Automating offboarding (2026): the Belgian deadlines, documents and access in one place
Gert-Jan Vermote · 9 min · 2026-09-07
Dimona OUT by the next working day, C4 on the last working day, mailbox closed on day one: an employee's departure comes with hard deadlines. Here's how to let them run themselves.
Key takeaways
- An employee's departure in Belgium is a chain of deadlines: Dimona OUT by the next working day at the latest, C4 by the last working day at the latest, mailbox closed on the day of actual departure.
- The mailbox is the costliest detail: the Belgian Data Protection Authority imposed a €15,000 fine because a dismissed employee's mailboxes stayed active for years.
- 34% of knowledge workers have accessed an account or file from a former employer after leaving; 30% of apps fall outside SSO.
- IT spends an average of 5 hours per leaver tracking down and revoking access, and usually has to search three or more sources to do it.
- The line is sharp: tasks, deadlines, archiving and the handoff to your social secretariat can run themselves. Salary calculation, departure holiday pay and statutory filings stay with your social secretariat.
In one sentence: automating offboarding means that a single end date in your HR system sets the entire departure in motion: the Dimona OUT by the next working day at the latest, the C4 on the last working day, the mailbox blocked on the day of departure, and the tasks with the right person before that day arrives.
What is automating offboarding?
Offboarding is the whole of administrative, legal and practical steps between the moment a departure becomes known and the moment a file is legally closed and safely archived. Automating offboarding means those steps carry themselves out from a single trigger, the contract's end date, with human approval wherever the law or policy requires it.
The difference with a digital checklist lies in who does the work. A checklist shows you what needs to happen and tracks what you've already ticked off. An agentic platform assigns the tasks to the right person, with the right deadline, and carries out the steps it can handle itself.
That distinction is called augmentation vs. execution: with augmentation the human remains the executor and the system helps; with execution the system executes and the human supervises.
Key takeaway: automating offboarding revolves around one end date that sets a chain of deadlines, documents and access changes in motion.
What does Belgian law require on an employee's departure?
This is what makes offboarding in Belgium different from most international HR literature: it comes with hard deadlines, and several of them carry a penalty. The full chain, in the order in which it falls due:
| Obligation |
Deadline |
Source |
| Blocking the mailbox and activating an autoreply |
The day of actual departure |
Securex |
| Handing over the C4 unemployment certificate |
By the last working day at the latest |
Securex |
| Filing the Dimona OUT with the NSSO |
By the next working day at the latest after the end of the contractual relationship |
NSSO |
| Paying out the final settlement |
At the moment of termination, and at the latest on the first pay day after |
Securex |
| Final entry in the staff register |
By the seventh day after departure at the latest |
FPS Employment |
| Removing the autoreply together with the mailbox |
After 1 month, exceptionally and with justification up to a maximum of 3 months |
Securex |
| Providing the individual account |
Within 2 months after the quarter in which the contract ends |
FPS Employment |
| Filing the 281.10 tax form |
Annually by the end of February (2025 income: 28 February 2026) |
Securex |
| Holiday certificate (white-collar) and 15.34% departure holiday pay |
On departure, via the final payslip |
Securex |
| Employment certificate |
Only on request, containing only start and end date and the nature of the work |
FPS Employment |
Three things that often surprise people:
The C4 is always mandatory. Securex states it without exception: "The employer is obliged to hand over an unemployment certificate (C4) to the employee, regardless of the reason for the termination of the contract." Also applies to a resignation by the employee, a mutual agreement, and the end of a fixed-term contract.
Fines have been a quarter higher since February 2026. The multiplier decimes in the Social Criminal Code rose on 1 February 2026 from ×8 to ×10. A late Dimona falls under sanction level 3: an administrative fine of €1,000 to €10,000 or a criminal fine of €2,000 to €20,000, each multiplied by the number of employees involved (Securex). For an intentional infringement it moves to level 4. Certain sectors, such as agriculture and horticulture, hospitality and temporary work, have stricter levels, so always check your joint committee.
Notice periods changed twice in 2026. For open-ended contracts starting from 1 June 2026, the notice period on dismissal by the employer is capped at 52 weeks, reached at 17 years of seniority (Partena Professional). For contracts starting from 1 August 2026, the notice period is one week as long as seniority is under six months, regardless of who gives notice (Claeys & Engels). Existing contracts follow the old progression. Your calculation therefore now also depends on the contract's start date.
