When a client's point person is out for a month, the relationship goes quiet in a dangerous way: four people keep asking, none of them know what the others asked, and all of them assume you have it in hand. Here is the workbook that held.
The ticket number is the join key. Without it you have four documents; with it you have one record.
Most client relationships run on one person's memory. Theirs, usually: the marketing lead or the office manager who knows what was asked, what was approved, and what is still owed. When that person is suddenly out for a month, the relationship goes quiet in a specific and dangerous way. Requests keep arriving from four different people, none of whom know what the others have asked for, and every one of them assumes you have it in hand.
This is the workbook I built for exactly that month, for a client whose primary contact was out and whose website work did not stop. It held. Here is why.
Four tabs, one join key
Ticket tracker. One row per piece of work, keyed by the ticket number in the project tool. Title, page or URL affected, priority, status, who on our side owns it, who on the client side asked for it, a one-line description, and blockers or notes. That last column is where the truth lives: "assets received Thursday, awaiting approval from the second reviewer" is worth more than any status value.
Timeline and milestones. Dated rows: what happened, which ticket it belongs to, who did it, due date, completed date. Not a plan, a record. Reading it top to bottom tells you the story of the month without opening a single email.
Communication log. Every email and call: date, time, from, to, ticket, subject, a one-sentence summary, and the action item it produced. Logging communications feels like overhead until the day someone says "I never asked for that", and you can answer with the date and the time.
Contacts. Who on the client side approves what, who is covering for whom, and who is away. This is the tab that makes coverage possible: when the usual approver is out, the sheet says who can say yes instead, and you do not spend three days finding out.
The ticket number is the join key across the first three tabs. Without it you have four documents. With it you have one record you can filter from any direction: everything about ticket 1705, everything the deputy contact has asked for, everything still open with a due date this week.
What the discipline actually is
Log at the moment, not at the end of the day. A communication that is not logged within the hour is not logged. Put a ticket number on everything, even the request that arrived by text message; if it does not have one, create the ticket, then log it. Update the blockers column when the blocker changes, not when someone asks. And send the client a short weekly summary drawn straight from the tracker, so the coverage is visible to them and not just to you.
What went wrong
The comms log had a gap in the second week where I was moving fast and logging in batches. Reconstructing three days from an inbox took longer than logging them would have. The rule became: the log is the work, not a record of the work.
What it is for
When the primary contact came back, they got the workbook: every request, every approval, every date, in one place, with nothing missing and nothing they had to ask about. That is what coverage is supposed to feel like from the client's side. Quiet.