A signed purchase agreement transfers ownership. It does not transfer working knowledge of the bank logins, the payroll cutoff dates, or which vendor contract quietly terminates on change of control. That gap between legal ownership and operational control is where most of the avoidable post-close fire drills happen — and almost all of them are preventable with a checklist run in the first two weeks, before anyone starts thinking about strategy.

The Items That Can't Wait for Week Three

Every acquisition has a version of the same story: a payroll run that almost didn't process because nobody confirmed the new signing authority in time, or a key vendor contract that had a change-of-control termination clause nobody read closely during diligence. These aren't exotic risks. They're the predictable cost of treating the first two weeks as a victory lap instead of a control exercise.

  1. Banking and signing authority. Confirm who can move money, on which accounts, effective the day of close — not the day someone gets around to updating the bank's records.
  2. Payroll and benefits continuity. Verify the next run processes correctly under the new entity structure, and that no employee sees a gap or error in their paycheck as their first experience of new ownership.
  3. Insurance and D&O coverage. Confirm the acquired entity is covered from day one, including directors' and officers' coverage for the new board and management structure.
  4. Change-of-control clauses. Pull the list of customer and vendor contracts flagged in diligence and confirm which require notice or consent, then start those conversations before the counterparty finds out some other way.
  5. Debt covenant review. If acquisition debt is in place, confirm the actual reporting obligations and deadlines — the first covenant report is not the moment to discover what's required.
  6. Retention conversations with the people who know where things are. The controller or bookkeeper who has run the finance function informally for years holds knowledge no data room fully captures. A short, direct conversation about their role going forward is worth more than any process document in week one.

None of this is complicated work. It's just work that has no natural owner in the chaos of a closing, which is exactly why it gets missed.

The Reporting Trap Most New Owners Fall Into

The other common mistake runs in the opposite direction: overcorrecting immediately with a full institutional reporting package before anyone understands how the business actually runs. A finance team that has never produced a board deck doesn't need twelve new templates in week one. It needs a CFO who can tell the difference between what has to be right immediately and what can be built deliberately over the next several weeks.

Key Insight

The first two weeks are about control, not capability. Trying to build the full reporting infrastructure before the immediate risks are contained is how sponsors end up with a beautiful board package built on numbers nobody has actually verified.

Once this list is clear — banking secured, payroll continuous, contracts reviewed, the right people retained — the real infrastructure work can start on solid ground instead of underneath it. That work, and the phased plan for building it over the following months, is what we cover in the 100-day CFO plan for PE portfolio companies. And when the reporting infrastructure is ready to go up, it's worth building it to the standard a sponsor actually expects rather than reinventing it twice — see what PE firms actually expect from portfolio company reporting.