Their files, sorted
before you need them

Not every file matters equally. Start with anything that binds the company: signed agreements, accepted quotes, purchase orders, and messages where a price, date or discount was confirmed. Those are the documents a client or supplier will hold you to, and they are the ones you need to find before the phone rings.

Next, look for anything that should not sit in a shared folder at all. Passwords saved in documents should go to IT to be changed. Personal files, such as payslips, medical letters or family photos, should be set aside and handled under your company policy and the privacy rules where you operate, rather than read or redistributed.

Do not keep the leaver’s name as the top folder. In a year, nobody will remember who “Priya’s stuff” belonged to, and her clients will be split from the rest of your files about them. Sort by client or project first, then document type, and merge into the folders the team already uses.

Keep one holding folder, like “Unsorted from Priya”, for files that do not obviously belong anywhere. Name everything with a date, the client and the type, so 2026-01-Acme-Foods-Proposal-Signed.pdf makes sense to whoever finds it next, including the person after you.

A good handover is a short conversation, not a long document. Ask what is promised but not delivered, which clients expect a call soon, and where the signed version of each live agreement is. Those three answers cover most of the surprises successors run into.

Ask which drafts are dead, too. Leavers know which “final v3” was abandoned, and five minutes of their time can save you from sending a client the wrong price. Write the answers down in the client folders themselves, not in a separate handover file that gets lost.

Most company drives let an administrator move a leaver’s files to a manager before the account is closed. That keeps the files, but it keeps the mess too: the manager receives one big folder with the same names it had before, and it often sits unopened until someone needs something from it.

Other teams zip everything into an archive folder named after the leaver, or ask the successor to sort it as they go. Filex sits after the transfer step: download the folder you were given, upload it, and it reads and sorts the contents so the archive becomes a working set of client folders.

Filex does not connect to a coworker’s account, mailbox or company drive. It works with the files you download and upload, so anything that was deleted, or never moved before the account closed, is outside its reach. Ask IT about recovery options for those.

It does not manage access rights or offboarding, and it does not decide what happens to personal data. It reads and sorts documents; choices about who may see a leaver’s files, and what must be returned or removed, belong to your HR and IT teams.