People & HR

How to offboard a departing employee as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

When someone gives notice, you have two weeks to revoke 15 system accesses, coordinate final pay with whoever runs payroll that week, retrieve the laptop, calculate the PTO payout, and make sure their manager hasn't left tribal knowledge in their head alone. You're doing this on a sticky note and a prayer while Paylocity sits in one tab, BambooHR in another, Slack in a third, and your offboarding checklist Notion doc — last updated eight months ago — in a fourth. Nothing talks to anything. You miss a step, IT finds out a deprovisioned employee still had GitHub access three weeks later, and now that's a compliance conversation.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Small HR Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A connected offboarding tracker that pulls the departing employee's record from Paylocity or ADP and auto-populates their last day, PTO balance, and department so you never copy-paste the basics again

An automated checklist that fires task reminders to IT, the employee's manager, and yourself at the right intervals — day of notice, one week out, final day — without you having to manually chase anyone

A departure knowledge-capture workflow that prompts the exiting employee to document what only they know, stores it in a searchable wiki, and flags gaps before their last day

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 Paylocity data on a schedule — employee records, PTO balances, org structure — so the offboarding tracker auto-fills without manual data entry. BambooHR and Rippling are reachable from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the tracker needs headcount or employment status data. Gmail is synced directly by Starch so the email drafting workflow has full thread context. For any HR vendor portal that lacks an API — a benefits carrier site, a 401(k) administrator, a state unemployment portal — Starch automates those through your browser with no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me an offboarding task tracker that creates a checklist for each departing employee. Pull their name, department, manager, last day, and PTO balance from Paylocity. The checklist should have tasks grouped by owner — IT, HR, manager, and finance — with due dates relative to the last day. Show me a Kanban view by owner and a list view filtered to overdue items.

Set up a knowledge management space for offboarding documentation. When a departing employee is added to the tracker, create a page templated with sections for: current projects and status, recurring responsibilities, key contacts and relationships, passwords or credentials that need transfer, and any institutional knowledge their manager flagged. Alert me if the page is still less than 50% complete five days before their last day.

Build me an email triage workflow for offboarding communications. When I add a departing employee's name to the tracker, draft a pre-populated offboarding notice email to their manager, an IT deprovisioning request, and a final-day checklist confirmation to the employee. Let me review and send each with one click.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch has a live read on employee records, PTO balances, and org structure — this is the single source of truth for every offboarding task.

2 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch can read thread context and draft offboarding communications with the right names, dates, and tone already filled in.

3 Install the Task Manager app and describe the offboarding checklist you need: Starch generates a per-employee task list with owners (IT, manager, finance, HR), relative due dates, and a Kanban view grouped by department.

4 Install the Knowledge Management app and tell Starch to create a templated departure doc for each offboarding employee with sections for active projects, recurring responsibilities, key relationships, and credential transfer — auto-populated with whatever Paylocity has on file.

5 Tell Starch to set a 5-day-before-last-day alert: if the knowledge doc is less than 50% complete, send a Slack message to the employee's manager and add a P1 task to your list.

6 Use the Email Agent to draft the IT deprovisioning request, the manager notification, and the final-day checklist email — all pre-populated from the tracker — so each goes out with one review-and-send, not from scratch.

7 For benefits portals, 401(k) administrators, or state unemployment sites that have no direct integration, describe the steps to Starch and it automates those through your browser — no API needed — logging each completion back to the offboarding tracker.

8 On the employee's final day, Starch checks which tasks are still open, escalates unclosed items to the relevant owner via Slack, and marks the record complete in Paylocity once you confirm final pay is processed.

9 After the offboarding is closed, Starch flags any knowledge doc pages that are still stubs and prompts the manager to review or fill them before the 30-day mark, so institutional knowledge doesn't quietly expire.

10 Review a weekly summary in the offboarding tracker dashboard — number of active offboardings, tasks overdue by owner, PTO payout totals, and average time-to-close — so you can spot the recurring bottlenecks (it's always IT access, it's always IT access).

