Introduction
Offboarding an employee is a critical process that ensures a smooth transition when someone leaves your company. Whether due to resignation, termination, or retirement, it's crucial to handle the departure professionally and efficiently to protect your company's interests and maintain a positive relationship with the departing employee. This guide will walk you through the essential steps to offboard an employee, covering everything from revoking access to company resources to ensuring proper documentation and compliance with legal requirements.
Ledgy's offboarding automation tool is only available for Scale+ customers.
Which offboarding options are available?
When it is necessary to organise an employee's exit from the company, it is easy to follow a step-by-step process on Ledgy.
There are three ways to begin the offboarding process for stakeholders:
In bulk - If you have a group of stakeholder with the same termination date and all need termination transactions.
Individual - If you have a single stakeholder with specific termination rules.
Workflows - If you have standardised leaver policies and want to automate offboarding activities.
Option 1: In bulk
Within the Stakeholders page, click the Offboard button at the top of the page.
Within the offboarding pop-up, you can choose to add more than one stakeholder from the drop-down:
Add the Termination date & Effective vesting date (if applicable).
Note: If an Effective vesting date is added, the amount of grants to terminate will be calculated based on this date. If left empty, the effective vesting date will be the termination date
(Optional) Toggling the Allow exercising button expands the menu so the collaborator can set the exercise window length.
(Optional) Stakeholders can optionally be notified of their exercise window by toggling on Notify affected stakeholders. The stakeholders will be notified via email on the day the exercise window opens.
Once 'Offboard' is entered and the workflow completed, any stakeholders affected will have a Termination transaction attached to them for the respective dates within Ownership > Transactions. This can be edited and changed retrospectively if necessary.
Important: In the event, a stakeholder is offboarded but still holds shares in the company, it is recommended that the email address be changed from work to personal, and then they are re-invited to the platform with said email. This ensures the cap table remains accurate, the stakeholder retains their access for transparency, and they are still able to receive any relevant communications in the future.
Option 2: Individual
Go to Stakeholders, and using the search bar on the top-right of the grid, enter the name of your leaver. Find the three-dot button on the stakeholder and choose Offboard stakeholder.
Within the offboarding pop-up, choose the Termination date & Effective vesting date (if applicable).
Note 1: If you have connected your HRIS to Ledgy, the Termination date will be automatically set based on your HRIS information.
Note 2: If an Effective vesting date is added, the amount of grants to terminate will be calculated based on this date. If left empty, the effective vesting date will be the termination date
(Optional) Define which group the stakeholder should be assigned to after offboarding.
(Optional) Toggling the Allow exercising button expands the menu so the collaborator can set the exercise window length.
(Optional) Stakeholders can optionally be notified of their exercise window by toggling on Notify affected stakeholders. The stakeholders will be notified via email on the day the exercise window opens.
If the Re-invite stakeholder via email toggle is off, stakeholder access will be revoked upon offboarding, and they will not be re-invited. If the Re-invite stakeholder via email toggle is on, the stakeholder will be re-invited. However, if the user account email is the same as the re-invitation email, the stakeholder will retain access and not be re-invited.
Note: If the offboarded stakeholder's stakeholder profile contains a personal email, the system will automatically pull the information into the field.
Define whether or not fractions of the unvested grants should be terminated. You can chose to Select all unvested which would automatically add all the unvested amount to terminate.
Once you click 'Offboard' and the workflow completed, any stakeholders affected will have a Termination transaction attached to them for the respective dates within Ownership > Transactions. This can be edited and changed retrospectively if necessary.
Option 3: Offboarding workflows
💡 Use this option if you have standardised leaver policies and want to automate offboarding activities with a single click.
Automated workflows enable you to create and group a series of offboarding actions, such as terminating unvested equity, re-inviting with a personal email, or moving individuals to a post-offboarding group. These workflows can be applied individually or in bulk and linked to specific predefined leaver reasons.
Step 1 - Create leaver reasons (set up once)
Go to Company settings > Data management > Leaver reasons
Add leaver reasons; these can be as simple as 'Good leaver' or 'Bad leaver', or more granular, such as 'Retirement', 'Redundancy' etc.
