How to remove a user in ApprovalMax

Offboarding is ApprovalMax's way of taking someone out of an organisation, whether they've left or simply don't need access any more. ApprovalMax lists three things to deal with when someone is offboarded: removing their access and roles in every workflow, handing their responsibilities in approval steps and open requests to other people, and removing any delegations assigned to them, so nothing is left half finished.

You'll need to be an Organisation Administrator or the Account Owner. The roles that can be offboarded are User, Auditor and Administrator. The Account Owner can't be offboarded at all.

First export any reports on the person's activity that you'll still need. After offboarding, ApprovalMax treats the user as deleted, and their name drops out of reporting.

Decide who will take over. If the person is the only Requester or Approver in any workflow step, even in a deactivated workflow, you'll have to name a replacement before ApprovalMax lets you remove them.

1. Under your organisation, go to Workflows and settings > Users.
2. Click the three-dot icon beside the person you want to remove and select Offboard.
3. The pop-up lists every workflow they're part of. Click REMOVE FROM WORKFLOWS to take them straight out, or assign a replacement for each role and then remove them.
4. Go through the open approval requests that involve them. Give all of them to the same replacement, or pick a different person for each one.
5. Click OFFBOARD in the upper right-hand corner to finish.

The person is removed from the organisation. Their workflow roles are either gone or held by the replacements you chose, and the people you picked take over the open approval requests you reassigned.

Requests they raised as a Requester don't disappear. Authorised Approvers and Administrators can still see them and approve or reject them. A rejection is a dead end, though: that request can't be edited and resubmitted, and the only way forward is a fresh request created from scratch.

Reporting changes too. You can't open or filter reports by the offboarded user's name, generate a report showing their name, or run reports on the requests they created. That's why the export comes first.

ApprovalMax's offboarding article describes the removed user as deleted, so check the replacements and exports before clicking OFFBOARD.

A greyed-out REMOVE FROM WORKFLOWS button means the person is the only Requester or Approver in at least one workflow step. Assign a replacement for that step first, including in deactivated workflows.

If offboarding stops with an error, especially in an organisation created before 2020, a workflow may have a step with no Requester or Approver defined. Go through every workflow, inactive ones too, and make sure each step has at least one. Once that's fixed, the offboarding and the replacement go through.