When a client leaves your practice: handing back invoice follow-up
A client moves to another bookkeeper or takes it in-house. What to do with the reminders you were running, the access you hold and the data you pulled from their books.
Clients leave. They move to another bookkeeper, bring the books in-house, or close the business. If you were running invoice reminders for them, the handover has a few specific steps that are easy to forget, because the reminders keep going quietly in the background.
Stop what is scheduled, in this order
1. **Pause the reminders.** Before anything else, so nothing goes out in the middle of the handover. 2. **Tell the owner what is in flight.** A short list: customers who have promised a date, customers in dispute, and anything waiting for your client's approval. These are the items a new person would otherwise trip over. 3. **Agree who picks it up.** If the client is handing over to someone else, give them the list. If the owner is taking it on, give them the list and the current schedule.
Hand over a record, not just access
Export what you have: the customers, the open invoices, what has been sent and when. The new bookkeeper will want to see which reminders went out and what the customer said. A paper trail you can hand over is also protection for you if a customer later says they were never chased.
Remove your access
Disconnect the QuickBooks connection you set up, and take yourself off any shared accounts. In QuickBooks Online you can also remove the app from the client's connected apps list. Do this on the date you agreed, and tell the client you have done it.
Delete what you no longer need
If you pulled the client's invoices and customers into another tool, decide with the client what happens to that copy. Many practices keep nothing beyond what the engagement letter says they must retain. Put the answer in writing so it is the same for every client.
Write it into the engagement letter
The easiest handover is the one agreed at the start. A short clause covers it: how much notice, what you hand over, in what format, and when your access ends. Our post on onboarding a client to invoice follow-up has the matching start-of-engagement checklist.
Where Mugavi fits
In Mugavi, the owner or an admin can download one ZIP from Settings with the customers, invoices, reminders, what each customer owes and the statements emailed, or each as a single CSV. After you disconnect QuickBooks, Integrations shows what the sync left behind. You see the counts and then confirm. Only rows with that provider's id format are removed, and anything typed in by hand stays. It is refused while the connection is still active, a customer who also has a hand-typed or other-provider invoice is kept, and it cannot be undone, so export first. It removes Mugavi's copy and does not change anything in QuickBooks itself.
If you handle follow-up for several client books, the pilot plan for running reminders across client books shows how to start with one book and add the next. The service side of this work is in how a bookkeeper can sell invoice follow-up as a service.