What to do in the first two weeks after your Finance Director resigns

Your Finance Director just resigned. The instinct is to start recruiting immediately.

Resist it for about a week. Recruiting is the only part of this that can wait, and the two weeks in front of you contain something that will not come back: a person who still works for you and still remembers how everything operates.

Most of the damage from a finance departure is not caused by the vacancy. It is caused by what walked out undocumented. Here is where the time actually goes.

First, find out what is genuinely at risk

Before any planning, establish what is due. Not broadly. Specifically, with dates.

• Grant reports and reimbursement requests due in the next ninety days
• Audit fieldwork dates, if the engagement is scheduled
• Board and finance committee meetings, and what each one expects
• Payroll run dates and who can actually approve one
• Filings, debt covenants, and insurance renewals
• Any funder commitment with a financial reporting condition attached

This takes an afternoon and it changes everything that follows. An organization with audit fieldwork in six weeks has a different problem from one whose audit is in March, and until you know which you are, you cannot prioritize.

Secure access before you need it

This is the item that becomes genuinely painful if you skip it, and it is easy to skip because it feels administrative.

Make a written list of every system the finance function touches: the accounting system, banking, payroll, the credit card portal, funder portals, the expense tool, the shared drive. For each one, record who the administrator is, who else has access, and how access is recovered if the current holder is gone.

Then make sure at least one other person, usually you, has administrator rights on each. Do this while the departing person is still there and still cooperative. Recovering a locked funder portal after the fact can take weeks, and the funder deadline will not move for it.

Sit with them and record how the recurring work is done

Not a document they write alone at the end. A conversation, recorded or written down as it happens, walking through an actual month.

Ask them to show you, in the system:

• How the close is performed, in order, including anything done outside the accounting system
• Which journal entries recur, and what drives the amounts
• How costs are allocated across programs and grants, and where that methodology came from
• Which reconciliations happen, how often, and which ones have quietly lapsed
• What each funder expects, in what format, and when
• The spreadsheet that feeds the board packet, and how it is built

That last one matters more than it sounds. In most organizations there is at least one spreadsheet nobody else understands that is load-bearing for the reporting.

Ask the question directly

At some point, ask: “What do you know about how this place runs financially that nobody else knows?”

People answer this honestly, particularly when they are leaving on good terms and want to be helpful. You will hear about the grant whose allocation is complicated, the vendor who invoices wrong every quarter, the account that never reconciles cleanly and why that is fine. None of it is written anywhere.

Do not let them quietly finish up

A departing employee with two weeks left and no structure will spend them tidying their own files and answering email. That is a waste of the only window you have.

Give the notice period an agenda. Capture first, then documentation, then whatever cleanup time remains. If they offer to be available afterward, accept, but do not plan around it. Goodwill fades quickly once someone has started a new job.

If they already left

The sequence is the same, but slower and more expensive, because you are reconstructing from records rather than asking a person.

Start with the most recent closed month and work forward to current, rather than trying to understand the whole history. Prior-year audit workpapers are the most useful document in the building, because an auditor already made someone explain how things worked. Then talk to the people adjacent to finance: the bookkeeper, the program managers who submit grant reports, the outside CPA. Each holds a piece.

Then recruit

With the recurring work stabilized and the deadlines mapped, you can hire on a reasonable timeline rather than an emergency one. You will write a better position description, because you now know what the role actually requires rather than what the last person happened to do.

And the candidate you want, the one with options, is far more likely to accept a job that looks like a functioning department than one that looks like a cleanup.