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Archiving & Access
This guide covers deactivating, reactivating, and deleting an employee record, and what that does to their login.
Purpose
People leave, and records need to reflect that without losing history. This answers: "How do we take someone off the active roster without erasing what we know about them?"
Archiving (Soft Deactivation)
Archiving an employee marks their record inactive and blocks their login — the record and its history stay intact, but the person no longer appears among active employees and can't sign in. Archiving can be reversed at any time.
An employee can't be archived while they're still relied on elsewhere — as someone's reporting manager, or as a manager in Recruitment or Onboarding. The system blocks the archive and offers a replace flow: pick someone to take over those responsibilities first, then archive proceeds.
The company's last remaining administrator account can't be archived, to avoid accidentally locking everyone out.
Deleting (Hard Delete)
Deleting removes the employee record — and their login — outright. It's blocked if the record is still referenced by other data the system won't let disappear silently (active contracts are cleaned up automatically first).
What Each User Sees
| Action | HR Administrator |
|---|---|
| Archive or reactivate an employee | ✅ |
| Delete an employee | ✅ |
| Reassign a departing manager's responsibilities | ✅ |
Archiving, deletion, and reassignment are administrative actions — they aren't available to employees or reporting managers.
How Visibility Is Decided
- Permissions. Both archiving and deleting require the relevant permission — the same one covers both actions, so anyone who can delete a record can also archive one, and vice versa.
Good to Know
- Archiving is the safer default. It preserves everything and can be undone; deletion cannot.
- Saving an archived employee's record can silently reactivate them if they're still referenced as someone's manager elsewhere in the system — a reminder to fully reassign a departing manager's responsibilities before archiving, not just archive and hope it sticks.
- This is a separate mechanism from the Offboarding module's own deactivation step, which happens automatically when an employee reaches the final stage of their exit process — either path ends with the same result: a blocked login and an inactive record.
Nothing lost, even when someone leaves.