How do I finish or cancel an onboarding?
An onboarding ends one of two ways: you finish it, which sets the hire to Active, or you cancel it, which closes the project and leaves the person as they were. Neither happens on its own. A project with every task done still sits there until somebody closes it.
In this guide
Before you begin
You need Admin access. Finish onboarding is on the journey's closing Onboarding complete step; Cancel onboarding is under Manage in the top right.
Finishing
Open the Onboarding complete step and click Finish onboarding. It completes the project, sets the hire to Active, and fires your editable "Onboarding completed" flow.
Open tasks do not block it. The step warns how many are still open, with a Jump to open tasks link, and finishing anyway leaves them on the timeline as a record. The point is that you stay in control of when a hire counts as onboarded — not the task list.
Two things do stop and ask first:
| Blocker | Why |
|---|---|
| Some equipment isn't confirmed received yet | The hire has not marked every delivered asset as received |
| Some software is still being set up | Provisioning has not finished — usually a workflow still running, sometimes one that died |
Both appear in a single dialog naming everything outstanding, with one Finish anyway button that overrides all of it. That is deliberate: taking your consent for one override and quietly spending it on two would be worse.
If the project closes but the hire cannot be set to Active, you get a warning rather than a success message, and you should check their status on their profile.
Cancelling
Manage → Cancel onboarding. It needs a reason, recorded on the audit trail.
Cancelling marks the project cancelled and skips every pending task. Completed tasks stay as a record. What it does not do is undo work already done — hardware already assigned stays assigned, and orders already placed stay placed. Handle those by hand.
Use it for a hire who never started, a duplicate project, or an onboarding built on a role that turned out to be wrong.
Afterwards you land back on the Transitions tab.
Good to know
What is the difference between rejecting and cancelling?
Timing. Reject is on the confirmation step, before any tasks exist — nothing was created, so nothing needs unwinding. Cancel is for a project already running, and it has to skip the tasks it already made.
Does finishing send the hire anything?
It runs your "Onboarding completed" flow, which is editable — so whether they hear about it is up to how that flow is configured.
Can I re-open a finished onboarding?
No. A completed project has nothing actionable left. If a hire needs more equipment, that is a request rather than a second onboarding.
Why is the Manage menu missing?
It only renders on active projects. On a pending one, the decision is the inline Confirm or Reject; on a completed or cancelled one there is nothing left to do.
What happens to the hire's status?
Finishing sets it to Active. Cancelling leaves it alone — a hire whose onboarding was cancelled keeps whatever status they had, which is usually Onboarding, so change it yourself if they are not joining.
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