Most of what a company loses when someone leaves is boring: logins that stay live for months, a password only one person had, a customer who keeps emailing someone who is gone. This free employee offboarding checklist prints on one page and covers the whole exit: 6 IT and access revocations, 5 knowledge transfer steps, 3 final pay and benefits lines, 6 equipment returns, and 4 exit interview questions, plus a last-day timeline you can work back from. The full HR Ops Kit adds a fill-in employee handbook and 5 form PDFs, linked at the bottom. Hiring the replacement first? The onboarding checklist template covers their first 90 days.
This is not legal advice. Employment rules vary by location: final-pay timing, benefits continuation, notice periods, and record retention are all treated differently by jurisdiction. The checklist here is generic, so have a qualified lawyer or advisor review anything you file, pay out, or hand out as policy.
Employee: ______________ Role: ______________ Manager: ______________ Last day: ______________
The last-day timeline, 5 steps
Offboarding fails when everything lands on the last day. Work back from the exit date instead.
| When | What happens |
|---|
| Two weeks out | Last day confirmed in writing, handover doc started, exit conversation on the calendar |
| One week out | Access list sent to IT, equipment return deadline set, customers and vendors told who takes over |
| Day before | Recurring tasks walked through live, key contacts introduced, stray files collected |
| Last day | Equipment returned, accounts shut down at end of day, goodbye note to the team |
| Week after | Final pay out on your normal payroll schedule, benefits questions routed to the named contact, exit notes filed |
The handover doc, 8 rows
The handover table is the part that saves you. One row per recurring task, with an owner and a link to the write-up. Example row is made up; the other 7 are yours to fill.
| Task | Owner | Doc link |
|---|
| Monthly invoice run (day 3, in the accounting tool) | Dana K. | drive/finance/invoice-run.md |
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Any task with no doc link gets a live walk-through before the last day. That rule is what stops the quiet stuff from disappearing.
Four offboarding mistakes
In my view, these four cause most of the damage. All four are fixable with the sheet above.
1. Orphaned accounts
The leaver's logins keep working because nobody owns turning them off. Three months later a former contractor still has the shared drive. One person owns access revocation, and access dies at end of day on the last day. That single rule removes the whole category of problem.
2. Tribal knowledge walks out the door
The tasks nobody ever documented leave with the person who did them. The invoice run that only works on Tuesdays, the vendor who answers one email address, the spreadsheet with the macro. The handover table forces a task, an owner, and a link, and anything without a link gets a live walk-through. Five rows of that beats an hour of "wait, how did you do X" messages a month later.
3. Improvising final pay and benefits
Questions about final pay and benefits show up weeks after the last day, when everyone has moved on and nobody remembers the details. Write the three lines on the sheet while the person is still in the room: the pay date, what continues and until when, and who fields the questions. Then check your payroll schedule and local rules against what you wrote, before you commit to it.
4. Skipping the exit conversation
The exit interview is the only unfiltered review of working there that you will get. My take: ask the same 4 questions every time, write the answers down, and read them together once a quarter. One leaver is an anecdote. Three leavers with the same answer is a scheduling problem, a pay problem, or a manager problem, and you want to know which.
What the full HR Ops Kit adds
- The fill-in employee handbook - all 12 sections written out, with 93 placeholder fields across the kit, so drafting means replacing brackets instead of staring at blank pages.
- 5 form PDFs, print-ready - the full 2-page offboarding checklist (20 rows across company assets, system access, exit steps, and knowledge transfer, plus sign-off lines), the 45-step onboarding checklist, an interview scorecard, a personnel record sheet, and an incident log.
- Plain formats - print the PDFs or edit the text file directly; everything is fill-in by design.
Full HR Ops Kit - fill-in handbook + 5 form PDFs, 93 placeholder fields →
one-time · PDF + editable text file · instant download · templates only, not legal advice