My boarding house manager just quit and I did not have a written policy for anything

That last line should be pinned somewhere. What you described is one of the most common and most avoidable ways a boarding house operation falls apart, and the fact that you are sitting down this weekend to fix it is exactly the right response.

A few things worth building into those documents while you are writing them:

A manager agreement. Even if the next person is also a live-in tenant, the arrangement needs to be in writing: what tasks they own, what hours count, what the rent credit covers, and what notice period applies on both sides. A local landlord-tenant attorney can make this solid in one short consultation, because the line between "tenant with duties" and "employee" matters legally and varies by state. Worth a conversation before you sign anything with the next person.

A resident file for every room. Name, ID copy, emergency contact, payment method, move-in date, signed house rules. The money-order situation you described, where someone pays to a name you do not recognize, needs to be resolved before it gets complicated. I would not try to interpret what arrangement existed; I would sit down with that resident directly and get a straight answer.

A weekly task list the manager runs from, not improvises. If someone can pick it up on day one and run the operation, you have a system. If it only works because they know things, you have a dependency.

The strategy guide for boarding houses makes this point about operational complexity being the defining challenge of the model. It is not overstated.

What does your resident agreement currently look like, and does it address the shared-space rules at all? That would tell me where to focus next.

The money order made out to a name you don't recognize is the part I would stop everything for before the weekend documentation session. That is not a management gap. That is a potential subletting or name-shielding situation you need to understand right now. Either the resident has a reason to obscure who is actually paying, which matters for your liability, or your former manager had her own arrangement with him that you were financing without knowing it. Find out what name is on those MOs and whether that person has ever signed anything in your building before you write a single intake template.

On the documentation piece, when I was building out my own service-side due diligence frameworks I started stealing from franchise operations manuals, because those are written for the assumption that the person who knows everything will be gone by Tuesday. The McDonald's approach to a 9-room boarding house sounds absurd but it works: every task gets a trigger, a step sequence, and a fallback contact. Not because your next manager is incompetent, but because the task survives the person. The mid-month rent credit situation you described, she walked with money you could not claw back, that is exactly what franchise ops manuals handle with three sentences about proration on departure. You are doing the right thing this weekend. What is your plan for covering intake while you are writing the process, because those two things cannot both happen at the same time if you have a vacancy?

The payee name on that money order is the assumption doing the most work here, because if it resolves to her personal name or a side entity she created, you may have a tenant whose legal tenancy relationship runs to her rather than to you.

What was the arrangement she had with that guy, do you think she was skimming a side fee off him?

That one guy with the mystery money orders, I'd sit with him face to face before you hire anyone new.

The two residents with no emergency contacts would have kept me up at night before the manager even left. What do you actually have on them, ID copy, anything?

The assumption doing the most work in your weekend documentation project is that you know what the job actually is now that you've spent a week doing it. You probably do not, yet. A live-in manager at a 9-room weekly-pay house is running something closer to a micro-hospitality operation than a standard tenancy, and the tasks that surface in week one are the visible ones. What you will not see until month two or three are the social dynamics she was managing: who she kept separated in the common areas, which resident she called before calling you because he responded better to her, which intake applicant she turned away verbally and never logged. None of that fits on a task list. So when you build the SOP this weekend, build a column for judgment calls and write down every one you make this month, because that is what you will actually be handing to the next person.

On finding a replacement, the structure matters as much as the documentation. A rent credit arrangement with no written scope is what produced this situation, so the next version needs a written agreement that covers the credit amount, what terminates it, notice requirements on both sides, and what counts as a performance failure. The mid-month exit with a full month's credit is a clean example of what happens when none of those terms exist. Separately, for the money order situation: before you let that arrangement continue another week, find out who the payee is and whether that person has any legal relationship to your property, because if he has been paying a third party under some informal sublet or assignment, that is a tenancy dispute that exists right now whether you can see it or not. What does the lease or intake agreement that she used for that resident actually say, assuming one exists?

The "no document that said she couldn't" problem is the one that keeps costing people money, and it's almost always discovered exactly this way.

What's your plan for the interim while you're writing everything up? Are you absorbing her hours yourself until you find someone, or is there a tenant you're looking at for the role? Because in my limited reading on these, the replacement manager hire is where a lot of people just recreate the same undocumented situation with a new face.