Deactivating & Reactivating
Take someone off the payroll without losing a single payslip — and bring them back if they return.
People leave. Deactivating is how you record that: it removes someone from every operational list and from every future pay run, while keeping every payslip and payment they ever received.
Deactivating
Select one or more people on the Active tab of the register and choose Deactivate.
Resigned, Terminated, Retired, Death, Contract Ended, Redundancy, or Other. The reason is stored on the record and shown on the Inactive tab.
The date the person stops being an active employee.
The dialog names everyone selected, and restates the four consequences, before anything is written.
What it actually does
| Effect | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Removes them from active employee lists | The register, the pay-run People step, and every operational picker. |
| Excludes them from future pay runs | A run you build after this date will not offer them. |
| Disables their portal login | Their self-service surfaces stop resolving — no payslips, no personnel record, no My details. |
| Preserves all historical payroll data | Every payslip, pay-run line and payment stays exactly as it was. |
Deactivation marks the employee record inactive, and every self-service read resolves the caller to their employee record. Once it is inactive nothing resolves, so payslips, the personnel record and My details all stop being reachable for that person. Their user account is a separate thing, managed with your other users — deactivate it there too if you also want the sign-in itself closed.
A deactivated employee keeps every payslip, every pay-run line, and every payment they have ever received. That history is what makes a closed period reproducible — a payroll report for last March must still show what last March actually paid. Deactivation never touches it.
Deactivating someone affects the next run you build. A draft that already carries them still carries them, and an approved run is untouched — it has been posted. If you deactivated someone who should not be on a draft, take them off the draft as well.
Finding people you have deactivated
The Inactive tab lists them with the date and reason. It is also reachable directly at /people/employees?status=inactive, which is where the Inactive employees shortcut on the People overview points.
The Inactive tab is deliberately narrower than the Active one: you can review and reactivate from it, but you cannot create, import or search there.
Reactivating
Select the person on the Inactive tab and choose Reactivate. A confirmation restates what happens before anything changes.
They return to the active register and become available for the next pay run. Their record comes back as it was — including their pay items, so someone who returns on the same terms needs no re-keying.
Reactivating keeps the same employee number, the same payment history, and the same portal identity. Creating a second record for someone who came back splits their history in two and is almost never what you want.
Status on the record versus deactivation
These are two different things, and it is worth knowing which one you want.
| What you change | Where | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Status → On leave | The Work section of their record | They stay in the active register and stay available to pay runs. Counted in the On leave hint under Headcount. |
| Status → Terminated | The Work section of their record | They drop out of the active register. |
| Deactivate | The register, in bulk | Records a reason and an effective date, and disables the portal login. This is the one that leaves an audit trail. |