Part of the Benchmarking the finance function series.
A CFO onboarding plan is usually written from the new hire's perspective - the 100-day agenda, the stakeholder map, the quick wins. This article covers the other side: what the business should have prepared before the new CFO arrives, and what the incoming CFO should request in week one if it hasn't been. The handover pack is the starting point; the 100-day plan is what comes after it.
Why does the handover pack matter more than most businesses assume?
A thin handover is diagnostic information. If the pack doesn't exist, or exists only as a slide deck summarising the finance function's achievements, that gap tells the incoming CFO something material about how the function is run. The items listed below are not bureaucratic formalities; each one is a window into a specific operational or financial risk. Treat their absence accordingly.
What should the close calendar show?
The close calendar should show actual dates for the last three months, not target dates. Target dates tell the incoming CFO what the process is supposed to do; actual dates tell them what it does. A consistent three-day gap between target and actual is a different problem from a gap that varies between one day and nine. The calendar should also note which entities or workstreams caused the variance. Without the actuals, the incoming CFO inherits a fiction.
Which manual journals should be listed, and why does it matter who raises them?
The manual journal log should name every recurring and one-off manual journal posted in the last quarter, including the preparer and the approver. Manual journals are the single most common vector for both error and misstatement. If one person raises and approves a material recurring journal, that is a segregation-of-duties failure the incoming CFO needs to know about before the next close, not after the next audit finding.
What does the reconciliation status tell an incoming CFO?
Outstanding reconciliations, with their age, show where the balance sheet has not been substantiated. A reconciliation that is two weeks old at month-end is normal in some functions; one that is six months old is a liability. The pack should list every outstanding reconciliation, the account it relates to, the value of the unreconciled difference, and who owns it. Age and value together tell the story; either figure alone does not.
Where are the covenant and reporting deadlines?
Banking covenants, loan agreements, and reporting obligations to lenders or regulators carry hard deadlines. A breach of a reporting deadline is a technical default under most facility agreements, regardless of whether the underlying covenant is met. The incoming CFO needs a single document listing every obligation, the deadline, the current status, and who is responsible for delivery. This is not something to reconstruct from a filing cabinet in month two.
What belongs in the systems inventory?
The systems inventory should cover every application that touches financial data - ERP, consolidation tool, planning tool, reporting layer - together with licence status, contract renewal dates, and the name of the internal owner. It should also list the spreadsheets that carry load-bearing data: the ones where a corruption or a departure would stop the close. Spreadsheet dependency is one of the clearest indicators of where the Maturity Matrix score will land in Planning and budgeting, Consolidation, and Forecasting. If the incoming CFO asks where the function sits on a Manual-to-AI-embedded scale, the systems inventory is the first evidence.
What should the audit findings summary cover?
The last two audit cycles - both external and internal where applicable - should be summarised with each finding, its original severity, the agreed management response, and its current status. A finding marked as remediated that resurfaces in the following year is a more serious signal than a new finding. The incoming CFO should be able to see, at a glance, whether the function closes its own loops.
Why do customer and supplier exposures belong in a finance handover?
The top ten customer exposures, by revenue concentration and by outstanding receivables, and the top ten supplier exposures, by spend and by any single-source dependency, are credit and operational risk items that sit squarely in the CFO's remit. A customer representing twenty percent of revenue with ninety-day arrears is a treasury issue as much as a commercial one. This information rarely appears in a handover pack and frequently appears in the first board paper the new CFO has to write.
What does the finance team structure need to show?
The team structure should go beyond an org chart. It should show tenure in role, not just in the business, and should flag single points of failure: the person who is the only one who knows how to run the consolidation, the team of one in treasury, the statutory accountant due to leave in three months. Tenure and dependency together tell the incoming CFO where operational risk sits in the team before a departure makes it visible.
What three questions surface what the handover left out?
Three questions asked in week one reliably expose the gaps that a handover pack - even a good one - tends to leave.
What did we restate or correct in the last two years? Restatements and prior-period corrections are the audit trail of where the numbers were wrong. They reveal the quality of the underlying processes and the degree to which management was aware of problems before auditors raised them.
What does the auditor ask for every year that we scramble to produce? Every finance function has at least one annual request from the auditor that triggers a frantic search through files or a rebuild from source data. The answer to this question identifies the reconciliation that is never quite finished, the evidence that is never properly archived, or the process that exists only in one person's head.
Which number does nobody here trust? Every finance team has a number - a cost allocation, an intercompany balance, a cash flow line - that the team treats as approximate and everyone else treats as authoritative. Knowing which number it is before presenting it to the board is the difference between a manageable conversation and a credibility problem.
What does a thin handover actually mean?
A handover pack that doesn't exist, or that covers only the headline financials, reflects the maturity of the function. It is evidence that processes are not documented, that knowledge is held by individuals, and that the function has not been run in a way that assumes leadership continuity. That is useful information. It sets the agenda for the first sixty days more honestly than any optimistic briefing document would.
Once the handover is in hand - complete or partial - the next step is the 100-day plan: what the incoming CFO does with what they've found. That companion article covers the sequencing, the stakeholder priorities, and the first decisions. Read the 100-day CFO plan here.
Common questions
What should a CFO receive on the first day of a new role?
On day one, an incoming CFO should receive a close calendar showing actual rather than target dates for the last three months, a manual journal log with preparers and approvers named, an outstanding reconciliations schedule with ages and values, a covenant and reporting obligations summary with hard deadlines, a systems inventory including load-bearing spreadsheets, audit findings from the last two cycles with current status, top ten customer and supplier exposures, and a finance team structure showing tenure and single points of failure. Most organisations do not prepare all of these without being asked.
What questions should a new CFO ask in the first week?
Three questions consistently surface what a handover pack leaves out: what did the business restate or correct in the last two years, what does the auditor request every year that requires a scramble to produce, and which number does nobody in the finance team trust. Each answer points to a process gap, a documentation failure, or a data quality problem that will otherwise surface at an inconvenient moment.
Why does the close calendar need actual dates, not target dates?
Target dates describe the intended process; actual dates describe the real one. A consistent gap between the two is a different risk from a variable gap, and the source of variance - a specific entity, a workstream, a dependency - is only visible when actuals are recorded. An incoming CFO who inherits only target dates is working from a plan rather than from evidence.
What does a thin CFO handover pack indicate about the finance function?
A sparse or missing handover pack indicates that the finance function does not document its processes to a standard that supports leadership continuity. It suggests knowledge is held by individuals, that procedures are not written down, and that the function has not been managed with succession in mind. This is diagnostic information: it sets the agenda for the incoming CFO's first two months more accurately than a polished briefing would.
Why should manual journals list who raises them, not just the amounts?
Manual journals are the most common source of both error and misstatement in financial reporting. Listing the preparer and approver alongside each journal entry allows an incoming CFO to identify segregation-of-duties failures immediately - specifically, cases where one person raises and approves a material journal with no independent check. That is an internal control weakness that needs to be addressed before the next close cycle.