People & HR

How to offboard a departing employee as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

When someone leaves a 150-person company, you are the one who touches everything. You're the one Slacking IT to revoke access, emailing the CFO to cut the final paycheck, chasing the hiring manager to reassign their direct reports in ADP, and updating the org chart in Notion — all while coordinating between HR, Finance, Legal, and the departing employee's manager. Nothing breaks spectacularly; it just leaks. A system access stays open for three weeks. A recurring vendor invoice keeps going to the leaver's Gmail. A deal in HubSpot stays assigned to someone who left in March. There's no single tool for this — it's five tools, twelve Slack messages, and you carrying it in your head.

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People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A reusable offboarding checklist app that pulls employee data from ADP and Paylocity and tracks every step — access revocation, final paycheck, equipment return, benefits cutoff — through a single status view

Automated Slack notifications and Gmail drafts that fire at the right moment: manager briefed before the employee's last day, IT notified the morning of, Finance triggered for final pay run

An audit trail you can actually show: timestamped completion log per step, owner per task, and a Notion page auto-updated with the departing employee's role, handoff docs, and rehire status

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Task Manager Knowledge Management Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your ADP and Paylocity data on a schedule — employee records, org units, and pay data flow in automatically. Starch connects directly to Slack and Notion (both scheduled-sync providers), so status updates and handoff pages write back in real time. HubSpot deal reassignment is handled by connecting HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the offboarding task runs. Gmail drafts for manager and IT notifications go through Starch's direct Gmail connection.

Prompts to copy

Build me an employee offboarding tracker. When I enter a departing employee's name and last day, pull their record from ADP, create a checklist of offboarding tasks (access revocation, equipment return, final paycheck, benefits cutoff, HubSpot deal reassignment, Notion page handoff), assign each task to the right owner, set due dates relative to their last day, and show me a kanban view of what's open, in-progress, and done.

Every time a new offboarding is opened, draft a Slack message to the employee's manager and a separate one to IT, each with the relevant task list and deadlines pre-filled. Send the manager message 5 days before their last day and the IT message the morning of.

After the employee's last day, create a Notion page under our 'Departed Employees' database with their role, team, key handoff notes, and a link to the completed task checklist. Flag any open items that weren't completed.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect ADP and Paylocity so Starch syncs employee records on a schedule — name, role, manager, department, employment status, and pay data are available the moment you open an offboarding.

2 Connect Slack and Notion as scheduled-sync providers; connect HubSpot and Gmail from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query them live when tasks run.

3 Open Starch and type: 'Build me an employee offboarding tracker that generates a task checklist when I enter a name and last day, assigns owners, and shows a kanban view.' Starch builds the app.

4 Enter the departing employee's name — Starch pulls their ADP record and pre-fills their manager, department, and employment details. You confirm the last day and trigger the offboard.

5 The app generates the full task checklist: IT access revocation (due last day), equipment return (due last day), final paycheck confirmation via Paylocity (due pay cycle after last day), benefits cutoff notification (due last day), HubSpot deal reassignment (due 2 days before last day), and Notion handoff doc creation (due 3 days before last day).

6 The automation fires Slack messages to the relevant owners — manager, IT lead, Finance — each with their specific tasks and deadlines, drafted by the Email Agent and sent through Starch's Gmail connection.

7 HubSpot open deals assigned to the departing employee are surfaced in the checklist; the assigned sales manager gets a live-queried list from HubSpot so they can reassign before the person logs off for the last time.

8 Track completion in the kanban view throughout the offboarding window. Any task still open 24 hours before the last day triggers an automatic Slack nudge to the task owner.

9 On the last day, Starch auto-creates a Notion page in the 'Departed Employees' database using the Knowledge Management app: role, team, handoff notes, and a timestamped log of every completed task.

10 After offboarding closes, you get a summary in your Gmail inbox: tasks completed, tasks missed (with owner and reason), and a flag if any system access or vendor payment is still unresolved.

11 The completed checklist and Notion page live in Starch's audit trail — searchable if Finance, Legal, or a future audit needs to verify that offboarding was handled correctly and when.

