Command Centre: Employee Offboarding

Overview

Signing in and finding your way around Command Center is covered in the Command Centre - Admin — Guide.

The Employee Offboarding Module lets HR Admins run exit clearance and exit interviews for departing employees entirely inside Command Center. Three roles interact with it:

• HR Admin — configures templates, creates and monitors records, and has full edit access across the whole record. See Step-by-Step: First-Time Setup (HR Admin) onward.
• Section Assignee — a department head who clears their scoped items, notified via both a CC To-Do task and an email in parallel mode, or a section-unlock email in sequential mode. See Step-by-Step: Clearing Your Section (Section Assignee).
• Departing Employee — accesses a magic-link portal, no Sprout HR login needed. See Step-by-Step: Completing Your Offboarding (Departing Employee).

Offboarding is available on every Command Center account — there is nothing to switch on and nothing to request. What each account does need first is its own templates: no departure record can be created until your clearance checklist exists and is Active. Your HR Admin sets these up under Workflow → Templates, with help from your Sprout Implementation contact.

A fourth participant can also appear on a record: the Company Signatory — someone the HR Admin delegates to sign the quitclaim on the company's behalf, often outside HR entirely (e.g., a Finance representative). They receive their own direct notification email with a link to the signing view; see the quitclaim step under HR Admin monitoring below.

Step-by-Step: First-Time Setup (HR Admin)

1. Configure your templates via Workflow → Templates, before creating your first departure record: 
   
   
   • Clearance Checklist — sections, items, attachment requirements, default assignees per section. A Sprout Starter template is preloaded as a read-only baseline: it carries a Starter chip instead of a Draft/Active status, it cannot be edited, and its only row action is Duplicate — there is no Set as default, no Delete, and no publish/unpublish toggle on it. It also does not appear in the template dropdown when you create an onboarding or offboarding record, so you cannot run a record off the starter directly. Duplicate it to get your own editable copy (or build one from scratch), then publish that. Templates you create do support Duplicate, Set as default, and Delete (delete is permanent — there's no archived state or undo, so duplicate first if you want a variant), alongside the normal Draft ↔ Active publish/unpublish toggle. 
     
   • Exit Interview Form — intro message and question sections (8 question types available). The builder also carries a response reviewer setting, but it does not restrict access today. Submitted responses are reached through the Offboarding list, which is HR Admin-gated, and there is no second surface where a named reviewer could read them — so any HR Admin can open any response, whoever is named. There is no way to narrow that audience in this release; if your exit interviews are treated as confidential, plan around that. (Section-level forking/branching can likewise be configured in the builder but does not take effect yet — every question renders in a fixed sequence regardless of earlier answers, so build your form as a single straight-through set.) 
     
     • Open it from Workflow → Manage Templates → Documents → New document. You get a single flowing document canvas with a formatting toolbar (undo/redo, paragraph/heading styles, bold/italic/underline, bulleted/numbered lists, alignment).
     • Insert merge fields either by clicking a chip in the Sprout HR Fields panel, or by typing {{ for an autocomplete popover. Fields are grouped by Employee (Full Name, First Name, Last Name, Position, Department), Offboarding (Last Working Day, Separation Type), and Document (Company Name, Date Today, Final Pay Amount — Numbers and Words).
     • Watch the color: most merge-field chips render green; the Final Pay Amount chips render amber with a pencil icon — that's your visual cue that this field resolves in two phases (a placeholder at record creation, then the real figure once the HR Admin enters it at the Move to Quitclaim Release step).
     • The Signers panel has two toggles — Company Signatory and Employee — both on by default. Turning either off removes its signature block from the document footer live as you edit.
     • Saving publishes the template as Active immediately — there's no separate draft/publish step for quitclaim documents like there is for the checklist and exit interview form.Quitclaim Document — compose via the Document Builder. Uploading a finished document is not a way to create one:
     
     
2. Confirm each template shows Active status before proceeding — a template in Draft status cannot be used on a new departure record, and the preloaded Sprout Starter does not count (it is never selectable on a record). You need all three of your own templates Active to run a departure end to end, though they bite at different points: the clearance checklist gates creating the record, the exit interview form is needed only if you are running an exit interview (you can opt out per departure), and the quitclaim document is needed by the time you release the quitclaim — no record can reach Completed without one.

Known Limitations and Workarounds

• No automated reminder emails, for anyone. HR Admins, Section Assignees, and Departing Employees all rely on their initial notification plus the Offboarding list's status indicators (HR Admin) or CC To-Do items (Section Assignee) instead of a follow-up nudge as a deadline approaches. The one-time "quitclaim is ready" notification (Record Status Reference above) is a status-change alert, not a recurring reminder — don't conflate the two if a client asks.
• No editing of checklist structure, at any point. Sections and items come from the template selected at record creation and cannot be changed for an individual record — before or after creation. HR Admins: get your template right in Workflow → Templates first; only the section and item approvers (at the section or item level) can be set per record, and only before it is created.
• No automatic final-pay pull from Payroll. The HR Admin enters the figure manually when moving a record to For Quitclaim Release; the two-party quitclaim signature is the confirmation control.
• A clearance section may show a count rather than the assignee's name and avatar. This is a display issue and can appear on an account of any size. Your clearance data, the assignments themselves and every sign-off are unaffected — confirm who the assignee is from the record, or ask them directly. A fix is already scheduled, so there is nothing Support can add in the meantime.

Your Customer Success Manager can share the full list of current limitations.

Where to Get Help

• HR Admin: Contact your Customer Success Manager for setup questions, or Sprout Support for anything that looks like a defect rather than expected behavior described above.
• Section Assignee: Contact your company's HR Admin first — they can resend notifications, check your section assignment, or escalate to Sprout Support on your behalf.
• Departing Employee: Contact your former employer's HR Admin — they can resend your portal link/PIN or escalate to Sprout Support. You won't have access to Sprout Support directly.

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