Offboarding is one of the most overlooked key processes in growing organizations — and one of the most significant security risks. Yet most small and medium-sized companies don’t have the budget or need for enterprise IAM tools. Here’s how SMBs can create a secure, scalable offboarding workflow using tools they already have.
Key Takeaways
- Offboarding doesn’t need to be chaotic, risky, or take up a lot of human resources — even for SMBs.
- 70% of businesses have experienced business disruption, security incidents, or wasted spending as a direct result of ineffective employee offboarding.
- With your existing identity platform plus a smart workflow tool like Substly, you can avoid unacceptable security risks and efficiently manage departing employees without investing in heavy IAM infrastructure.
What User offboarding means (and why it matters)
When an employee leaves your organization, the offboarding process involves removing their access to Saas apps, licenses, and services. It’s not just good housekeeping — employee SaaS offboarding is critical for both cost control and security. Unrevoked access creates risk. Unused licenses cost money.
According to a survey by Nudge Security, 70% have experienced business disruption, security incidents, or wasted spending as a direct result of ineffective employee offboarding. In the same survey, Nudge Security also discovered that businesses spent an average of five hours per employee on cloud and SaaS access offboarding for departing employees.
Why offboarding is still hard for SMBs
Modern identity platforms such as Microsoft Entra ID or Google Workspace provide powerful tools for managing user accounts. And when a SaaS service supports standards like SSO or SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management), both provisioning and deprovisioning can usually be automated.
The challenge is this: many SaaS vendors only provide SSO/SCIM features on their Enterprise plans, which often cost 4–5x more than the standard plans. This makes full automation of company software economically impractical for many smaller companies.
As a result, SMBs end up with a mix of:
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SaaS apps where automation is available and is handled by Entra ID/Workspace
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And many SaaS apps where automation is not available under their current plan, so manual offboarding steps are required
Without a structured process to manage both automated and manual cases, gaps and delays creep in—and the risk of human error increases.
How to bridge the gap
Here’s where Substly comes in, working alongside your identity platform, not replacing it.
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For the services that do support an automated deprovisioning process (via SSO/SCIM), your identity system handles the deprovisioning.
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For services that don’t support full automation under your plan, Substly picks up the rest of the workflow.
Offboarding workflow
- 1. The offboarding for the departing employee is triggered.
- 2. User access is automatically revoked for SaaS apps with automated deprovisioning enabled in your Microsoft Entra ID or Google Workspace.
- 3. Substly identifies all other services assigned to the departing user.
- 4. Substly sends notifications to each service owner with a direct link to remove the account.
- 5. Service owners click to confirm removal.
- 6. The admin view in Substly shows live status — who’s done, who’s pending, and sends reminders when needed.
- The service owner's task is simple — just a few clicks. Admins get visibility and actionable insight.
Ideal employee offboarding software setup for SMBs
Most SMBs do not need a dedicated IAM tool like Okta or OneLogin. These enterprise-grade platforms bring power, but also complexity and cost.
For most SMBs, the smarter configuration is:
Entra ID or Google Workspace + Substly
This setup gives you:
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Identity lifecycle automation where it’s available
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A secure, managed offboarding workflow where it’s not
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Visibility, status tracking, and reminders of departing and former employees
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No need to invest in expensive enterprise IAM stacks or other employee offboarding software
The value you get
Time savings: Substly customers report up to 90% less time spent on offboarding after introducing this workflow (mirroring findings around average 5-hour spend per user across the whole organization found by Nudge Security).
Reduced risk: Fewer lingering accounts of former employees, better visibility, fewer gaps.
Cost control: You reclaim unused licenses faster and reduce waste.
Low friction: The workflow is simple for service owners and centralized for admins.
If you work in a small or medium-sized business and are looking for a user-friendly SaaS management platform with a short learning curve to help you identify and manage SaaS tools, consider exploring Substly on your own or getting a demo to see if it suits your needs.
