A construction company brings on a new project coordinator - she gets a laptop, company email, and access to the scheduling software the team uses. There isn't any process, it just kicks off with a note to IT that says "set her up like XYZ". About a year later she takes a job with a competitor and the scramble begins to figure out what all she had access to.
This pattern shows up regardless of industry. Whatever gets skipped in the rush of someone's first week rarely stays skipped forever. It always comes back around, usually when that employee leaves and someone has to play detective to make sure the company isn't at risk.
Off-boarding gets most of the attention in these conversations, but clean off-boarding start with clean ONboardings. If things are set things up properly from the get-go, the last day is a short checklist. If they aren't...
Every new hire should get an account created in your identity management system, ideally Entra ID if you're a Microsoft 365 shop. Then every tool they'll use - CRM, project management, marketing, whatever - should be setup with Single Sign-On (SSO). With SSO in place, disabling the account removes their access to everything everywhere with one quick toggle. If not, then IT has to dip in and out of all the systems, one at a time, to get everything turned off.
You should also have a set policy for either company-owned devices or BYOD. Company hardware enrolled in a management system can be wiped and collected while personal devices can be a bit messier. If a personal device is unavoidable, require company email and files run through managed apps.
New hires often ask around for logins to whatever tool they need that day. A teammate might share credentials to save time, but now that shared login is the way access works for that tool going forward. It avoided friction in the moment, but is now a liability the day anyone using that shared login leaves.
The better habit is to keep your list of tools up to date, know what every role is going to need access to, and provisioning access properly from day one. Hopefully you're able to do so with SSO, even for tools that feel minor.
For businesses where staff manage ongoing client relationships, like construction project managers or account managers at a CPA firm, the relationship needs a home outside one person's inbox.
A shared mailbox, or better yet, a CRM platform where communication gets logged for anyone to reference means the business can maintain the relationship effectively as the people managing it change. Setting this in motion right away is far easier than trying to reconstruct months of context after someone has left.
A handover document doesn't need to be complicated. For each employee, it should list the account they were provisioned, every tool connected to that identity, any devices issued to them and its enrollment status, and any client or vendor relationship they're responsible for maintaining. Anything outside your identity system, like a vendor portal that only supports its own login, should get documented too along with who else can access it as a backup.
The document gets created during on-boarding and updated as the employee evolves. Then if the time comes for the employee to leave, the off-boarding manager simply works through the list
Every login created outside a central identity system becomes something someone has to remember months or years later, usually after that person is already gone. The best time to prevent an off-boarding headache is when the account gets created.
This doesn't require any special software, it's just making the decision to improve things for the organization and employees and then getting started. The biggest benefit is predictability - a business that knows exactly what every employee has access to isn't caught off guard by departures, audits, or an inquisitive client.