There are two ways of removing an employee record from Rotaready.

Rather than deleting someone forever, it's sensible to keep their employee profile for good business record keeping and to adhere to local employment laws and regulations. In the UK, HMRC states you must retain employee information for at least six years, in case the information is needed for an investigation, for example.

However, data protection regulations (like GDPR in the UK) states you should not keep information longer than necessary, so there's definitely a balance to be struck. Our anonymisation feature is designed with this in mind.

Once you have marked someone as a leaver by setting an end date on their employment, you will be automatically prompted to anonymise the employee. If you skipped this, find their profile, click Options in the corner, then Anonymise.

You'll be prompted to set an Anonymisation date. This is the date when Rotaready will anonymise the employee record for you. It must be in the future and after the employee's leave date. By default, it will be six years after their leave date. You can change the date or disable anonymisation at any time by re-opening the form.

Any field that could contain personally identifiable information (PII) is cleared. Including:

And everything below is deleted, because Rotaready won't know whether you included PII in any of the following:

💡 Name and date of birth are mandatory fields in Rotaready, so they are replaced with "Anonymous Employee" and 1st January 1900.

❗️ This is permanent! It's designed for when you created an employee by mistake.

There's rarely a good reason to completely delete an employee record. As we discussed above, there are usually laws that require an employer to retain information long after an employee has departed.

You can't delete an active employee. Rotaready will only let you do it when you've ended their employment and when their last day is in the past.

To delete an employee, find their profile, click Options in the corner, then Delete. As it's permanent, Rotaready will double check by asking you to type the employee's full name. Deletion is instant and cannot be undone.

Everything! Well, almost. There are a couple of exceptions:

If the employee worked any shifts or clocked in and out, these will be retained, along with any signed-off hours and wages. Those historical shifts and attendance records will remain on the rota and attendance overview, and will continue to contribute to financial reports such as Cost Control and Payroll Export. This is to ensure the referential integrity of your financial data. But you won't be able to navigate to their employee profile and they won't appear in search or any other reports.

It's a good idea to use the Anonymise feature first, as this will clear any remaining personally identifiable artefacts, such as their name.

👀 Check out our Spotlight Session 'Removing employee records' for more information.