Most Bookkeeping Handovers Go Wrong in the First Five Minutes
Not because the work is hard. Because people give notice before they have the files — and the one thing that is hard to fix afterwards is who owns the accounting subscription.
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If your bookkeeper’s name is on the accounting subscription, the file can travel with them. If your bookkeeper’s email address is the one that resets the passwords, so can everything else. Most owners find this out in the week they are trying to leave.
This checklist is what to collect, and in what order. Fifty-seven items across nine sections, starting with the eight that stop being available once the relationship ends.
What is in it
- Access and ownership — the eight things to confirm before you give notice
- The books — what to ask for as files you keep, not a screen someone shows you
- Bank, card and reconciliations — because your opening balance is only as good as these
- Payroll — and how to move it the way you would move a passport
- Contractors — the single most common gap, because the data lives in a folder
- Customers, suppliers and open items
- Documents and the paper trail
- The handover conversation — short, written, unemotional
- The first thirty days with the new firm
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Thank you — here is the checklist.
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A clean year boundary is the cheapest time to change providers: one closed period to hand over, one opening balance to agree. Mid-year means two sets of records and a reconciliation nobody owns.
If one line of the checklist is where yours is stuck, that is a half-hour conversation, not a project.