Onboarding & exit

What managed onboarding and offboarding is, and what a company uses it for

Managed onboarding and offboarding means every step around someone's arrival and departure has an owner and a due date: training, the pre-employment medical check-up, the contract to sign, the issue of protective equipment, handing over a laptop. The eIntranet module holds that sequence as a template tied to a job position and runs it for a specific employee.

What sets it apart from a checklist in Word is where the tick mark comes from. A process is built from the template, and eight of the nine item types are never ticked by hand — the module looks into the related record and reads the real state there. Training counts as done once it reaches the Completed or Confirmed state in the Training module. A medical check-up counts once it has an examination date and the assessment concludes fit, or fit with conditions. A contract counts once it is signed. If someone deletes the target record, the item drops back to outstanding and the reason is written into its note.

The other half of the module is the departure, and that half usually gets neglected. The exit sheet lists what the departing employee still has assigned in the asset register — individual items with their inventory numbers — and which issued protective equipment has no return date recorded. That is the list a manager prints and takes to the handover meeting.

How onboarding and offboarding works in eIntranet, step by step

The whole cycle has six steps, and two of them run without anyone touching them:

1. A template for the position. You prepare an onboarding or offboarding template and assign the job positions it applies to. A template with no position assigned applies to everyone.
2. Starting the process. You pick the employee and the event date — the start date or the last working day. The module offers the template that best matches the employee's position.
3. Recalculating the due dates. Every template item carries an offset in days from the event date. A negative value means before: preparing a laptop with −14 lands on the fourteenth day before the start date, an induction with +5 on the fifth day after it.
4. Creating records in the related modules. Typed items create what they need on their own — a training assignment, a scheduled medical check-up, a contract generated from a template with its attachments copied across, a task with a due date and two assignees.
5. Work by the responsible people. The My items tab shows each person only what they own, across every running process. Responsibility can be set in the template as a named user, a job position, the line manager, the process owner, or the incoming employee themselves.
6. Closing and printing. Once everything is done, the process is closed and the onboarding or exit sheet prints with a signature block.

Deadline chasing runs off-screen. A nightly job recalculates running processes, and when an item is overdue or its date is approaching, it sends a reminder to the responsible person and to the process owner. The lead times are configured as a cascade, 7, 3 and 0 days before the due date by default. Move an item's date and the cascade resets, so the reminders for the new date actually arrive.

What the module creates elsewhere, and what it reads back

This is the question we get most often about onboarding software: is it just a list to tick off, or will it do something for me? For the Employee onboarding and offboarding module the answer looks like this.

What it reads as input. The employee and their job position from the Employees module, and for automatic starts also the start date and end date from the personal record. The work category and risk factors for the medical request come from the job position settings in the OHS module — and when someone holds several positions, the stricter variant wins.

What it creates by itself. A training assignment or a document to read, a scheduled occupational medical check-up with the work category pre-filled, a contract to sign generated from a template along with its attachments, and a task with a due date, a main assignee and an approver. The record it creates behaves in the target module exactly like one entered by hand, including that module's own reminder jobs.

What it deliberately does not create. Not the issue of protective equipment, because that needs a size and a stock variant nobody can guess. Not a form, because an empty row would look completed in the Forms module and would skew the completion statistics. Not the asset handover protocol either — the module only links to it with the recipient pre-filled.

What comes out. Three printed PDF outputs: the onboarding or exit sheet with the item table and a signature block, the request for an occupational medical check-up for the provider, and the record sheet of issued protective equipment. You need no hardware at all — no reader, terminal or tag plays any part here; the module works purely with data already held in eIntranet.

Everything the Employee onboarding and offboarding module can do

Nine item types cover what really happens around an arrival and a departure. Eight of them read their state from the related module, so they cannot be ticked by hand — they can only be marked Not relevant, which the recalculation deliberately skips.

On top of that come six permission levels, from No access through Own only and Own and subordinates up to Delete and recycle bin, assignable to an individual or to a whole job position. Deleted processes, items and templates go to the recycle bin and can be restored; an item disappears from the bin if its parent process has been deleted in the meantime, so that nobody restores a row into a process no one can reach.

How to roll the module out

Do not start with a complete template for every position. The approach that works has four steps:

1. Build one onboarding template for the position you hire for most often, and put in only the items where you already know who owns them.
2. Run it on the next real start date and, a week later, look at the My items tab through the eyes of the people who received those items. This is where you find out whether the due dates are realistic.
3. Add the offboarding template. It tends to be shorter, but it is the one that gets the company's property back and revokes access.
4. Only then switch on automatic starts driven by the start and end dates on the personal record.

