The Five-Minute Departure Checklist: What to Verify the Moment a Rep Hands In Their Badge

The gap in every offboarding protocol.

Standard offboarding covers two things well: IT access revocation and HR paperwork. Badge returned. Laptop wiped. Final paycheck confirmed. COBRA notice sent. From an HR and IT perspective, the rep is gone.

From a revenue system perspective, they are still very much present. Their name is on 40 accounts in Salesforce. Their commission plan is still active in Xactly. Their email sequences are still running from a mailbox that will start bouncing within hours. Their territory is defined in the comp plan but owned by no one.

This checklist is for the revenue systems — the ones IT doesn't touch, that HR doesn't own, and that Finance doesn't notice until the period closes and the numbers don't add up.

Step 1: HRIS — Confirm the effective date.

Before touching anything else, confirm the official termination date in your HRIS and what pay period it falls in. This is the anchor date for everything downstream. A departure logged as effective on the 15th of the period is treated very differently by most comp tools than one logged on the 16th — especially if the 15th is mid-accelerator territory.

• Log into HRIS and confirm termination record is filed with correct effective date
• Note whether termination falls before or after the current pay period midpoint
• Document who authorized the termination and when the record was created
• Confirm status: voluntary resignation, involuntary, or negotiated departure

Step 2: CRM — Surface all account exposure.

Pull a report in your CRM filtered to accounts owned by the departed rep. This is the exposure list — every account that will be uncontacted, misrouted, or left in limbo without action. The report should include: account name, last activity date, opportunity stage (if applicable), and any active renewals.

• Filter CRM by owner = departed rep; export full account list
• Identify accounts with activity in the last 30 days — highest priority for immediate reassignment
• Flag any accounts with open opportunities, especially if close date is within 45 days
• Identify and cancel all active outreach sequences running from the rep's email
• Reassign accounts to interim owner (manager or named successor) before end of business

The accounts with recent activity are the ones most likely to generate inbound responses in the next 72 hours. Those are the ones that bounce if you don't act immediately. — Ken Lannon, OrgDrift

Step 3: ICM — Suspend the comp plan.

This is the step most often missed — because it requires a manual action in a system that most managers don't have access to, and the notification chain rarely includes whoever owns ICM administration. The comp plan needs a hard stop date equal to the HRIS effective termination date.

• Log into ICM tool (Xactly, CaptivateIQ, Spiff, etc.) and locate the rep's active plan
• Set plan end date to match HRIS termination effective date
• Document any open pipeline that was in-flight at departure — agree on credit policy before period closes
• Confirm whether any accelerator thresholds were reached before the effective date
• Notify Finance of the suspension for period reconciliation

Step 4: Verify cross-system agreement.

Once you've taken action in each system, run a quick cross-system verification. The goal is to confirm that your HRIS, CRM, and ICM all reflect the same reality: this person no longer works here, their accounts are reassigned, and their comp plan is closed.

If you are using OrgDrift, this is a CSV upload — HRIS export and CRM export — that will surface any remaining mismatches between the two systems. You will get a specific list of accounts still in the departed rep's name, territories still mapped to their ID, and any comp records that haven't been updated.

• Export HRIS termination record for the departed rep
• Export CRM account and owner report filtered to the rep's name
• Export ICM active plan status for the rep
• Verify all three reflect the same termination effective date
• Document the verification with a timestamp for audit purposes

Step 5: 30-day follow-up.

The acute phase of a departure is the first 72 hours. But the chronic phase runs for 30+ days. Territory coverage, open pipeline disposition, and comp true-ups all require follow-through after the initial offboarding. Set a 30-day calendar item to confirm that all accounts have been contacted by the new owner, that no commissions ran through the departed rep's plan after the effective date, and that the territory has been formally reassigned in both CRM and the comp plan.

OrgDrift ships this checklist as a structured field kit on the Verify tier — including the scan template pre-configured for departure scenarios, the cross-system verification prompts, and the 30-day follow-up protocol as a trackable workflow.