The Staff Departure Checklist: Same-Day Security for Private Households
In a business, an employee's departure triggers a process: accounts are closed, badges returned, laptops collected. In a private household it often triggers nothing. The person who held the gate code, the alarm code, a set of keys, the vendor relationships, and a good share of the household's operating knowledge simply stops coming in, and the household finds out over the following weeks what it no longer knows.
Most departures are friendly. The checklist below isn't about suspicion. It is about making sure a departure is an access event and a handover, handled on one day, rather than a slow leak of risk and knowledge. We covered the knowledge side in depth in the handover problem. This post is the same-day version.
Before the last day
If you have notice, use it.
- Book a handover session. An hour or two, walking through the properties, open work, vendors, and anything only this person knows. Record what you learn somewhere the next person will find it, not in a notebook.
- List what they hold. Codes they know, keys and fobs they carry, accounts they log into (vendor portals, utility accounts, delivery services), and any household cards or payment methods.
- List what they own. Recurring tasks, open jobs, vendor relationships, standing orders, and anything scheduled in the coming weeks.
- Decide who takes over each item, and tell the people affected, including vendors who are used to calling this person.
On the last day
This is the part that should happen on the day itself, not when someone remembers.
- Collect physical access. Keys, fobs, garage remotes, parking passes, and any household devices. Check them off against the list rather than asking "is that everything?"
- Remove system access. Their account in any household system, shared drives, cameras and smart-home apps, and any shared logins they used. Removing one person's access shouldn't require changing anyone else's.
- Rotate the codes they knew. Gate, door, alarm, garage, safe, and Wi-Fi where it matters. This is the step households skip most often, because it touches everyone. Stored codes in an encrypted record, with a note of who holds each one, make it an afternoon's work instead of a guessing game.
- Stop household payment methods they carried, and note any purchases still in flight.
- Reassign their open work visibly, so that nothing they owned quietly stops.
The week after
- Tell vendors and service providers who the new contact is, and that the former employee no longer authorizes work or deliveries.
- Check the recurring schedule. Anything that ran on the departed person's memory, such as a monthly filter change or a seasonal vendor call, will surface now as a gap. Put each one on a schedule the household owns.
- Review what you learned in the handover and fill the gaps in the house manual while the details are fresh.
Keep the history
When someone leaves, their access should end, but their record shouldn't. The tasks they completed, the vendors they used, the notes they left, and the expenses they logged are part of the household's history. A new house manager who can read what the last one did starts working in days rather than months.
This is the difference between a household that runs on a person and one that runs on a system the person used. In the second kind, a departure still costs you someone you valued, but it doesn't cost you the household's operating knowledge.
A system that makes this routine
Every step above is easier when access, codes, open work, and history live in one place rather than across a drawer, a group chat, and someone's phone. In Hauseora, a departing member's account is removed in one step and their history stays. Their open tasks are unassigned rather than lost, ready to be picked up from the Tasks board. Access codes are stored encrypted, each noting which staff may see it, and keys and fobs are recorded with how many exist and where they are kept. If your household is staffing up or going through a transition, see how it's organized or walk through it with us. For coordinating the team that remains, see how to manage household staff across multiple properties.