A staff departure should not erase the job history. Preserve the approval trail and help the replacement contact assess the account without inventing a new agreement.
Corporate Recovery Partners
01 / 06
The approval contact has left the company
A signage business follows up an accepted variation and discovers the project manager no longer works for the customer. The replacement manager says they cannot approve payment without understanding the change. The signage team has several emails but no consolidated record. The next task is an orderly handover of the evidence, not a fresh sales pitch.
Save the full email chain, attachments, quote version and any work instruction. Include dates and the departing person's role. Avoid relying on a screenshot that omits conditions or context.
If the approval was verbal, prepare a clearly dated recollection and locate supporting messages or witnesses. Do not create a retrospective signature or imply the replacement person authorised earlier work.
Ask the customer who now handles the project and which records they can access internally. Send a short chronology with an indexed document set. Make the handover easy to investigate.
Separate missing organisational knowledge from a denial of authority. If the customer disputes the former employee's power to approve, that requires a specific contractual assessment.
Match the approved change to the work completed and the amount charged. Include relevant delivery or completion evidence. Explain differences between the original order and final invoice.
Business.gov.au recommends documenting contract variations. Where the record is incomplete, identify the gap openly and ask what evidence would help resolve it rather than repeatedly forwarding the same message.
Request confirmation of the customer's position and the next payment step. Avoid accidentally treating the handover as an agreement to restart all payment timing.
If the account remains disputed, use the relevant resolution process with the assembled record. For later work, keep approvals in a shared job file so collection does not depend on one employee staying in place.
