How to Create Employee Offboarding Checklist?

This article is intended for HR managers, professionals, IT managers and other people responsible for employee offboarding.

Why Businesses Need a Clear Process for Employee Offboarding?

An employee leaving the company is not just a formality. It’s a moment when the company often loses track of:

• who needs to return what
• who should cancel access to company systems
• what needs to be signed or archived
• what legal obligations apply when ending employment

Companies that don’t have a clear checklist for employee offboarding risk loss of assets, GDPR violations, security risks, and legal complications.

In this article, we will show you how to create a simple yet professional checklist for ending employment, how to tailor it to your company, and how software like Aptien can help you manage it.

How to Create a Checklist for Employee Offboarding 

1. Open the employee records. Here you have all employees sorted by job positions
2. Select any employee
3. Go to the "Activity Plans" tab, where you can create offboarding activities using activity plans
4. Click "Add Activity"
5. Name the employee offboarding activity according to your preferences  

 You can set up offboarding tasks for all employees, for specific job roles, or for individual employees.

• "For all" means the offboarding task will apply to every employee.
  
• "For category" means the offboarding task will apply to all employees in a specific job role. To create an offboarding task for a different role, select an employee with that role and create the task from their profile.
• "For this item only" means the offboarding task will apply only to the selected employee.
• You can set most employee offboarding tasks as one-time actions.

How to Schedule and Confirm Departure of a Specific Employee?

• Once the offboarding checklist is set up, a scheduling button will appear next to each activity
• You can then schedule and confirm these activities when the specific employee is leaving

Sample Employee Offboarding Checklist

Below is a sample checklist you can customize in Aptien or use as a template for your own process.

• Confirm resignation or mutual separation agreement
• Notify HR, IT, manager, and front desk
• Set the employee’s last working day
• Collect company equipment and property
• Revoke access to systems, software, and cloud services
• Process final paycheck and any owed compensation
• Provide exit paperwork (e.g., NDAs, agreements), employment verification, and work history
• Conduct exit interview and gather feedback
• Review data for HR and management
• Verify completion of all offboarding steps
• Archive the employee’s personnel file