New to this? You're in the right place. This post doesn't assume you know what "onboarding" or "offboarding" mean when IT people say them, or why anyone would bother automating it. If a word needs explaining, it's explained right where it shows up.
The problem this kind of software solves
When someone joins a company, a bunch of accounts need to be set up for them — email, shared drives, whatever tools the team uses. When someone leaves, all of that needs to be shut down, and it needs to happen close to their last day, not whenever someone gets around to it.
Here's the part that causes real problems: "offboarding" isn't about the person, it's about their accounts. A departing employee's login still works until someone actually turns it off. If that step gets forgotten — because it was a busy week, because nobody wrote it down — that account just sits there, active, for weeks or months after the person stopped working there. That's a real, ordinary security gap, not a dramatic one: an old account nobody's watching is an easy thing to miss and an easy thing to misuse.
The three words you'll see everywhere
- A queue is a list. Nothing complicated — think of it as a named to-do list, like "People starting this month" or "People leaving this month."
- A case is one specific person's onboarding or offboarding — one entry that tracks everything that needs to happen for that one person, start to finish.
- A playbook is a checklist for a specific kind of task, so the same steps get followed every time instead of relying on someone's memory.
That's most of the vocabulary already. Everything else below is a variation on those three ideas.
What this actually automates — and what it doesn't
Here's the part worth being direct about, because "automation" can sound like accounts get created and deleted by themselves: this doesn't touch anyone's actual account on its own. What it automates is the paperwork trail — when a case is marked ready, it automatically creates the follow-up tasks (a task for the account work, a ticket for IT) and lines them up in the right queue. A person still does the actual account work themselves, following a playbook's checklist, using their own admin tools.
Think of it like a hiring checklist that automatically photocopies itself and hands a copy to the right person the moment someone says "go" — it doesn't hire anyone by itself, it just makes sure nothing gets forgotten and nobody has to remember the steps from scratch.
What you'd actually see, in a project
If you opened a project built from an "Access Automation" starting template, you'd find four separate lists (queues), each doing one job:
| What you'd see | What it's for, in plain words |
|---|---|
| An onboarding list | One entry per new hire, tracking everything that needs to be ready before their first day |
| An offboarding list | One entry per person leaving, tracking everything that needs to be shut down |
| An IT tickets list | The actual account-setup or account-teardown tasks, ready for someone to work through |
| A communications list | Draft messages for the new hire and their manager — or the departing employee and their manager |
Two dashboards (screens) show the big picture: one for how the account work itself is going, and one meant for compliance-style reporting — though that second one is honestly still mostly empty right now, since that piece hasn't been built yet.
What this isn't (yet)
An honest note, because overselling doesn't help anyone: this doesn't connect to a real account system out of the box. It doesn't create, suspend, or delete anything on its own — every one of the account-side steps is something a person does by hand, following the checklist. What it's good at is making sure that checklist actually gets handed to someone and doesn't quietly fall through the cracks the week everyone's busy.
Ready for the deeper version?
Everything above describes the shape of the Access Automation template built into OpenTechnologyApp. If you want the real technical detail — the exact automations, every field, what the playbooks actually walk through — the full version is here: Access Automation: The Google Workspace Joiner/Mover/Leaver Template.
If this was your first time reading about account onboarding and offboarding, you now know enough to follow that post — and enough to tell whether this kind of tool would actually help your team.