Offboarding is the part of staff turnover most likely to cost a small business something it cannot get back. Almost always it is the same loss: the mailbox. Work through the steps below in order and you will not have that problem.

The checklist, in order

1. Decide the leaving date and time. Not just the date - the hour. If someone finishes at 3pm on a Friday, their access should end at 3pm on the Friday, not at midnight and not on Monday. Send us both, and tell us whether they will be in the office or working remotely on their last day.
2. Sign the account out and block it. Do not delete it. We sign the account out of every device it is signed into, reset the password so nobody can sign back in, and block sign-in. The account still exists and the mailbox is still there - it just cannot be used. This is the single most important step on the list.
3. Convert or delegate the mailbox so replies are not lost. Either we give the manager, or whoever picks up the work, delegated access to the mailbox, or we convert it to a shared mailbox that a few people can watch. Either way the customer who replies to a three-week-old quote still reaches a human.
4. Set an out-of-office pointing to a real person. Short, factual, and with a name and address that works. "Jo no longer works here, please contact Sam at sam@..." is worth more than any redirect rule, because it tells the sender what to do instead of silently swallowing the message.
5. Redirect the phone. Mobile and extension. Voicemail greeting updated too - an old greeting in the departed person's voice is the thing customers mention months later.
6. Collect the hardware. Laptop, charger, monitors, phone, headset, security key, and anything at their home if they worked remotely. Write down what you expect back before the last day, because after it you will not remember.
7. Revoke access to third-party systems. The accounting package, payroll, the bank, the CRM, the supplier portals, the social media accounts, the domain registrar. We can only remove what we manage - the rest needs someone in your business to go in and remove the user. Keep a list; the day someone resigns is a bad time to start writing one.
8. Wipe the machine only once the data is confirmed to be somewhere else. Not before. Someone has to actually look at what is on the desktop, in the downloads folder, and in any local files, and confirm it is copied to the shared drive. Then we wipe and rebuild it for the next person.

The mistake we see most often

Deleting the account on the last day.

It feels like the tidy thing to do, and it looks like a cost saving because the licence stops. But deleting the account destroys the mailbox with it - years of quotes, approvals, supplier correspondence and the one email that proves what was agreed. There is a short recovery window after deletion and then it is genuinely gone. Not "hard to get back". Gone.

Keeping the account blocked but alive costs one licence. Losing the mailbox costs whatever the missing information turns out to be worth, and you generally find out three months later, when a customer disputes something.

Tell us when you no longer need the mailbox and we will deal with the licence properly - usually by converting it to a shared mailbox, which does not need a paid licence in most setups.

If the departure is not amicable

Plan it with us in advance, not afterwards.

A resignation on good terms can be handled in normal order. A dismissal, a dispute, or a departure to a competitor is different: access should be cut at a specific minute, usually while the conversation is happening, and it should be cut everywhere at once. That takes a small amount of preparation on our side and it cannot be done well from a phone call that starts "they left an hour ago".

Tell us the date and time, tell us it is sensitive, and we will have it ready and do it quietly. We do not need to know why.

Related

• Getting to a former employee's email and files
• Before you sell, trade in or bin an old phone or computer
• Why sharing one login between staff causes problems
• Someone is changing roles or going on extended leave

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.

Not a client yet?

This help centre is free to read and we would rather you fixed it yourself. If it has not worked, or you would rather someone just dealt with it:

The first call is free. Tell us what’s happening and we’ll tell you what we think it is, what fixing it involves, and what it’ll cost — before anything is charged. If it turns out to be a five-minute thing, we’ll usually just sort it out on the call.

Call 03 9028 4358 or email admin@yougrowit.com.au. Melbourne small businesses, Monday to Friday 8:30am–5:30pm. We don’t do home computers.