End Employment
How do I end employment for an employee?
Purpose: When an employee leaves your company, it is important to officially end their employment in BambooHR. This action will ensure the record is accurately tracked in reporting. This help guide will teach you how to end employment for an employee.
Did you know we have a BambooHR Learning course about Offboarding in BambooHR? Click here to learn more about what is included in this course.
If you are the Account Owner and are leaving BambooHR, please be sure to check out this guide for instructions on how to transfer account ownership before you leave.
End Employment
Navigate the specific employee's profile. Click the action menu and select End Employment.
Add information
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Effective Date: Enter the effective date of when the employment will end. This entry means that you can future date terminating/resigning the employee, and employment for that employee will not end until 11:59 p.m. company timezone, on the effective date. If the employment end date is future dated, the employee will still have access* and show in the Company Directory and Org Chart until the future effective date (see example below).
However, please note that if you initiate the termination/resignation on the same day as you enter the details (March 20th on March 20th), the employee will immediately end employment in BambooHR and lose access to the system.
*If you future date the end of employment and need to remove access immediately, you can do this by clicking Disable Access Now as shown in the screenshot below or by navigating to the action menu in the top right corner of the employee's profile. Hover over BambooHR Access and select No Access. The employee cannot access your BambooHR account any longer. - Type: Select if this is Resignation (Voluntary), Termination (Involuntary), or Death. If you select Resignation (Voluntary), an additional field will pop up where you can select if it's Regrettable (Employees you would have liked to keep, but decided to leave) or Non-Regrettable (Employees whose departure did not hurt the company).
- Reason: You can select from the available options, or add a new item if needed. See below for more information.
- Eligible for Rehire: Select Yes, No, or Upon Review.
- Reassign Direct Reports to: On the day after the Effective Date, all employees reporting to this employee will have a new line on their Job Information table with the new manager you select here. If you don't add a new manager here, a placeholder will appear for this employee in the org chart.
- Comment: Add any additional information you would like to record here.
- End Employment: Click End Employment to save the information, or Cancel to close without saving.
Encourage the employee(s) leaving your company to download their pay stubs and tax documents before their access is gone. All terminated/resigned employees will receive their W2s by mail. This is an automatic setting for all of those who leave your company during the year.
Please note that when you future date an employment end date, this information will still pull into reports if you check the Show History box when creating the report. For example, if I run a custom report that includes the Employment Status table, then the Terminated status will pull into the report even if it is for a future date. However, the termination/resignation information will not pull into the Employee Turnover report until the employment officially ends in BambooHR.
Any user with access to view the employee's Employment Status table will see the future termination/resignation information. If they cannot access this information, they will see the employee as active until the effective date.
Confirmation
Once the employee officially ends their employment, the following changes occur:
- The employee's status changes from Active to Inactive.
- The Employment Status table updates with a Terminated status and all termination information lists in the comment.
- The suppression of any future time off accruals.
- Their access to BambooHR is disabled.
- A new entry will appear on all the direct reports of this employee with their new manager. *This only happens if the employee being terminated has direct reports, and you selected someone to reassign the direct reports to in the End Employment modal.
You may need to terminate an employee before they start but want to keep their profile for your records. If this is the case, be sure you delete the future-dated line from the Employment Status table after you submit the termination information. Otherwise, the system will reactivate the employee on their entered hire date as it comes after their termination date.
Additional steps
Once an employee officially ends employment in BambooHR, there are a few items you will want to check to make sure everything runs smoothly without them.
- Onboarding and offboarding: Is this employee assigned to any onboarding and offboarding tasks? If yes, update the onboarding and offboarding templates to reflect the new assignee. Additionally, do you need to activate the onboarding template for this new employee?
- E-signatures: Is this employee part of the signature workflow on any of your signature templates? If yes, update the templates accordingly. If a signature request sends while the terminated/resigned employee is still a signer, you will not be able to correct the pending signature request to a new signer. Instead, you will have to cancel the request and change the signature template before sending a new one.
- Approvals: Is this employee set as the approver for any of your approvals in Settings? If yes, update the approvals workflow to ensure requests are still running during this change.
- Access levels: Is this employee part of a custom access level group with responsibilities that need reassigning to another employee?
There are two ways to add a custom option to the Reason list. One way is to click + Add Item within the Reason list when entering the termination/resignation details for the employee.
The other way to add a custom option is to navigate Settings > Employee Fields > Termination Reason. Type in the preferred custom option and click Add. You can also edit the Reason list here by hovering over a line item and clicking on the pencil icon.
You may have a situation where you need to initiate the offboarding process before you officially enter an employee's End Employment date. To do this, navigate to the employee's Offboarding tab and click Import From Template.
A modal will display and allow you to enter an expected termination date. This date will determine the task due dates. Please note this will not add a termination line to their Employment Status table. You can update that on their Job tab when you are ready for the end employment date to be visible to the employee.
If you use Payroll, you will also see the Final Pay Date field. This field allows the employee to remain active in Payroll until the final pay date to ensure that they receive their final paycheck. There are a couple of things to note:
- The Final Pay Date field remains editable in case you need to make changes to ensure your terminated employees sync to payroll. Please note that if you need to make a change to the dates on the Employee Status table, you update the active line by clicking This is a correction instead of adding a new entry to the table (see Paying your terminated employees below).
- If an employee has a set final pay date in the past, they will be immediately updated and removed from payroll immediately.
- Ensure the End Date of the active compensation record (found within the Compensation Table on the Job Tab) aligns with the Final Pay Date chosen.
- Active benefit and non-benefit deductions that have no end date or an end date after the final pay date will automatically be set to have an end date that matches the final pay date. Active deductions with end dates already set before the final pay date will not be changed and will end naturally.
If you would like a deduction to end prior to the final pay date, you will need to manually set the end date for the deduction on the employee's Benefits tab before the employee is terminated.
For example, your employee's last day is on September 1st and the end of the pay period is September 5th for a pay date of September 10th. In the Final Pay Date field, you enter September 10th so that the employee will remain active in Payroll until they have received their final paycheck. In the case of a termination/resignation where a paycheck must be issued on the day of termination/resignation, you enter that date in the Final Pay Date field.
After setting up the Final Pay Date when ending an employee's employment (see above), check to make sure the Final Pay Date field matches the End Date on their Compensation table. This ensures the employee will sync to payroll seamlessly.
If you need to update the dates within either of these table, hover over the active record in the table and click on the pencil icon. It is important that you select the option This is a correction. This will update the active record instead of making a new entry within the table. Then, update the date if necessary and click OK.
Please note that you must manually prorate your salaried employees' pay within payroll if you terminate them mid-pay period.