--- title: "The day someone leaves: what to switch off and what to keep" source: https://www.lskhata.com/blog/the-day-someone-leaves category: "Team" language: en published: 2026-08-30 reading_time: 6 min --- # The day someone leaves: what to switch off and what to keep _Offboarding a staff member in a small shop, including the mistake that quietly destroys months of your own records._ ## In short - Disable the account the same day, not next week. This is the whole of the security part. - Never delete the person — deleting them orphans every bill and every entry that carried their name. - Settle wages and attendance while both of you are still talking easily. - Change any shared credentials they knew, which is the step everybody forgets. 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. _[Figure: Two different things, often confused. The access goes today; the record of what they did stays for good.]_ ### The mistake that costs you the most **Do not delete the person.** It feels like the tidy thing to do. It is the single most damaging step available to you here. Every bill they raised, every payment they took, every stock adjustment they made carried their name — that is the entire value of individual logins. Delete the person and you are left with months of entries attributable to nobody, at exactly the moment you might want to ask about one. 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. ## Common questions **Should I delete a staff member's account when they leave?** No. Disable it. Their past bills, stock adjustments and payments should keep their name attached — that is what makes your history readable. Deleting the person removes the name from months of records and leaves you with entries nobody can account for. **How quickly should I remove access?** The same day, as a matter of routine rather than suspicion. Most people leave on good terms and nothing would have happened; the point of doing it immediately every time is that it never becomes a signal about a particular person. **What do I do about shared passwords they knew?** Change them. This is the step most often missed, because disabling the individual account feels like the job is done. Anything shared — a payment app login, the shop's email, a supplier portal — was known to them and is still open. **What if they leave in the middle of a dispute?** Disable access first, then deal with the dispute. Those are separate matters and doing them in that order protects both of you: the records stop changing, which means the evidence for whatever is being discussed stops changing too.