Ingestion Contract Sign-Off (Onboarding)

Ingestion Contract Sign-Off (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Inventory every source system the client will hand over, with owner and refresh cadence

   List each SaaS app, database, ad platform, and file drop. Record who inside the client controls access and how often the data actually changes, not how often they claim it changes.

2. 02

   Classify each source as connector-ready, custom-extract, or out of scope

   A 300+ connector catalog such as Peliqan covers mainstream SaaS; anything behind a login wall or bespoke API needs a scraping or custom path, which changes the estimate by days, not hours.

3. 03

   Write the field-level contract before any pipeline is built

   Specify column names, types, nullability, timezone, and primary key for each entity. Ambiguity resolved in writing here prevents rework during delivery.

4. 04

   Confirm credential custody and rotation ownership in writing

   Decide whether the agency holds service-account keys or the client issues scoped tokens. Document who rotates them and what happens when a client offboards a staff member.

5. 05

   Set the freshness SLA per dataset and price it

   Hourly marketing spend data and monthly finance extracts carry very different orchestration costs. Attach a delivery window to each tier so scope creep has a reference point.

6. 06

   Run a one-week shadow load into a staging schema

   Load real data, not samples, and compare row counts and totals against the client's own reports. Discrepancies surfaced now are onboarding issues; surfaced later they are retainer disputes.

7. 07

   Get written client sign-off on the contract and the staging reconciliation

   A single signed artifact covering schema, SLA, and reconciliation becomes the baseline for every later change request.