Nobody wants to ask whether they can still get in

A resignation usually lands on an ordinary Tuesday morning. The paralegal who has been with you six years puts her head round the door, and for the rest of that week the office turns kind. A card goes round. Somebody brings in a cake. You have an honest conversation about a reference.

Nothing in that week feels like the moment to ask about logins. Then the last day arrives, the desk gets cleared, everybody goes back to work, and the one thing nobody raised sits exactly where it sat on Tuesday.

Why it is still open in June

That is the real problem, and almost none of it is technical. Said out loud, “does she still have access?” sounds like an accusation — about somebody you liked, who gave proper notice, and who is probably coming back for lunch in the spring.

So it waits for a better week, and the better week never arrives. Nobody decides to leave her mailbox open; closing it simply sat tenth on one person’s list and nowhere at all on anybody else’s. Months later we are the ones who find it, and nobody in the room is at fault.

The part nobody thinks of as an account

Most firms handle what they can see — the mail, the client system, the shared drive. Somebody sits down on the Friday and works through those, and that part is usually done properly. What stays open for years is the loose collection of things that were never really accounts at all.

• The code on the back door, and the four digits that switch the alarm off.
• A building fob that still works on a Sunday, sitting in a drawer at somebody’s house.
• After-hours calls to the office line, quietly forwarding to a phone that left with its owner.
• A second sign-in step that still asks a phone nobody in the building owns.
• Renewal notices and supplier mail that arrive, quite properly, addressed to a person rather than to the practice.

The last of those is the one that bites, and it usually bites in November. Somebody leaves in March, the renewal form goes to a mailbox nobody opens, and the first anyone hears of it is a lapse notice or a client asking a question you cannot answer.

Write it forwards, run it backwards

Write down on one page everything a new person is handed in their first week — every login, every key, every code, every list their name gets added to. Keep it with the leaving paperwork rather than anywhere technical, and put a single name against it: usually whoever already knows the leaving date.

On a last day, that person reads the page from the bottom up. Written in advance, it does the one thing goodwill cannot: it takes the question away from the individual. Nobody has to decide whether raising it would be unkind, because running the list is simply what happens on a last day, like the keys coming back.

None of this is about mistrust. Almost nobody who leaves a small firm ever thinks about any of it again, and the rare bad leaver is not really the reason to bother. The duller reason is the better one: a door nobody watches is the one that eventually gets tried, usually by somebody who has never heard of your firm.

If you would like to know what is still open from the last two or three people who left, we go and look. Ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.