And then there's a layer with no deadline but a fine attached: the mailbox. In 2020 the Belgian Data Protection Authority fined a small company €15,000 because the mailboxes of an employee dismissed in November 2016 weren't deactivated until 2019, with no autoreply. The Litigation Chamber explicitly stated that this obligation doesn't depend on a request from the former employee (DPA, decision 64/2020). Automatically forwarding to a colleague is also forbidden.
Key takeaway: the first three obligations on a Belgian departure fall due within one working day of the last working day. Anyone tracking them manually is structurally working against the clock.
What actually goes wrong in practice?
The pattern in the research is remarkably consistent: the problem rarely lies in intent and almost always in the handoff between HR, IT and payroll.
A peer-reviewed interview study by Fraunhofer FKIE and the University of Bonn, with 15 IT managers who handle offboarding themselves, names communication as the biggest stumbling block. The quote the authors highlight: "they forget to report that the person is leaving" (SOUPS 2025). Eleven of the fifteen organisations use an offboarding checklist, and the respondents themselves are sceptical about it, precisely because ticking boxes isn't enforceable. Eight of them only revised the process after audit pressure.
The consequences, in numbers:
- 34% of knowledge workers have accessed an account, file or app from a former employer after leaving. 30% of the apps in an organisation fall outside SSO and 52% of employees installed apps without IT's approval (1Password, 5,200 knowledge workers, October 2025).
- 91% of leavers retained access to company files after offboarding and 32% still had access to company email (Beyond Identity, 1,216 respondents, 2023).
- Only 55% of HR managers managed to fully lock a former employee out of all systems, and 86% saw at least one employee skip the exit interview (Capterra, 287 HR professionals, 2022).
- IT spends an average of 5 hours per departing employee tracking down and revoking cloud and SaaS access, and 69% has to search three or more different sources to do it (Nudge Security, 375 IT professionals, 2023).
- The annualised cost of insider risk in Europe stands at $18.6 million per organisation. A single incident caused by a negligent employee costs an average of $747,107 and takes an average of 67 days to contain (Ponemon Institute, 354 organisations, May 2026).
Run the numbers for a Belgian company of 200 employees. Under normal turnover that's several departures a month, each with a C4 on the last working day, a Dimona OUT the day after, a mailbox that must be closed, an average of five hours of IT work, and a final settlement. At that frequency, offboarding isn't an exception, it's a recurring process with fixed deadlines, month after month.
Key takeaway: offboarding rarely fails on willingness and almost always on the handoff. Treating a departure as one event instead of five separate notifications removes most of the risk.
What can you actually automate in offboarding?
Being honest about the boundary matters more here than a long feature list. Three categories:
Fully executable from a single end date
- Assigning tasks to HR, the team lead and the colleague taking over, with deadlines relative to the last working day ("2 days before the end date")
- Stopping leave accrual and preparing the remaining balance for the settlement
- Reclaiming equipment and vehicles and logging the return
- Sending the end date and reason for termination through to your social secretariat
- Sending an exit survey and having the responses summarised
- Archiving the file while respecting retention periods: 5 years for the staff register and individual account, 10 years for tax documents and workplace accident reports (Claeys & Engels)
Automatically triggered, with a human deciding
- Calculating the notice period, including the new rules based on the contract's start date
- Checking whether outplacement is mandatory: with a notice period or severance payment of 30 weeks or more, the employee falls under the general scheme (60 hours of guidance, valued at 1/12 of gross annual salary with a minimum of €1,800 and a maximum of €5,500). Anyone 45 or older with at least one year of seniority who falls under 30 weeks is covered by the specific scheme under collective agreement no. 82 (Securex)
- Job-search leave: one working day a week during the last 26 weeks of the notice period, half a day a week before that
- Checking that the C4 is ready and correct before the last working day
Stays with your social secretariat
Salary calculations, departure holiday pay, the tax form and the legally required filings such as the Dimona belong in your social secretariat's payroll engine. An HR platform supplies the input (end date, reason, attendance, balance) and retrieves the output. A platform claiming to run the final settlement itself is selling you a risk.
Key takeaway: the automatable part of offboarding is the coordination: who does what, when, and which system should know it. Payroll stays with the social secretariat.
