An account can already be un-recommendable when you take it over, and the client will think you did that
this is the one that costs money and nobody checks it at handover
instagram can stop showing an account to people who dont follow it without issuing a strike, without a notification, and while the account status screen still looks completely clean. if that already happened before you signed, everything you publish in month one underperforms, and the only story you have is that the algorithm changed. which is the exact sentence every bad contractor says. you cant prove it wasnt you because you have no before
trial reels are the cheapest way to get a before. a trial goes to non followers only, so what it does is mostly a statement about whether the account can reach strangers at all, separate from whether your creative is any good. post one in the first week, before you change the strategy, before you touch the grid, and screenshot the result. if it does nothing you have that documented on day three instead of arguing about it on day forty. and if it does fine, you now have a number to compare against when something drops later
the other half of this is the reporting habit. if youre only looking at reach and follows you cannot tell an account problem from a content problem, and those go on completely different slides. i would rather tell a client in week one that we have an account level issue and here is the plan, than spend six weeks making better videos into a wall
also worth saying, im inferring the recommendation link from how the feature is built rather than quoting anyone, so take it as a thing to test on your own accounts.
if you take over accounts, what do you actually check before you start, and has anyone put this kind of thing in the contract