People
Termination and leaving
Two dates that are not the same date, what closes when, and what deliberately does not.
Recording that somebody is leaving is an HR event. What it costs — final pay, gratuity, an accrued-leave payout — is payroll's output, computed from a snapshot rather than live from here.
The last working day is not the termination date
Collapsing them gets somebody's service wrong
Notice paid in lieu means somebody stops working weeks before their engagement legally ends. Treated as one date, either their service is cut short — costing them gratuity and notice — or they appear to have been working after they left. Both are recorded, and both are used.
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Last working day | The final day they actually work. Capacity, attendance and rotas stop here |
| Termination date | The day the engagement legally ends. Service, notice and statutory entitlement run to here |
| Notice given on | When notice was served, which is what a notice period is measured from |
| Notice worked | Whether they worked it or it was paid in lieu |
| Reason and who initiated it | Resignation, dismissal, redundancy, end of a fixed term — reported separately in turnover |
| Eligible for rehire | A judgement recorded at the time, while the people who made it are still here |
What recording it does
- Closes any engagement still in force, on the termination date.
- Sets the leaving date on the person's record.
- Flips their status to terminated only once that date has passed — somebody serving notice still works here, and showing them as gone would take them off rotas they are still on.
- Reports any leave request still pending back to you. It does not block: a request outstanding when somebody resigns is a decision somebody has to make, not a reason the resignation cannot be filed.
What it does not do
Nothing is deleted. Employment, tax and leave records are retained by law for years after somebody leaves, and the leave ledger is insert-only regardless. A leaver keeps their history, their documents and their balances; what changes is that they stop appearing in capacity, in rotas and in the active directory.
Erasing somebody is a separate and deliberate act, and it pseudonymises rather than deletes for exactly the reason above. See Audit, export and erasure.
Around the event
- Offboarding
- A checklist resolved the same way onboarding is. Tasks are materialised when it starts, so editing the template later does not rewrite a checklist somebody is halfway through.
- Equipment
- An asset still assigned to somebody whose last working day has passed is reported as held by a leaver — its own state, sorted first, rather than folded into the assigned count. A checklist task asks for the laptop back; the one thing nobody does on their last day is chase hardware. See Assets.
- Performance
- Somebody who left during a review period is still reviewed. There is a period to assess and a conversation owed, and skipping them is how a leaver's final review never happens.
- Access
- Suspending a login is separate from ending employment, and either can happen without the other. A directory can deprovision access while the employment record stays intact. See Provisioning.