12 Fork the app for different offboarding scenarios — standard departure, PIP termination, contractor end-of-engagement — each with a different task template and notification sequence, all built from the same connected data.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Marcus Chen departure — March 2026, Senior AE, 12 direct vendor relationships

Sample numbers from a real run

ADP employee record pulled	1
HubSpot deals reassigned (open pipeline)	4
Days until last day when checklist generated	10
Tasks auto-assigned across IT, Finance, Sales Ops	11
Slack notifications sent automatically	3
Hours you personally spent coordinating	2

Marcus is a Senior AE who gave 10 days notice in late February. He has 4 open HubSpot deals — two in negotiation, two in proposal — plus a Calendly link on the company website that would keep sending meeting requests to his Gmail after he left. The moment you entered his name and last day into the Starch offboarding app, it pulled his ADP record (manager: VP Sales, department: Revenue, pay cycle: bi-weekly), generated an 11-task checklist, and assigned owners: IT got access revocation, Finance got final pay confirmation via Paylocity, Sales Ops got HubSpot deal reassignment. Starch queried HubSpot live and surfaced all 4 open deals with deal size and stage. The VP Sales got a Slack message that morning with the deal list pre-formatted. By Marcus's last day, 10 of 11 tasks were marked done. The one open item — his Calendly link was still live — showed up flagged in your Gmail summary. You typed 'Starch, automate removal of Marcus's Calendly booking page through the browser' and it handled it. Total time you personally spent coordinating: under 2 hours across 10 days, versus the 6-8 hours a manual offboard at that seniority usually costs.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Offboarding task completion rate by last day (target: 100% of P1 tasks — access, final pay, system handoff)

Days from departure notice to full checklist generated and assigned (target: same day)

Open HubSpot deals reassigned before last day (no orphaned pipeline)

Notion handoff pages created per offboarding (audit trail coverage)

Hours of CoS time spent per offboarding (benchmark: under 2 hours for a standard departure)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Manual Notion checklist + Slack coordination

Works until you have more than 2 offboardings a quarter — after that the manual copy-paste, Slack chase, and forgotten steps compound into real risk; Starch generates and assigns the checklist from live employee data automatically.

BambooHR or Rippling native offboarding flows

Good for HR-specific steps like benefits cutoff and equipment tracking, but they don't touch HubSpot deal reassignment, Notion handoff docs, or Slack owner notifications — Starch connects all of those in one workflow.

Spreadsheet tracker owned by HR

Audit-able in theory, but it's always out of date, nobody knows who's responsible for updating it, and it doesn't actually trigger anything — Starch triggers actions and writes the audit log automatically.

Linear or Asana project template per offboarding

Task management is solid but you still have to manually create the project, pull employee data, assign owners, and fire the notifications yourself; Starch does all of that from a single natural-language trigger.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, knowledge management, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually write back to ADP or Paylocity, or is it read-only?

The ADP and Paylocity connections are read-only — Starch syncs employee records, pay data, and org units on a schedule but does not submit payroll runs or change records. For final paycheck processing, Starch surfaces the data and drafts the notification to Finance; the actual pay run happens in ADP or Paylocity as usual.

What if the departing employee's tools aren't in Starch's integration catalog — say a niche SaaS we use internally?

If it's a web-based tool, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. You'd describe the steps ('log into [tool], navigate to user management, deactivate this email address') and Starch handles it. That said, for access revocation of critical systems, you should still have a human confirm the step is done.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm asking because HR and payroll data is sensitive.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you route sensitive payroll or HR data through it. If your legal or security team has a hard requirement on SOC 2 Type II, that's a real constraint — worth raising with the Starch team directly.

Can I build different offboarding templates for different departure types — standard resignation vs. involuntary termination?

Yes. Describe each scenario to Starch ('build a checklist template for involuntary terminations that includes a Legal review step and skips the manager farewell Slack') and it builds a separate variant. You pick which template applies when you open a new offboarding.

The Email Agent and Task Manager are listed — are those both available now?

The Email Agent (founder-inbox) is live. Task Manager is currently in development — you can request beta access. For the offboarding workflow, the core checklist and automation functionality is built through the custom app you describe to Starch, not dependent on Task Manager being out of beta.

How long does it take to build this the first time?

Connecting ADP, Paylocity, Slack, Notion, Gmail, and HubSpot takes about 20-30 minutes including OAuth. Describing and iterating on the offboarding app usually takes another 30-45 minutes the first time — you'll refine the task list and notification timing based on how your company actually runs. After that, each new offboarding takes minutes to open.