The step that gets skipped is never the laptop. Here is the checklist that catches the rest.
A departure that was never properly offboarded is live accounts, shared logins and API keys with nobody watching them. This free checklist covers what to close and when — from the day notice is given to the week after the last day — as a printable sheet and a spreadsheet.
What's inside
Offboarding Checklist
Word (.docx)- Per-departure header: who is leaving, role, last day, who is running the offboarding
- Four phases in the order they have to happen — when notice is given, the last day, within the week, afterwards
- Sixteen steps, each with a tick box, the role that normally does it, and an initials column
- Security steps first within each phase: identity-provider account, shared credentials and keys, devices, file ownership, vendor seats
- A closing block for the completion date — the one fact worth keeping after the sheet is filed
- "Moving this into ATLAS" mapping, and the standing threat this procedure mitigates
Offboarding Checklist (spreadsheet)
Excel & CSV- The same sixteen steps as rows: phase, step, owner, done, initials, notes
- Done column with a Yes / No / N/A dropdown in the Excel version
- Copy the sheet once per departure, or keep one tab per person
- CSV for anything that is not Excel
The same checklist ATLAS ships
These are the sixteen steps the People & Culture module carries as its default offboarding guide. In ATLAS the guide is editable, printable per departure, and paired with a completion date on each person's employment record — so "was this departure actually processed" has an answer on the record, and a departure with no date is flagged on your readiness checklist and chased in the weekly digest.
What it is and is not. The checklist names the kinds of access to close, not the accounts — your own systems and identity provider hold those. It is a practical governance aid, not legal or HR advice; notice periods, final pay and statutory paperwork vary by jurisdiction.
Get the free checklist
Word, Excel and CSV in one download. Enter your email and we'll send the link instantly.
What should an employee offboarding checklist include?
Five things, in order of how fast they cost you: disabling the identity-provider account and every session it holds; rotating any shared credentials, API keys and tokens the person could reach; collecting or remotely wiping devices, cards and keys; transferring ownership of files, mailboxes and any service registered in their name; and a second pass a few days later through every third-party tool for a seat or admin role that survived. The handover, the exit conversation and the final-pay paperwork sit around those, and a good checklist records who does each step and when it was done.
Why does offboarding matter for security and compliance?
"Access left active after someone leaves" is one of the most common findings in a small-organization security review, and one of the few that an insurer, an auditor or a buyer's diligence team will ask about by name. The question they ask is not whether you tried to be careful — it is whether a written procedure exists and whether somebody recorded that it ran for each departure. A completion date per leaver is the cheapest piece of evidence in the whole security posture, and the one most organizations under a hundred people do not have.
Prefer a record over a printout?
ATLAS keeps the employment register, the role register, both guides and a completion date per joiner and leaver — and tells you which departures are still open.