There's a moment most business owners quietly dread. Your bookkeeper — the one who knows where everything lives, who chases the odd unpaid invoice, who quietly keeps the ATO happy — tells you they're moving on. Retiring, changing careers, or life has simply pointed them somewhere else. Whatever the reason, the first instinct is almost always the same: find a replacement, and find one fast.
That instinct isn't wrong. But there's a step most people skip in the scramble, and skipping it costs far more than the hiring ever will. Before you replace the person, you need to capture the work.
The work that lives in someone’s head
Here's the problem. A good bookkeeper carries a surprising amount of your business around in their head. Which supplier is always late and needs a nudge on the 20th. The client who pays on a handshake and sorts the paperwork later. The quirk in your payroll where one staff member salary-sacrifices and another has a garnishee. The login that only works if you tick a particular box. None of that is written down anywhere, because it never needed to be — it lived with the person doing it. The day they leave, it walks out the door with them.
You don't notice straight away. The first week or two runs on momentum. Then super is due, or a BAS lands, or a customer queries an invoice from three months ago, and suddenly nobody can find the thread. The new person — however capable — is starting from a blank page, and you're paying them to rediscover things your last bookkeeper already knew.
Get the knowledge onto paper
So before you post the job ad, do this. Sit down with your outgoing bookkeeper while they're still willing to help, and get the knowledge out of their head and onto paper. It doesn't need to be fancy. A plain document will do.
Start with the calendar. What has to happen, and when? BAS, IAS, super guarantee, payroll runs, end-of-month, end-of-year. Write the dates and who it goes to. Then the systems and authorised access — accounting software, bank feeds, the ATO and any portals. Note who has access to what, and securely arrange authorised access for the incoming person through each system's own invitation or authorisation process. Confirm the business retains control, and don't share personal passwords, multi-factor authentication codes or identity credentials. Then the relationships: which suppliers and clients need handling a certain way, and any arrangement that isn't obvious from the ledger. Finally, the odd jobs — the small recurring tasks that don't fit neatly anywhere but still have to be done.
If your bookkeeper is leaving on good terms, most will happily walk you through this. It's the kind of handover any decent professional wants to leave behind. If the parting is less friendly, capture whatever you reasonably can and accept that some gaps are unavoidable — that's exactly why doing it early matters.
Hire against the real job
There's a second reason this is worth the effort, and it's the one people appreciate most later. Once the work is written down, you can actually see it. You can see whether it's a full role or a few hours a week. You can see whether you need a replacement at all, or whether a bookkeeping service could pick it up without you carrying an extra person on payroll. You hire against the real job, not against a vague sense of “we need someone for the books.”
Keep access and obligations covered
A quick word on the two things that trip people up. First, don't let access lapse. Before your bookkeeper leaves, confirm the incoming authorised person can access the systems they need, then remove the departing bookkeeper's access when their authority ends. Transfer business account ownership where needed through the provider's process, rather than handing over personal logins — for your security as much as anything. Second, keep paying your obligations on time through the gap. The ATO doesn't pause because you're between bookkeepers, and a missed lodgement in the handover period is the last thing you need on top of everything else.
Give the next person a clear starting point
Losing a good bookkeeper is genuinely unsettling. But the businesses that come through it well aren't the ones who replace fastest — they're the ones who take a breath, capture what the person knew, and then hire against a clear picture. Do that, and the next person steps into a role that's already been mapped, instead of spending their first month working out where the bodies are buried.
If you're facing a handover and aren't sure where to start, that first document is the whole game. Get it down while you still can.