My Bookkeeper Quit. What Do I Do Now?

Your bookkeeper quit. The books are probably in QuickBooks or Xero that you own — that's the good news. The bad news is that routine work (receipts, categorizations, reconciliations) is stacking up from day one, and every week you wait makes catch-up harder. Here's the playbook.

This week: preserve access

Before anything else, make sure you still have admin access to everything. That means QuickBooks or Xero, your bank and credit card logins, Dext or receipt-capture tools, Shopify or whatever sales platforms your bookkeeper was pulling from, and your payroll platform.

If your ex-bookkeeper was the primary admin on any of these, change that today. You're not accusing them of anything — you're just making sure no one gets locked out if something happens with their email or account. Most bookkeepers expect this and will help walk through it.

Also grab any notes they kept — usually a Google doc or Notion page with your chart of accounts quirks, recurring adjustments, or client-specific rules. This stuff lives in their head half the time, and whoever takes over will thank you.

This month: pick a path forward

You have three real options. Hire another part-time bookkeeper. Hire full-time. Or move to an outsourced accounting team. Each makes sense for a different size of business.

Another part-time bookkeeper costs $300 to $800 per month but recreates the single-point-of-failure problem you just lived through. Fine if your business is simple and you don't mind doing this dance again in 18 months.

Full-time in-house is $50K to $75K per year fully loaded. Worth it if you're doing $3M+ in revenue and have enough volume to keep a dedicated person busy. Below that, the role shrinks and you're paying for idle time.

An outsourced accounting team starts around $300 to $800 per month, includes the accountant review your part-time bookkeeper couldn't do, and doesn't quit on you because it's a team instead of a person. This is usually the right answer for businesses between $500K and $10M in revenue, especially if you've now lost a bookkeeper once.

Before tax season: catch up

If your bookkeeper left mid-year, you probably have 2-6 months of transactions that need categorizing and reconciling. Get a fixed-price cleanup quote — it usually runs $1,000 to $3,500 for 3-12 months depending on volume and complexity — and get it done before October. That gives your CPA a clean year-end package instead of a panicked scramble in March.

While you're catching up, don't hold onto receipts in an email folder. Get Dext or Hubdoc set up. It takes 30 minutes and it captures every receipt going forward automatically. This one change prevents about 80% of the "where did this charge come from" back-and-forth next year.

How to avoid repeating this

The underlying issue with solo bookkeepers — the thing people rarely name — is that you're one person's life away from this exact situation. They move, they have a kid, they change careers, they get overwhelmed. If you rebuild on a single-person dependency, you've booked yourself a sequel.

The practical alternative is either (a) formalize the part-time role with written process docs so handoff is possible, or (b) move to a team-based provider (in-house or outsourced) where the coverage is structural. Option (b) costs more than a solo bookkeeper — usually 20-30% more — but it's the thing that makes this the last time you have to do a mid-year scramble.