How does Pending Offboarding work?

One of the most difficult aspects of managing your IT inventory is making sure you get everything back when an Employee has left. BlueTally helps you keep track of this with our offboarding tools, specifically the Pending Offboarding notification in the Dashboard and the Offboarding Report.

If you would like to navigate quickly to a specific section of this article, click the appropriate option from the outline below:

Pending Offboarding is one of the available widgets you can add to your customizable dashboards. It also comes pre-loaded into the default dashboard built into your account when it was first created.

The red number will increase anytime after an Employee becomes Archived in BlueTally and they still have IT inventory, consisting of Assets, Accessories, and/or Licenses, checked out to them.

If you click on the number in the Pending Offboarding widget, it will redirect you to the Offboarding Report.

Knowing how to Archive your Employees is a key part of ensuring your offboarding data is accurate. There are two ways you can Archive Employees:

Whichever way you Archive the Employee, the Archived label will appear next to the name when viewing the Employees page. The same row of information for that Employee will also appear in the Offboarding Report on either the Pending Offboarding tab or the Completed Offboarding tab, depending on whether or not they still have any equipment checked out to them.

While the Pending Offboarding widget will show you how many Employees are currently in Pending Offboarding status, the notifications you'll receive through the app focus on the individual pieces of equipment that need to be returned to your inventory. They'll appear as Due Back notifications when you click the bell icon in the upper-right corner of your screen.

When you archive an Employee, all of their Deployed items will have their Due Back Date set to the value you entered in the "When an employee is archived, set their checked out items due back in" field found in the Company Details section of your Settings.

Then notifications are created within BlueTally, letting you know that a specific piece of equipment is due back from that Archived Employee in the number of days you have set. This same notification will also appear in your Slack or Microsoft Teams account if you set up the appropriate integration and enable the Due Back notifications for Assets, Accessories, and Licenses.

Please also keep in mind that this job runs every 30 minutes, so a notification will not trigger immediately after you Archive an Employee. For example, if you archive someone at 12:15 pm, then the notification will appear at 12:30 pm.

This report can be accessed in one of two ways:

The report consists of three separate tabs:

The Summary provides a bar graph representation of the equipment each of your Archived Employees still has. You can display the graph by item count or total item value.

Count:

Value:

If you scroll down past the graph, it will show you the same information in list form:

The Summary's default organization is done by Employee, but you can organize it differently when you click the dropdown menu next to the Export button in the upper-right corner of the Summary section.

You can pick from one of the four following options:

The Pending tab will display all Employees who are "Pending Offboarding", which is to say, someone who is Archived and still has equipment checked out to them. You'll see a brief snapshot of what the Employee still has in their possession by viewing the columns with the symbols that match Assets, Accessories, Consumables, and License. At least one of these columns* will show a number higher than zero.

*While a Consumables column appears in both the Pending and Completed tabs, it will not affect an Employee's Pending or Completed status since Consumables cannot be checked in or returned in the software.

The Completed tab will show you any Archived Employees who have had all of their equipment checked back in. You'll notice that each Employee listed in Completed Offboarding will have a zero listed for the Assets, Accessories, and Licenses columns.

Like many other pages on BlueTally, the Pending and Completed tabs of the Offboarding Report give you some options on what you can do with the data presented. The most notable to discuss are the Filter and Export options.

Filter:

You can filter either tab of the Offboarding Report through the following parameters:

Apply the filters as you see fit so that when you Export the report, you will have the specific data you need. For example, if you want to provide one manager a report with all of the former employees under their direct report who still need to return their equipment, you could select that manager's name from the Managers filter, then click Apply Filters. This will update which data appears on the Pending Offboarding tab.

Export:

Clicking the Export button will generate an Excel file that you can then download and save for your own reporting purposes. Remember that this report will account for all the filters you put in place prior to clicking the Export button. This allows you to produce a report for whatever specific offboarding you need to track.

When you first click the Export button, a pop-up window will appear to let you know the report is being generated.

It will then let you know that the report is done and ready for you to download.

You can then share this report with managers and other important decision makers who can help ensure that the equipment from former employees is returned and handled properly.

For any Business or Corporate subscribers, you have additional ways in which you can interface with BlueTally to streamline your offboarding process. The Corporate subscription gives you access to our Webhooks, and both our Corporate and Business plans will allow you to use our REST API.

We have a webhook event specifically designed to send Pending Offboarding alerts to any of your other external systems. You can find an example of the code you can use on this page of our Developer Hub.

On the API side, you can execute an Update Employee query to set whether or not an Employee should be archived. You can find this option amongst the Query Parameters on the Update Employee page of our API guide in the Developer Hub.

Can we enable Email Notifications for Pending Offboarding alerts?

Since Pending Offboarding notifications are delivered as Due Back notifications, as long as you enable the Asset Due Back, Accessory Due Back, and License Due Back Notifications in the Email Notifications section of your account settings in BlueTally, then you will receive offboarding alerts via email.

Can Pending Offboarding notifications be sent directly to the Manager of the Employee who was just offboarded?

The Pending Offboarding notification will trigger for any BlueTally account user who has notifications enabled. This includes anyone with the Administrator, Manager, or Operator Permission Levels, as well as anyone with a Custom Permission Level that has Notifications enabled. Additionally, any email address that's listed in the email notification section will receive these alerts too.
​
So if the manager of the offboarded employee is already receiving notifications through the criteria listed above, then they will get the Pending Offboarding notification for their employee. However, it isn't possible to narrow this down so that managers will receive the offboarding notifications only when their specific employees are being offboarded.

I want to email the Offboarding Reports to managers on a regular basis. Is there a Save and Schedule feature, like what's available for the Asset Report, that will help me do that?

Unfortunately, the Offboarding Report does not have a Save and Schedule feature at this time, so you won't be able to automate sending it out on a scheduled frequency like you can with our Asset Report.