What happens if my bookkeeper quits?

The twelve things that stop

Most owners picture the obvious one: nobody reconciles the bank. The list is longer, and most of it is invisible until the day it stops.

• Vendor bills sit unpaid because they arrive in a mailbox only one person reads.
• Payroll runs late because the provider portal has one login.
• The bank feed disconnects and nobody knows the re-auth steps.
• Sales tax is filed late; the deadline lived in one person's calendar.
• Customer statements stop going out.
• The month-end close does not happen, so you fly blind for a quarter.
• The accountant's questions go unanswered; they only ever emailed one address.
• Company card receipts pile up unmatched.
• Recurring vendor contracts auto-renew because the reminder was a personal task.
• The credit line covenant report is missed.
• Fixed-asset and inventory reconciliations quietly lapse.
• Somebody guesses at a journal entry to make the numbers close.

Which of these you can see today

Almost all of them leave a trace in your Microsoft 365 tenant, and none of it requires reading anyone's email. Who sends from the vendor-payments mailbox. Who organizes the monthly close meeting. Who is the only owner of the finance SharePoint site. Whose calendar holds the tax deadline. Which portal logins exist as enterprise apps with one assigned user.

Directory data is enough to draw the map. The map is usually uglier than the org chart.

A two-week plan

Week one: write the seat page. For the bookkeeper's seat, list every process they perform, every system they log into, and every vendor that only knows them. Add a second owner to each shared mailbox and site. Add a second login to each portal.

Week two: run one cycle with the backup. One bill batch, one payroll, one bank reconciliation, with the primary watching. Fix the surprises. Then repeat for the next seat.

What to write down today

If you do one thing after reading this, make it a single page titled with the bookkeeper's name and three columns: what only they do, what others can also do, and who is the named backup. A blank third column is the finding.