Offboarding: the control everyone skips

Almost every small business has a good sense of how someone joins. Very few have written down how someone leaves. So the laptop comes back, the key card comes back, and the accounts stay open — sometimes for years.

This is the single most common finding in a small-business access review, and it is also the cheapest one to fix, because it costs a checklist rather than software.

Do this today

List everywhere a member of staff can log in. Email, file storage, accounting, the CRM, the phone system, the door system, any shared account.
Write the order of operations for a departure: disable rather than delete, transfer file ownership, revoke sessions and app passwords, forward the mailbox, collect the hardware.
Run it against the last person who left. If any of it is still live, you have your answer about how well the informal version works.

What good looks like

A departure is a checklist someone follows on the day, not an act of memory weeks later.

You disable first and delete later on a known schedule — deleting immediately destroys files and mail the business still needs.

Want someone to just do this for you? Start a conversation — twenty minutes, free.

Last reviewed: September 2026