See this running on Starch

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

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Marcus Chen departure — April 2026, 6-year senior engineer, 18 days PTO balance

Sample numbers from a real run

PTO payout (18 days × $760/day)	13,680
Final payroll run coordination with Paylocity	0
System accesses to revoke (GitHub, AWS, Notion, Slack, Jira, 1Password, Okta, Zoom, Figma, Sentry, Linear, PagerDuty — 12 total)	0
Knowledge docs created for active projects (4 projects, 2 on-call runbooks)	0
Laptop retrieval scheduled via FedEx label automation through browser	0

Marcus gave two weeks' notice on April 7. The offboarding tracker pulled his record from Paylocity automatically — 18 days PTO balance, $760/day rate, last day April 18, reporting to the VP of Engineering. Starch created 24 tasks across four owners: IT got the deprovisioning list (12 systems), his manager got the knowledge-capture template pre-seeded with his four active projects and two on-call runbooks, finance got a PTO payout calculation task with the $13,680 number already computed, and HR got the final-day paperwork sequence. The Email Agent drafted the manager notification, the IT ticket, and the employee exit survey with names and dates filled in — three emails sent in under four minutes. By April 14, three of four knowledge docs were complete; Starch flagged the missing on-call runbook to the VP of Engineering via Slack. For the 401(k) rollover notification, Starch automated the carrier portal through the browser since it has no direct API. Final day: 11 of 12 system accesses were revoked on time (one PagerDuty escalation policy required manual manager approval — Starch flagged it at 9am with a P1 task). Marcus's knowledge base stayed live and searchable. Total HR time on this offboarding: roughly 3 hours spread across two weeks, down from the usual 7–9.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time-to-close per offboarding (target: all tasks complete within 5 business days of last day)

System access revocation rate on final day (target: 100% same-day; flag anything open at end of day)

Knowledge doc completion rate before last day (target: all flagged docs ≥80% complete)

PTO payout accuracy vs. Paylocity balance (zero discrepancies)

Manager task completion rate within SLA (are managers actually doing the handoff steps you assigned them)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Rippling or BambooHR native offboarding workflows

Solid if your whole stack is inside one HRIS, but the moment you need to coordinate IT systems, knowledge capture, or a vendor portal that lives outside the HRIS, you're back to manual follow-up — Starch connects those gaps.

Notion offboarding checklist template

Free and flexible, but entirely manual — someone has to remember to create the page, fill in the employee details, and chase people for updates; Starch automates the population and the reminders.

Workato or Zapier HR automation

Can automate some hand-offs between systems, but building and maintaining those flows requires technical setup time that a 2-person HR team realistically doesn't have; Starch takes a natural-language description and builds the workflow for you.

Google Sheets offboarding tracker

Almost every small HR team has one of these; it's free and you control it, but it can't send the reminders, draft the emails, or log the task completions back automatically — every update is still a human updating a cell.

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 connect to Paylocity, or is this an API I need to set up myself?

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, PTO balances, org structure, pay statements. You authenticate once and the data stays current. ADP works the same way. BambooHR and Rippling are reachable from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when your app needs them. You don't write any API code.

What about systems that don't have an integration — like our 401(k) carrier portal or the state unemployment portal?

If you can log into it through a browser, Starch can automate it. Describe the steps — 'log into [carrier URL], navigate to the termination notice form, fill in the employee name and last day, submit' — and Starch handles it through browser automation. No API needed.

We're not SOC 2 certified. Is Starch?

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's worth knowing if your company's security review requires it. It's on the roadmap, and it's an honest limit rather than one we'd paper over.

The Task Manager says it's currently in development. Can we still use it for offboarding checklists?

Task Manager is in beta — you can request access. In the meantime, you can build a custom offboarding tracker app by describing what you need to Starch directly: 'Build me a checklist app for offboarding with tasks grouped by owner, relative due dates from the last day, and overdue alerts.' Starch will build it as a custom surface.

Will Starch replace our HRIS?

No, and it's not trying to. Your HRIS (Paylocity, BambooHR, Rippling, ADP) is still the system of record for employee data. Starch connects to it and lets you build the in-between workflows — the offboarding tracker, the knowledge capture flow, the automated reminders — that your HRIS doesn't do on its own.

What if a manager ignores their offboarding tasks in the tracker? Can Starch actually chase them?

You can set up an automation that sends a Slack message to the manager (and optionally you) when their tasks are overdue by a configurable number of hours. Describe it: 'If any manager-owned offboarding task is incomplete 24 hours before its due date, send the manager a Slack DM with the task list and copy me.' Starch builds and runs that on schedule.

How does the knowledge capture actually work — are we expecting the departing employee to fill out a doc themselves?

The knowledge doc is created automatically and templated based on the employee's role and active projects pulled from the tracker. The employee gets a direct link with sections pre-labeled for what to fill in. You can also set an automation to prompt them via email or Slack at day 3 and day 8 of their notice period with a reminder and a completion percentage. Starch doesn't write the knowledge for them, but it removes every excuse for not starting.