That last step comes with a safeguard the module applies on its own. When you enable automatic starts, it notes the day the option took effect and ignores earlier start dates. Without it, the first nightly run at a company with history in its personal records would open a process for every single employee at once and send out hundreds of e-mails.

Choosing onboarding software: what to ask before you buy

There is no shortage of onboarding tools, and most of them are really a shared task list with nicer graphics. Three questions tell them apart faster than a demo does:

Who ticks the item off, and based on what

If a person ticks the checklist, you have two sources of truth: the state in the checklist and the reality in your HR records. Ask what happens when someone deletes or changes the record in the target module. In eIntranet the item returns to outstanding and the reason is written into its note.

Can the tool actually create what is supposed to happen

The gap between a line saying "assign safety training" and a training actually assigned is the entire value of the module. Check whether the software creates records in the module where the work really gets done, or whether it just e-mails the HR officer.

What it does for departures

Everyone sells the arrival; the departure gets skipped. Ask whether the tool lists assigned assets with inventory numbers and unreturned protective equipment as of the leaving date. That is the part you can put a number on.

Onboarding for a small company and for a production plant

For a company of under twenty people hiring two or three a year, two things matter: that nothing gets forgotten when HR is the owner squeezing it between other work, and that a laptop does not vanish when someone leaves. One onboarding template, one offboarding template, items of the Task and Manual type, and the exit sheet with assets will do.

In manufacturing and shift operations the centre of gravity moves. An arrival there means a medical check-up matched to the work category, induction and refresher training, a protective equipment norm tied to the position, and often structured on-the-job training as well. You end up with more templates — a welder, a forklift operator and a warehouse worker already differ at the medical check-up, not at the welcome e-mail. That is why the module ties a template to a job position and, at start, offers the one that fits the employee's position best.

Seasonal hiring is a third case. There, automatic starts driven by the start date pay for themselves: fifteen temporary workers arriving in the same week get their processes on their own, including the dates pushed back to fourteen days before the start.

What managed onboarding in eIntranet costs

The Employee onboarding and offboarding module has no price of its own. You pay for user seats in eIntranet and every module is included in every plan. Prices per user and month, excluding VAT, look like this:

The question we hear most often about onboarding is this: do I pay for every hire separately? No. The number of processes started, the number of templates and the number of checklist items have no effect on the price. A company of eighty that hires twelve people a year and parts with nine runs twenty-one processes and pays exactly what it would pay without them.

The second question is more practical: a process runs on an employee held in eIntranet, so that person occupies a seat. For temporary and seasonal staff this means counting them into your plan for as long as you keep their records. You need no hardware and the module itself creates no extra fees; the cost of the medical check-up or of buying protective equipment goes to the provider and the supplier, not to us. Current prices and storage sizes are on the pricing page.

Onboarding for free: what a spreadsheet handles and where it runs out

Let us be straight about it: an onboarding checklist in a spreadsheet is free, and for a company that hires two people a year and has no protective equipment or medical check-ups to arrange, it genuinely is enough. A shared document with five rows and an owner against each of them does the job, and paying for that makes no sense.

The limit shows up in two places. The first is evidence. A spreadsheet can claim the training happened, but it cannot prove it — and with safety training or a pre-employment medical check-up, the document is the only thing that carries weight during an inspection. The second is re-keying. The moment an item means "create a record in another system", somebody starts typing the same thing in two places, and from then on the two drift apart.

The remaining options deserve an honest word. Dedicated onboarding tools are pleasant to use, but they know nothing about Czech occupational medical check-ups, work categorisation or protective equipment norms. And general task tools such as Trello handle an arrival perfectly well, right up to the point where you need an exit list of assigned assets. You can try it out at no cost: eIntranet comes with a 14-day free trial covering every module.

What to read next

The Employee onboarding and offboarding module builds on four other eIntranet areas. The Employees module is the source of personal records, job positions and contracts to sign. The Employee training module receives assigned training and documents to read and watches their validity. The OHS module keeps occupational medical check-ups, work categories and the issue of protective equipment. The Asset register supplies the exit sheet with the list of assigned items, and the Tasks module takes on the items that have no agenda of their own.