The treasurer resigns in March: a handover checklist

A treasurer resigning in June is an inconvenience. A treasurer resigning in March is a small institutional crisis, because a volunteer ensemble's financial year is front-loaded — dues came in during September, the spring concert is booked and partly paid for, and the donor statements went out in January from a laptop nobody else has touched.

It happens constantly. Jobs move, parents get ill, someone burns out on a role that turned out to be four hours a week rather than the one they were promised. The ensembles that survive it well are not the ones with better luck. They are the ones where the handover list existed before it was needed.

The real failure mode

It is almost never theft, and it is almost never incompetence. It is that the records were real but personal. The dues spreadsheet lived in a personal Google account. The bank's two-factor code went to a personal phone. The receipt template was a Word file on a home desktop. Everything the outgoing officer did was diligent, and none of it was reachable.

Six weeks later the new treasurer is reconstructing who paid dues in September from bank deposits, and getting it wrong, and sending a chase email to a violist who paid in cash at the second rehearsal.

Fourteen things to get in writing before the last handshake

Work through this in a single sitting with the outgoing officer present. It takes about ninety minutes and it is the highest-leverage ninety minutes on the board's calendar.

1. The bank. Which institution, which account numbers, who is currently a signer, and what your bylaws say about how many signers you need. Changing signers usually requires a board resolution and an in-branch visit — start it before the resignation is effective, not after.
2. Online banking access. Not the password. Whose name the login is in, where the two-factor code goes, and what has to happen to move it. This is the single most common thing to get stuck on, because the phone number belongs to a person who has stopped answering the group chat.
3. Every payment processor. Square, PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, the ticket platform. Which one is the ensemble's, which one is somebody's personal account being used for convenience, and where the payouts land. Any personal account in this list is a finding, and the fix is a new account, not a note.
4. The dues ledger as of today. Who has paid in full, who is partial, who is waived and by whose authority, and who has quietly not paid and been carried. That last category exists in every ensemble and is never written down.
5. Unbanked cash and uncashed checks. Anything sitting in an envelope in someone's car counts. Reconcile it that day.
6. Outstanding invoices, both directions. What the ensemble owes and what is owed to it, with dates. Include the handshake arrangements — the rehearsal space that invoices annually in arrears, the conductor's honorarium paid at season end.
7. Recurring charges. Insurance, music licensing, storage unit, website hosting, the domain renewal, the accounting software. Get the renewal dates and the card each one is on. A lapsed liability policy discovered at a concert is a very bad afternoon.
8. Filing status. Which annual return your organisation files with the IRS and when it was last filed, plus any state charitable-solicitation registration and annual report. Missed filings are recoverable; unknown missed filings are how exempt status gets revoked.
9. The donor file. Names, addresses, amounts, dates, and what was given in return. Also copies of the acknowledgment letters actually sent, not just the data they were built from. See the $250 letter for what those have to contain.
10. Grant obligations. Any award with a report still due, the report deadline, and where the supporting figures live. A missed final report can disqualify you from the next cycle.
11. Restricted funds. The memorial donation earmarked for percussion, the bequest for commissioning. What is restricted, by what document, and how much remains. Boards spend restricted money by accident more often than anyone admits.
12. Physical assets and where they are. Instruments on loan to members, the timpani in a member's garage, the trailer. With the member's name against each item.
13. The tax and legal documents themselves. Determination letter, EIN confirmation, articles, current bylaws, insurance certificate, W-9 for the ensemble. Somewhere the whole board can reach, today, without asking anyone.
14. An exit interview of one question. “What did you spend the most time on that you think should not have taken that long?” Whatever they say is the actual reason the role burns people out, and it is fixable for the next person.

The structural fix

A checklist is a patch. The reason a March resignation is a crisis at all is that the records were held rather than shared, and no amount of diligence at handover time changes that pattern for the next officer.

What actually breaks the cycle is boringly simple: the ensemble's records should live somewhere the ensemble owns, where more than one person can see them at all times, where a change of officer is a permission change rather than a migration. That is partly a software question and mostly a governance one. You can achieve it with shared organisational accounts and real discipline. Most ensembles do not, because the discipline is unpaid and the volunteer is tired.

A record only one person can reach is not a record. It is a favour, and it ends when they do.

The test to run at your next board meeting: if your treasurer stopped answering their phone tonight, name the things you could not get to by Friday. If the list is longer than two items, you have found this season's most useful project.

Rehearsal Letter exists partly because of this problem — the ledger, donor file, attendance history and board documents sit in the ensemble's own deployment and its own database, so an officer change is a role change and nothing has to be handed over on a laptop. This article is general operational guidance, not legal or tax advice; check your own bylaws and filing obligations.