Rostid

How to remove an ex-employee from Google Workspace

If someone just left your company and you’re the one who has to clean up their Google Workspace account, here’s the actual process — not the leadership-summary version, the click-by-click one.

The steps

  1. Decide: suspend or delete. Suspend if there’s any chance they’re coming back, or if you need to keep their account accessible while you sort out their data. Delete only once you’re sure — deletion is the point of no return for anything you haven’t transferred out first.
  2. Transfer their data before you touch the account. This is the step people skip and regret:
    • Gmail — migrate their inbox to someone else, or set up mail forwarding so incoming messages don’t just vanish.
    • Drive and Docs — transfer file ownership to a manager or a shared drive from the admin console. Do this before deletion; it’s much harder to recover after.
    • Calendar — move any group calendars they own.
  3. Remove or delete the user. In the admin console: Directory → Users, select the person, and choose Delete user (or Remove user, if you’re on an email-verified domain rather than a fully verified one). You’ll be prompted for the data-transfer option if you haven’t already handled it in step 2.
  4. Clean up after. A few things people forget:
    • Wipe any company-managed mobile devices tied to the account.
    • Reset sign-in cookies and revoke any security keys.
    • If you plan to reuse their email address, Google recommends waiting 30 days if it might get reused for a personal account elsewhere.

The part this doesn’t cover

That’s the Google Workspace side, and it’s real work — but Google Workspace is rarely the only place someone has access. The same person probably also has Slack, GitHub, a password manager, whatever project tool your team uses. None of those are covered by the process above; each one is its own manual removal, and the more of them there are, the easier it is to miss one. That’s how a departed contractor ends up still able to log into a repo six months later.

If that’s the shape of your problem, we wrote a broader version of this: what to do with accounts when someone quits.

If you’re tired of doing this by hand

Rostid is built to be the one place you manage who has access to what — add someone once and their accounts get set up, remove them once and it’s all gone, everywhere you’ve connected.

We’re in early access. Join the waitlist and we’ll send one email when it opens.

Sources

Google Workspace offboarding steps verified against Google’s own admin documentation (knowledge.workspace.google.com), retrieved August 2026.

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