Lifecycle
Exits go wrong quietly, and then expensively.
A laptop nobody collected. Access that stayed live for four months. A final settlement calculated from a spreadsheet after the person had already left and stopped answering. None of these announce themselves — they are discovered later, usually by an auditor.
Clearance
A list with an owner, and a state that means stuck.
Clearance is checklists with items, each one owned by the function that has to do it — IT, finance, the manager. An item can be done, marked not applicable, or blocked.
That third state is the one most checklists lack, and it is the useful one. Without it, a handover somebody is stuck on looks exactly like a handover nobody has started, and the difference is the entire reason you are looking at the list nine days before the last working day.
- Laptop and access card returnedITDone
- System access revokedITDone
- Handover document signed offManagerBlocked
- Company card closedFinanceNot applicable
- Exit interviewHROpen
Five lists spawn, not one — HR, IT, the manager, finance, and the handover itself. Each has an owner and a due date, and an item can be submitted with evidence for somebody to verify or send back rather than simply ticked.
- Closing is refused while anything is open or blocked —
With the count in the message. You cannot close clearance on an exit where the handover never happened, which is the entire point of tracking it.
- Closing clearance starts the settlement —
Created from the exit, against the entity that actually employed them on their last working day — and refused, with an instruction, if no assignment covers that date.
- A stay conversation is a record, not a corridor chat —
Scheduled, held by a named person, with an outcome and a decision — keep them, or continue the exit. Most companies have this conversation and keep nothing from it.
- Finalising revokes access —
The act that ends the employment is the act that ends the login. Not a ticket raised afterwards.
- An exit can be retracted, before clearance closes —
People withdraw resignations, and up to that point the record supports it rather than forcing you to re-create somebody. Once the settlement exists, it is no longer a clean reversal.
- The employee resigns from their own portal —
With their preferred last working day and a reason. Their manager is notified, they can withdraw it themselves, and once HR accepts they watch their own notice period and their own list.
- The last working day can move —
Because it always does, and a date that cannot change is a date somebody keeps in a calendar instead.
The exit interview
Scheduled, recorded, and read by a person.
An exit interview is scheduled and then marked complete against the exit itself, with the notes and who conducted it — so whether it happened is a fact rather than a recollection.
Attrition itself is measured: exits by month and a headline rate sit on the people dashboard. Sentiment across the organisation is measured too, but through surveys — rating and score questions aggregated across a targeted audience, answerable anonymously — which is a far better instrument for it than a conversation held on somebody's last week.
What is not done is analysing these notes themselves, or breaking attrition down by exit type. The notes are written to be read.
What HR asks
Mostly about the parts that go wrong after the person has gone.
›Does access actually get revoked, or is it a reminder?
Finalising the exit disables the login. It is the same action, not a task that appears on somebody's list afterwards.
›What if the resignation is withdrawn?
Retract the exit — available until clearance closes and the settlement is created. The employee record is not re-created, and the period when an exit existed stays on the history.
›Who does the handover?
They do. The knowledge-transfer items are assigned to the person leaving and appear in their own portal — write the handover document, transfer the client relationships, hand over the credentials — each submitted with evidence and verified or sent back by their manager.
›Who chases the clearance items?
Each item has an owner, and blocked is a state somebody sets deliberately. The handover items chase themselves, because they sit in the departing person's own portal rather than on a list only HR reads.
›Does the employee start the process?
They can. Resignation is filed from their portal with their preferred last working day; HR keeps the final say on the date and the notice period when they accept.
›Can we use our own clearance checklists?
The starter set is fixed today — you can add checklists and items to an individual exit, but not define your own template for every exit.
›How does final settlement know what to recover?
It is created from the exit, so notice shortfall, outstanding loan recovery and unused leave are calculated against the same record rather than assembled from three places after the fact.
›Can we see our attrition rate?
Yes — exits by month over a window you choose, with a headline rate, on the people dashboard. What is not there is the why: attrition is not broken down by exit type, and nothing analyses the interview notes.
›How do we understand sentiment, if not from exit interviews?
Surveys. Rating and score questions, aimed at an audience you choose, answerable anonymously, with the distribution and averages aggregated per question. An exit interview is a sample of one taken at the worst possible moment; a survey is the instrument for the question you are actually asking.
›Do you analyse the exit interview notes themselves?
No. They are stored with who conducted the interview and when, and they are written to be read rather than scored.
Book a demo
Walk an exit end to end.
The retract is the one most products cannot do, and the one every HR team needs about twice a year.
- Block a clearance item and see what the list says
- Move the last working day after clearance has started
- Close it and follow the settlement that appears
- Retract an exit you already started