**Find out what a leaving employee holds by looking at the custody record, not by
asking around.** If handovers were recorded when they happened, the return list
already exists. If they were not, offboarding is where you discover it.
Every company has an offboarding checklist. Access revoked, email forwarded,
handover documented. The equipment line is on it too, and it is the one that gets
ticked optimistically.
Why it leaks
The failure is almost never a refusal. It is four ordinary gaps.
Nobody owned the collection. IT assumed the line manager was handling it. The
manager assumed IT was. Both were reasonable assumptions and neither made a
phone call.
It was collected on the last day. The last day is a bad day for this. There
are handovers, a lunch, someone's leaving card, and the laptop is the thing they
are still typing on at four in the afternoon.
Nobody knew the full list. The laptop was obvious. The second monitor at
home, the phone, the access card, the parking remote and the external drive were
not.
The register was wrong. It said they had a laptop. They had a laptop, a
docking station and a company phone, because two of those were handed over
informally at a desk eighteen months ago.
The one change that fixes most of it
Record custody at the moment of handover.
That is the whole intervention. Not a better checklist, not a stricter policy.
The reason offboarding fails is that the list of what somebody has is assembled
at the end, from memory, under time pressure, by people who were not present for
most of the handovers.
If the record is made when the thing changes hands, the leaver's list writes
itself and the checklist item becomes a five-second lookup.
In Wurxa the assets a person holds appear on their employee profile alongside
everything else about them, which means the person running offboarding does not
need to know the asset system exists. They open the employee, and the list is
there.
A checklist that survives contact with a real leaving date
Two weeks out. Pull the custody list. Send it to the employee, itemised, and
ask them to confirm what they actually have. This is where you find the docking
station nobody recorded.
One week out. Collect everything except the machine they are working on.
Monitors, phones, drives, access cards, keys, the parking remote. Check each item
back in as it arrives rather than at the end, because a pile in the corner is not
a record.
Last day. Collect the working machine. Check it in. Confirm the list is
empty.
After. If something is outstanding, chase it within the week. The probability
of recovery drops sharply once the final salary has been paid, and drops again
after a month.
The awkward one
If a former employee still has equipment, ask early and ask specifically, naming
the items and their tags.
Most non-returns are not refusals. They are the result of nobody asking clearly
while the person still felt some obligation to respond, followed by everybody
feeling it is now too awkward to raise.
Whether anything can be withheld from a final settlement in the UAE is a question
worth taking advice on rather than assuming, and the answer varies with contract
and circumstance. What is true regardless is that the settlement date is the last
moment anybody has attention on the process. Treat it as the deadline for the
conversation even if nothing is withheld.
What good looks like
You can tell whether offboarding works by asking one question of a company: **how
long does it take to answer "what does this person have?"**
If the answer is five seconds, the process works and the checklist is a
formality. If the answer involves asking IT and looking through emails, the
checklist is decorative and equipment is leaving the building at a rate nobody
has measured.
The gap between those two is not policy. It is whether somebody wrote down the
handover eighteen months ago.
Starting from a bad position
If you are reading this because somebody has already left with a laptop, the
register you needed did not exist and building it now will not recover that
machine.
It will make the next one recoverable, and there is always a next one. Start with
the people most likely to leave in the next year and the equipment that would
actually hurt to lose. That is a short list, and it takes an afternoon.
The part that is about security, not property
An uncollected laptop is not only a missing asset. It is a device that may still
hold company documents, cached credentials and an email client that was signed in
when it left.
Access revocation and equipment collection are usually run by different people on
different schedules, which means there is often a window where the account is
disabled but the machine is still out there with data on it. For most companies
that window is measured in weeks.
Two things narrow it:
Treat the device list as part of the security offboarding, not the HR one.
The question "what have they still got" belongs beside "what can they still log
into", and both should be answered on the same day.
Record the return, not just the collection. A laptop in a drawer awaiting
wipe is not the same state as a laptop returned to stock. If the register cannot
tell those apart, nobody knows which machines still hold data.
This is the argument that usually unlocks budget and attention for asset
tracking, incidentally. Equipment loss is an expense; unretrieved data is a
different category of problem.
What happens to the equipment afterwards
Collection is half the process. The other half is deciding what the returned item
now is, and it is the half that gets skipped.
A laptop that comes back and sits in a cupboard is in an ambiguous state: not
assigned, not available, not retired. Six months later nobody can say whether it
works, whether it was wiped, or whether it should have been part of the last
hardware order that was placed instead of using it.
Give returned equipment one of three outcomes on the day it arrives:
Back to stock. Wiped, working, available for the next joiner. This is the
outcome that saves money, and it only happens if somebody can see the item is
there.
Out for repair. Recorded as such, with where it went. Repair is where assets
disappear most quietly, because the item is legitimately absent and nobody is
expecting to see it.
Retired. Written off, disposed of, and recorded as gone rather than deleted.
Keeping the record is what lets you answer questions about it later.
An asset with no state after return is an asset that will be bought again while
sitting in a cupboard forty metres away.
The bug that taught us what offboarding really asks
There is a query in our codebase that answers one question: what is this person
holding? It reads from two places, and the comment above it explains why, because
the single-source version was quietly wrong in the worst possible way.
Custody used to live on the asset itself, as a field pointing at an employee.
Later it moved to a proper custody record, which is what lets you keep a history
rather than just a current holder. Rows written before that change still carried
the old field.
Reading only the new record looked correct. Every recent handover appeared. What
disappeared were the assets that had been out the longest, because those were the
ones recorded under the old shape and never touched since.
Which is exactly backwards. The laptop somebody has had for three years and never
mentioned is the item most likely to go missing at offboarding, and it was the
one item the offboarding list would have failed to mention. A tool that silently
omits your oldest custody is worse than a tool with no custody at all, because
the empty one makes you go and ask.
We fixed it by reading both. The lesson generalises past our own migration.
**Whatever holds your custody data, ask it for the oldest record and check the
answer.** Any system that has been through a change of shape, and every system
eventually has, will tend to surface what it understands best, which is the
recent stuff. The old rows are where the exposure is.
And check that the assets view and the people view agree. If you can open an
asset and see a holder, you should be able to open that person and see the asset.
When those two disagree, one of them is reading a different source, and the one
you happen to be looking at during an offboarding decides whether the item comes
back.
The version of this you can run today, in whatever you use: pick your
longest-serving employee, ask the system what they hold, then go and look at
their desk.
Put the workflow into practice.
Start with every Wurxa feature for 14 days. No credit card required.
