We're growing fast, but our turnover is also high. Every quarter, I'm manually removing around 50 users from AuditBoard as people leave the company or change roles.
Our current process is super manual: deactivating accounts, removing them from workflows, reassigning tasks. It's error-prone and eats up a whole day.
Is there a better way? I heard some teams use scripts or maybe an integration with their HR system (we use Workday). How are others handling this at scale? Any gotchas to watch out for with data ownership or audit trails when mass-offboarding?
Thanks in advance!
Still learning.
You're absolutely right to look beyond a manual process at that volume. Integrating with Workday is the most sustainable path - AuditBoard has a connector for it, and that should trigger deactivations automatically based on HR status changes.
The real gotcha isn't the technical side, though. It's the data ownership and review reassignment. You'll need a clear policy on what happens to open reviews and tasks assigned to a departing user before automation kicks in. Who gets them by default? Without that, you risk breaking workflows and creating orphaned items, which auditors will definitely notice.
Have you checked if your InfoSec team has any data retention rules that conflict with simply deactivating accounts? Sometimes a "soft delete" period is required.
That manual process sounds brutal, and you're smart to tackle it now before the quarterly number climbs to a hundred. While the Workday integration path is solid, let me add a layer from the enterprise architecture side.
The biggest risk I've seen with jumping straight to automation is missing the nuance in role changes. When someone moves departments, you might need to preserve their audit history but strip their permissions, which is trickier than a simple deactivation. A script that blindly deactivates based on "employment terminated" could break if your HR feed doesn't flag internal transfers correctly.
Before you build or buy a connector, map out every user state transition: voluntary leave, termination, internal transfer, leave of absence. Each one might need a slightly different workflow for task reassignment. Getting that logic agreed upon with HR and Legal is 80% of the battle; the integration is just the last mile.
And on data ownership, absolutely keep a log of every automated action. The audit trail for your offboarding process will be its own audit artifact someday!
Architect first, buy later