In a small company, a departure is handled by whoever happens to be around. The manager says goodbye, someone collects the laptop, and the rest is left for later. Months afterwards an invoice goes unanswered because the leaver was the only one who knew about it, or an old account turns out to still be active.
None of this needs a large process. It needs one page that is used every time. This article describes what belongs on it, who should own each line and how to run it without turning a difficult week into a bureaucratic one. It is written for owners and managers of companies with roughly five to fifty people.
Three jobs, not one
"Offboarding" sounds like a single task, but it is three different ones with different owners and different deadlines:
- Access. Accounts, shared mailboxes, tools, passwords and keys that the person could use.
- Equipment. Laptop, phone, badge, keys, test devices, anything paid for by the company.
- Open work. Customers waiting for an answer, jobs half done, promises made, recurring duties.
Mixing them leads to the usual failure: the laptop comes back, everyone feels finished, and the other two jobs are never opened.
Start the page before the last day
As soon as the departure is known, the manager creates the page, ideally from a saved template. The top has four facts: the person's name, the last working day, the manager who owns the page and the person who will take over day-to-day contact. Everything else is a table with three columns: what, who, by when.
Keep it to one page. If it grows past that, you are probably listing things nobody will check.
Access: close it in a planned order
Begin with a list of what the person can reach. Do not rely on memory; check the places where access is actually granted: the company directory or email admin console, the main business tools, shared drives, the code or document repositories, the bank or payment portals, and any supplier portals. If you keep a record of who has access to what, as described in our article on access requests for business systems, this step takes minutes. If you do not, this is a good moment to start one.
Then decide the timing for each item:
- On the day, or before. Anything that touches money, customer data or production systems. If the departure is not friendly, do this before the conversation, not after it.
- On the last working day. Email sign-in, chat, shared drives and everyday tools.
- After a short delay. The mailbox itself. Do not delete it. Forward it to the successor or to the manager for thirty days, set an automatic reply that names a contact, and delete only when someone has confirmed nothing is missing.
Two details are often forgotten. First, shared passwords: if the person knew any, change them and write down who now holds them. Second, accounts that were registered with a personal email address or phone number. Ask the leaver directly where such accounts exist, and move ownership to a company address.
Equipment: collect it and note its state
For each item, write who collects it, when and how it is wiped or reused. A remote departure needs a prepaid return with a tracking number, and the page should record when it was sent and received. Before the device is wiped, ask the leaver whether any files exist only on it, and copy what the company needs.
Do not forget small things: office keys, parking cards, company credit cards, SIM cards and any software licences tied to the person rather than the company. Cancel or reassign each one, and note the date.
Open work: let the leaver list it, let the manager decide
The leaver knows what is in progress. The manager knows what matters. Use both.
Ask the person to write down, in a few lines each:
- active customers or suppliers and what is waiting on either side,
- jobs that are started but not finished, and where the files are,
- recurring duties, such as a monthly report or a renewal that falls due soon,
- promises made that are not written anywhere else.
Then the manager goes through the list and gives every item one new owner and a date by which that person has made contact or taken over. For customers, a short message from the successor within a few days is usually enough: who they are, that the previous contact has moved on and what will happen with the open matter. If the departing person can introduce the successor personally, that is better than any message.
For a longer view of passing a whole tool or system to someone else, see our piece on who owns an internal tool after its author leaves. The checklist here covers the broader week; that article goes deeper on one tool.
The conversation and the paperwork
Some parts depend on your country and contract, so check them with whoever advises you on employment matters: final pay, unused leave, return of company property, confidentiality and any notice or non-compete terms. This article does not give legal advice. What the checklist can do is make sure the dates and people are written down, so these questions are not forgotten in the rush.
Treat the leaver with respect. A person who is asked clearly and early to list their open work and return their equipment usually does it well. A person who finds the accounts closed without warning does not.
After the last day
A week later, the manager checks three things: the successor has contacted every customer on the list, nothing new has arrived for the old address that is unhandled, and every line on the page has a date. A month later, the mailbox forwarding ends and the account is removed, if the manager confirms it. Then the page is saved with the date and kept for a year.
At the end, spend ten minutes asking what was missing. Add that line to the template. After two or three departures the page will be right for your company in a way no generic list can be.
Common mistakes
- Owners such as "HR" or "IT". A line without a person's name is not done by anyone.
- Deleting too early. Remove the mailbox and you remove the history customers refer to.
- Forgetting accounts outside the directory. Supplier portals, social media pages and tools bought with a card are often missed.
- Treating open work as the leaver's problem. The manager decides who takes over; the leaver supplies the facts.
- No review. Without a note on what went wrong this time, the next departure repeats it.
A first step
Write the template today, before anyone is leaving. Use the three jobs above, four lines under each, and a name and date column. Test it against the last person who left, and note what it would have caught. That small exercise shows how much a one-page checklist is worth.
Sources
- Practical guidance based on common operational practice, offered as a planning aid. It is not legal or employment advice; check requirements for your country and contract. The examples are generic. No client results or performance figures are claimed in this article.