Organising vs. executing: the 4 levels of HR software
HR software has been stuck at organising work. Agentic HR executes it. For offboarding, that ladder looks like this:
| Level |
Name |
What a departure looks like |
| 1 |
Manual |
The departure lives in an email thread, a Word checklist and one person's head |
| 2 |
System of Record |
The end date is correctly entered in the system. You carry out every step after that yourself |
| 3 |
System of Workflow |
Tasks get routed to the right person. You still tick them all off yourself |
| 4 |
System of Execution (agentic) |
You give one end date and the chain runs. You approve where the law requires it |
The jump from 3 to 4 is exactly where offboarding fails today. A routed task nobody ticks off is a mailbox that stays open. More on this in digitising HR processes and the evolution of HR software.
How Peepel approaches it
In Peepel, an employee's departure is one event with a name: employee offboarded. What follows from that:
- You end the employment with an end date and a reason for termination (dismissal, termination by mutual agreement, end of contract). That's the only action a human needs to take.
- A routine on that event starts the offboarding checklist, launches a survey or runs an AI agent.
- The checklist distributes the tasks across HR, the team lead and the colleague taking over, with deadlines relative to the end date. You can generate one in natural language instead of building it field by field.
- Vehicles are automatically returned on the end date of the contract.
- The end date is included in the monthly attendance transmission to your social secretariat, together with the contract type.
- You archive the person once the file is complete: out of active views and integrations, with the data retained for reporting and the statutory retention periods, and recoverable for as long as that's allowed.
And the boundary, explicitly: salary calculations, tax calculations and legally required filings such as the Dimona stay with your social secretariat. Peepel carries out the coordination and delivers the input, the payroll engine stays where it belongs. See also how Peepel works.
Peepel is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant and hosted in the EU (AWS Frankfurt). Certificates and pentest reports are available at trust.peepel.io.
What level is your offboarding at?
Four questions. Your first "yes" is your level.
- Does a departure at your company mainly live in email, Excel and a shared folder? Level 1
- Is the end date neatly stored in a single system, while you carry out every following step yourself? Level 2
- Do tasks get automatically routed to the right people, but does someone still have to tick them all off? Level 3
- Does a single end date set the entire chain in motion, and do you only step in to approve? Level 4
Further reading: Automating onboarding · HR automation: the complete guide · What is agentic HR? · What is a Dimona filing? · Leave management software compared
FAQ
- When must the Dimona OUT be filed?
- By the next working day at the latest after the end of the legal or contractual relationship between employer and employee. With a served notice period that's the day after the last working day; with an immediate termination it's the working day after the termination. A late filing falls under sanction level 3 of the Social Criminal Code: €1,000 to €10,000 administrative or €2,000 to €20,000 criminal, multiplied by the number of employees involved.
- Is a C4 always mandatory?
- Yes. The employer must issue a C4 unemployment certificate regardless of the reason for termination, including a resignation by the employee, a mutual agreement, and the end of a fixed-term contract. It must be handed over by the last working day at the latest.
- Can you leave the mailbox of a departed employee running?
- The mailbox must be blocked on the day of actual departure. You inform the employee beforehand, give them the chance to collect private messages, retrieve business messages in their presence, and set up an autoreply. That reply may stay active for one month, exceptionally and with justification up to three. Automatically forwarding to a colleague is forbidden. The Belgian Data Protection Authority already imposed a €15,000 fine for this.
- How long can you keep a personnel file after departure?
- There's one period per document type, not a single uniform period for the whole file. The staff register and individual account are kept for 5 years, tax documents and workplace accident reports for 10 years, camera footage for a maximum of 30 days. For the rest of the file, the applicable statutes of limitation apply, typically one year for claims arising from the employment contract and up to ten years where criminal time limits are involved.
- When is outplacement mandatory?
- On dismissal by the employer with a notice period or severance payment of at least 30 weeks, the general scheme applies: 60 hours of guidance over a maximum of 12 months, valued at 1/12 of gross annual salary with a minimum of €1,800 and a maximum of €5,500. Below that 30 weeks, if the employee is at least 45 with at least one year of seniority, the specific scheme under collective agreement no. 82 applies. Sectors and regions may have additional schemes.
- What can you actually automate in offboarding?
- The coordination: assigning tasks and deadlines, reclaiming equipment, preparing the leave balance, sending the end date through to your social secretariat, sending an exit survey and archiving the file according to retention periods. Salary calculations, departure holiday pay and statutory filings such as the Dimona stay with your social secretariat.
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