Right away
Chakra is the fundamental life force necessary to perform even the most basic tasks. As said previously, chakra is split into two groups, physical and spiritual energy. Balancing the two are what allows for proper execution of techniques. If someone has proper chakra control, when they activate a technique, it should not take so much chakra to deplete them. However, someone with poor chakra control would use excessive chakra for techniques and run out of chakra faster. Additionally, there is a third part to chakra. For those who are capable of utilizing nature energy or senjutsu chakra, they also utilize nature energy alongside physical and spiritual energy. Doing so requires and incredible amount of chakra control and also a sizable chakra pool. Finally, chakra is what is used for techniques, including ninjutsu, genjutsu, and even taijutsu to increase power. When used in ninjutsu, the chakra can be shaped. Shape manipulation revolves around changing the structure of the raw chakra in an attack. The strongest example of shape manipulation is the Rasengan. The counterpart to shape manipulation is nature transformation which revolves around changing the chakra into elemental natures. Nature transformation generally takes more control and is more energy consuming. Also, it is incredibly difficult to balance high degrees of shape transformation with nature transformation. So techniques that utilizes both transformations would be Chidori which has less shape transformation than the Rasengan, but added with nature transformation.
That is what I know of Chakra.