most of their attention went to “Checklist” — 2m 17s of 4m 00s.
Time each section spent on screen, counted only while the tab was in front and the reader was active. It shows what was in front of them, not what they read.
This page is about what a onboarding document has to do. For the blocks the editor is built from — see the editor.
A Notion page cannot become a plain PDF sent outside your workspace, and a PDF cannot be updated once it is sent. This document is edited once and can go out either way, as a link or as an export, from the same source.
No — ticking a box works for whoever is looking at it right then, but nothing saves that change. Reopen the same link tomorrow and every box starts unchecked again.
Not yet — start from a blank document; the checklist, the folded explanations, and the PDF export all work from the first step you write.