The middle of a gap is where standards quietly slip. Months keep ending whether or not anybody is watching them, and a month that got skipped never comes back cheaply.
It is tempting to let the close slide while the chair is empty and catch up when the permanent person arrives. That trade almost never pays off.
A month left open loses the detail that made it easy. Bank feeds get harder to read, people forget what a payment was for, and whoever arrives in the new year inherits a puzzle where a business should have been.
Cash ties to the bank. Payroll lands where it belongs. Anything unusual gets a note on it while somebody can still remember what it was.
That is the minimum and it is genuinely not much. The polish can wait. The tie out cannot.
Reworking the chart of accounts, changing how jobs are costed, rebuilding a report pack. All of those are better done by the person who will have to live with them, so doing them during a gap wastes the work twice over.
The middle weeks are for keeping the record true. The improvements go on a list for whoever takes the chair.
Every month closed during the gap is a month the next person never has to reconstruct. It is the most valuable thing cover work produces and it is almost invisible while it is happening.
Closed months that tie, notes on anything odd, and a short list of the improvements that were deliberately left alone.
The strip is shape only, with no figures of yours anywhere on it.
Covering empty weeks is ordinary work, and a temporary chair does not come with a CPA credential. This desk has none. A firm that holds one still signs audits, reviews and assurance opinions, even in the middle of a gap, and if one falls inside your weeks you will hear that on the first call while the ordinary weeks carry on closing. Every part of that is set out on the disclosures page.
Source. Texas Occupations Code, sections 901.451 and 901.456, with 901.453 on reports expressing assurance. Read 29 September 2026.
Somebody has to decide, month by month, what genuinely has to be right and what is polish. Err one way and the cover costs more than the salary it replaced. Err the other way and the record rots while you wait.
Breadth is the desk closing the month also knowing what the return will need from it, so nothing gets tidied into the wrong place by somebody who will be gone before it matters. Height is the judgement about which work belongs to these weeks and which belongs to a person who has not arrived.
I assumed the months could wait. What I wanted was for the next person to start on solid ground.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice. A sentence about the gap span is enough to start.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.