Step 2 - Create offboarding workflow (set up once)
Go to Equity plans > Workflows > View Workflows > Add Workflow
In the first sections you can select a name, and the leaver reasons for that workflow. You can select multiple leaver reasons, these will be shown as options when offboarding a stakeholder/employee. A leaver reason can only be linked to a single offboarding workflow.
Add a stakeholder post-offboarding group
Decide whether to re-invite stakeholders to Ledgy via their personal email, if available on their profile.
Add rules for vested equity. This section describes what happens to the vested equity of your stakeholder when they're offboarded. The options are:
Opportunity to retain — Vested equity remains untouched.
Exercise window — You can additionally select the option of creating an offboarding exercise window for that employee. Select the length and the settlement methods you'd like for that window.
Terminate grants — Generates termination transactions for all of the employee’s vested equity.
Add rules for unvested equity, this section describes what happens to the unvested equity of your stakeholder when they're offboarded. The options are:
Terminate immediately —- Unvested equity is terminated, generating one or more termination transactions, each dated with the offboarding date.
Continue vesting — Unvested equity continues at the granted vesting schedule.
Accelerate vesting — Accelerated vesting allows a stakeholder to receive all unvested equity at their offboarding date.
[Optional] Add plan-specific overrides. This section allows you to define custom rules for individual plans. For example, you might choose to terminate unvested equity but retain vested equity for a particular leaver reason—applying this special treatment only to that specific plan.
Select 'Add workflow'. Make sure your workflow is enabled.
Step 3 - Offboard stakeholders
Go to Stakeholders and select the stakeholder you'd like to offboard.
Select 'Offboard' from the island bar and select termination date and leaver reason.
Click 'Offboard' — all your termination transactions are now in draft state and waiting for publishing. Ledgy will create a termination transaction for every grant that needs terminating.
Understanding the Leaver status tag
Once you process the offboarding, you'll notice some changes on the Stakeholders grid:
The stakeholder will display a "Leaver" status tag next to their name. This tag indicates that a termination transaction has been recorded for this stakeholder.
If the termination transaction is still in draft state (e.g. when using workflows), the stakeholder will also show a "Leaver(i)" tag until the transaction is published.
The stakeholder's equity grants will reflect the termination — unvested amounts will be terminated according to the method you selected during offboarding.
Note: The "Leaver" tag is purely informational and does not affect the stakeholder's ability to access the dashboard if they've been re-invited with a personal email.
How to reverse an offboarding?
If you need to undo an offboarding — for example, if a stakeholder was offboarded in error or a departure has been rescinded — you can reverse the process by removing the termination transaction(s).
Steps to remove the termination transactions
Go to Ownership > Transactions.
Use the search bar or filters to locate the Termination transaction(s) for the stakeholder.
Click on the termination transaction to open it.
Delete the transaction by clicking the Delete button (trash icon).
If there are multiple termination transactions (e.g., one per grant), repeat for each.
Once all termination transactions have been deleted:
The stakeholder's equity grants will revert to their pre-offboarding state.
If the stakeholder's access was revoked during offboarding, you will need to re-invite them separately.
If an exercise window was also recreated, you'll need to delete this from the Equity Events > Windows page.
The "Leaver(i)" status tag will also not be automatically removed from the stakeholder's profile on the grid. You can manually remove this by clicking Edit on the stakeholder profile (via three-dot icon), then click the x next to the Leaver(i) tag that's placed adjacent to the Full name field:
Important: Deleting a termination transaction is a significant action. Make sure to review the impact on the stakeholder's equity position before proceeding. If transactions have already been published, consult your legal or equity administration team before reversing.
FAQs
Can I deactivate a workflow after using it without affecting employees who were already offboarded through it?
Yes. When an offboarding workflow runs, its rules are applied immediately and the results are permanent — termination transactions, exercise windows, status updates, and group reassignments are all written to the employee's record at the time of offboarding.
Once offboarding completes, there's no ongoing link between the employee's record and the workflow that was used. Deactivating or replacing a workflow only affects future offboardings — it simply prevents the workflow from being selected going forward.
Note: disabled workflows still count toward your plan limit.