Volunteer Bookkeeper Leaving? A Handover Checklist

The person who has kept your charity's books for six years has just given notice. Most of what you need from them exists only in their head, on their laptop, or in an email account you cannot open. You have a short window in which they are still willing to help, and the order in which you use it matters. This is the handover, in sequence.

What is the first thing to do when a volunteer bookkeeper resigns?

Inventory what they hold before you do anything else. Not the books. The access.

Sit down with the outgoing volunteer and write out every system, account and location connected to your finances, and who can currently reach each one. Bank accounts. Your CRA account. The accounting software. Donation platforms and payment processors. The donor database. Any email address that receives financial correspondence. Physical files, wherever they actually are.

Do this while the relationship is friendly and the person is still engaged. An inventory taken in week one is a conversation. The same inventory attempted three months later is an investigation.

Do not start changing passwords yet. Locking out the person who knows where everything is, before you know where everything is, is the most common early mistake.

Where are your records, and are they legally in the right place?

Your original books and records must be kept at a Canadian address that CRA has on file for your charity, in a format that is accessible to your charity and to CRA. For a charity that has relied on a volunteer, they are usually on that volunteer's personal computer, in their personal cloud storage, or in a filing box in their basement.

Personal ownership of the device is not itself the statutory test. The test is location, accessibility and format. But a departing volunteer's personal device tends to fail all three at once: the charity cannot reach the records, nobody can confirm where they physically sit, and CRA's requirement is that records held outside Canada and made accessible electronically from Canada do not satisfy the rule. There is a governance problem alongside the compliance one, because the charity has no control over records it does not hold.

The handover is the moment to fix it. Move the records to the charity's address of record, or to a location the charity controls and CRA has been told about. Confirm what your charity's address on file actually is while you are at it, because it is often an address the organization left years ago.

What you need to move covers more than the ledger. Our guide to keeping proper books and records sets out the full obligation, and the retention periods below tell you what has to survive the move.

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What access has to change, and in what order?

Change signing authority first, system access second, and only after the records are secured. Reversing that order is how charities lock themselves out of their own accounts.

The sequence that works is this. Secure the records and the inventory. Deal with signing authority next, because banks commonly require a board resolution or similar authorization and this step takes longer than anything else on the list. Add the incoming person to each system alongside the outgoing one. Confirm the incoming person can actually get in. Then remove the outgoing person.

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The personal email address is the quiet failure. If your donation platform was registered under a volunteer's own address, password resets go to them after they leave, and recovering the account can take weeks.

What documents does the outgoing volunteer need to hand over?

Ask for the working papers, not just the financial statements. Statements tell you the answer. Working papers tell you how the answer was reached, which is what your next bookkeeper actually needs.

Request the following in writing, with a date attached:

Current-year transactions up to the handover date, reconciled to the last completed month. The most recent bank reconciliations for every account. A schedule of restricted funds showing what remains in each one and what it is for. Every grant agreement and funder reporting deadline. The last filed T3010 and the working papers behind it. Payroll records if the charity has staff. Any outstanding items: unrecorded transactions, unresolved differences, cheques that have not cleared.

Then ask for the thing that never gets written down. What does the outgoing volunteer know that is not in the file? Which funder wants reports in a particular format, which supplier is paid by cheque because they refuse e-transfers, why one bank account exists at all. An hour of that conversation, recorded, is worth more than any document on the list.

How do you cover the gap before a replacement starts?

Keep reconciliation running even if nothing else does. A charity can survive a few months without board reporting. It cannot easily survive a gap in reconciliation, because that is where a backlog starts.

Your immediate obligations do not pause because a volunteer left. The T3010 is still due within six months of your fiscal period end. Donation receipts still have to be issued correctly. Grant reporting deadlines still arrive.

Most charities in this position bridge with outsourced help, either for the interim or permanently. It is worth deciding which you are doing before you start, because the two produce different handover requirements. Our guide to hiring a charity bookkeeper covers the assessment.

Whatever you choose, record it. The board should minute who now holds financial responsibility, when signing authority changed, and where the records are kept. That minute is the document an auditor, a funder or CRA will ask for, and it is the one nobody thinks to create.

If you need continuity quickly, our charity bookkeeping service page sets out how an engagement starts, and our team page covers who does the work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Our treasurer kept everything on a personal laptop. What do we do?

Copy everything to a location the charity controls before their last day, and confirm that your charity's address on file with CRA is where your records are kept. The legal test is location, accessibility and format rather than who owns the device. In practice a departing volunteer's personal device fails on accessibility, which is reason enough to move the records.

How long should a handover take?

Allow four to six weeks if you have the choice. Bank signing authority changes are the long pole, because banks commonly require a board resolution or other authorization and then take time to process it. Requirements vary by institution, so ask yours early. Everything else can move faster.

Do we need to tell CRA that our treasurer changed?

Update your directors and authorized representatives so CRA's records reflect who is actually responsible. Director changes are also reported on your annual return through the directors and trustees worksheet. Removing a departing volunteer's access to your CRA account is a separate step and it is easy to forget.

What if the volunteer leaves before handing anything over?

Start from the bank. Complete statements for every account give you a third-party record of everything that moved through those accounts, which is the best available starting spine. It will not capture gifts in kind, grant restrictions, accruals, payroll detail or most source documents, so reconstruct those from payment processors, your payroll provider, funder agreements, suppliers and donor records.

Should we replace them with another volunteer?

That depends on how much continuity risk your charity can carry. A volunteer arrangement concentrates knowledge in one person, and this handover is what that concentration costs. Many charities move the record-keeping to an outsourced provider and keep a volunteer treasurer for oversight, which separates the two roles.

This article provides general information about bookkeeping practice and Canadian charity compliance. It is not accounting, tax or legal advice. Speak with a qualified adviser about your organization's circumstances.

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