Most people leave a small shop on ordinary terms — a better job, a move, a family reason. Very little of what follows is about protecting yourself from someone. It is about making sure that six months later, your records still make sense.
The mistake that costs you the most
Disabling does the useful half and none of the harm. The login stops working immediately; the history stays intact and attributed.
The checklist
- 1
Disable their login, the same day
Not at the end of the week, and not once the handover is finished. Same day, every time, for everybody — which is what stops it looking like a comment on any individual.
- 2
Change anything shared that they knew
The payment app, the shop's email, a supplier portal, the wifi if it matters. Their own account being off does nothing about credentials that belonged to everybody.
- 3
Settle attendance and wages now
While you are both still in easy contact and both remember the last fortnight the same way. Attendance and payroll records exist so this is a lookup rather than a negotiation.
- 4
Reassign anything open in their name
Tasks assigned to them, a purchase order they raised and did not receive, a customer they were chasing. Otherwise these sit quietly forever, belonging to nobody.
- 5
Do a stock count on what they handled
Not as an accusation — as a clean line. It establishes what was there on the day the handover happened, which protects them as much as it protects you.
Why the same-day rule is worth keeping even for people you trust
If disabling access on the last day is what you always do, it means nothing about the individual. If it is something you do for some people and not others, then doing it becomes a statement, and everybody can read it.
The consistent version is also the one that actually protects you, because the situations where it matters most are exactly the ones where you are least inclined to follow a checklist.
The person taking over
- Give them their own login, not the leaver's. Reusing an account merges two people's work under one name and undoes the thing you were protecting.
- Set their permissions from the job, the same as anybody else — not by copying the previous person, whose access may have grown over years.
- Walk them through what the leaver actually did daily, which is rarely what the job description said.
- Expect a fortnight of small differences in the counts. New hands make ordinary mistakes and that is not a scandal.
Switch off the key. Leave the record alone. The two get confused because they feel like the same act, and they are opposites.