Offboarding in Productive ensures a user’s responsibilities are safely transferred when their account is deactivated. This process applies to employees, contractors, and clients. This guide explains how to offboard users, track progress, and reassign items.
📌 Note: Deactivating a user does not automatically reduce the number of paid seats. To adjust seat count, see Account Management: Adding and Removing Seats.
Initiating Offboarding
Open the profile of the user you wish to offboard. Click the three dots in the upper-right corner and select Deactivate person.
Assigning Items During Offboarding
When you offboard a user, their items are transferred to active users. Only items that are still in progress move. Closed, archived, won, or lost items keep the original owner.
The following items can be reassigned:
Projects - active projects where the user is the project manager
Budgets - open budgets the user owns
Deals - deals in an open pipeline stage that the user owns
Deal to-dos - open to-dos on deals assigned to the user
Tasks and to-dos - open tasks and to-dos assigned to the user
Milestones - milestones on active projects assigned to the user; you can also leave them unassigned
Managed people - active direct reports move to the new manager
Absence approvals - the user is replaced as approver and subscriber
Time entry approvals - the user is replaced as approver and subscriber (if your organization uses approval policies)
Expense approvals - the user is replaced as approver and subscriber (if your organization uses approval policies)
Champions - each champion type (General, Resourcing, Invoicing, HR, Project Management, and Sales) can go to a different person
Templates are included, and the form counts them separately, for example "5 projects and 2 templates".
If the person taking over tasks or milestones isn't on the project yet, they're added as a project member automatically.
📌 Private tasks and their to-dos aren't transferred. The form shows how many will stay with the offboarded user.
Offboard Items to a Single User
The first row, “Offboard everything to”, lets you assign all items to a single active employee. Selecting a person here automatically fills all other rows.
📌 Note: Only users with adequate permissions for all items appear in the dropdown. For example, if offboarding a budget owner, only users with similar permissions can receive these budgets.
Assigning Items Individually
Each item type can also be assigned to a different person, following the same permission rules.
Next to each item type, a number (e.g., 2) indicates how many items will be transferred.
📌 Note: Item types cannot be divided. For example, all budgets owned by a user being offboarded must be assigned to a single person.
Click the number to generate the report with the full list of items that will be reassigned.
Completing the Offboarding
After selecting offboarding targets, click Continue.
A pop-up will show what will happen to the user’s bookings:
Future bookings are deleted.
Ongoing bookings end on the deactivation day.
Deleted bookings cannot be restored.
Click Confirm deactivate and transfer to start the process. The process may take a few minutes, and you will receive an email notification once it is complete.
Monitoring Offboarding Progress
Once offboarding is initiated, a new field appears on the user’s profile: Offboarding status, which can be:
Not initiated
In progress
Completed
These statuses allow you to track the process in real time and can also be used in reports to monitor offboarding activity across the organization.
Who Can Offboard Users
The ability to offboard users depends on the default permission set assigned to a person.
📌 Note: By default, users can only offboard according to their permission set. For more granular control, you can create a custom permission set and assign one or both of these permissions to specific users. This lets you control exactly who can offboard clients versus employees/contractors:
Deactivate and offboard clients
Deactivate and offboard employees and contractors
