Onboarding automation: getting a new employee’s account, equipment and paperwork ready before day one

Take a hypothetical trading company with 150 employees. A new salesperson is due to start on Monday. On Friday it turns out that the IT person was told about the new hire a week earlier in an email he missed, and the laptop has not arrived yet. On Monday the new starter gets a temporary password on a slip of paper and waits two days for access to the sales system.

Situations like this are rarely down to bad intentions. Onboarding an employee involves dozens of small tasks in four different parts of the company, and each department keeps its own list in someone’s head or in Excel. Below is a typical breakdown:

Some onboarding tasks have statutory deadlines. A well-designed process keeps track of them itself and reminds HR before a deadline passes. The table below lists the most important ones.

Pay attention to the first group. Without a medical certificate and health and safety training, the employee cannot start work, so these tasks should start as soon as the contract is signed, not on the first day.

The principle is simple: the new person’s details are entered once, and the system distributes the tasks. It usually looks like the steps below. The Microsoft 365 tools involved are Power Apps or Microsoft Forms for the form, Power Automate for distributing tasks, a SharePoint list as the progress register and Teams for notifications.

It is important that the form contains only the data needed to organise the work: name, department, job title, line manager, start date and location. Personal data such as the PESEL national ID number or bank account number should go only into the HR and payroll system, not onto a SharePoint list visible to several departments.

New employees most often wait for access to systems. Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft’s service for managing accounts and sign-in in Microsoft 365, lets you grant access by department instead of manually for each person. Power Automate creates the account from the form data and enters the department and job title in it.

From there, rules take over. A dynamic “Sales” group automatically takes in everyone whose account lists the sales department. Licences, a team in Teams, SharePoint libraries and the department’s applications are all assigned to this group. Dynamic groups require an Entra ID P1 licence, which is included in, among others, Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

For applications outside Microsoft, such as monday.com or a CRM system, it is worth setting up single sign-on (SSO). The employee then signs in with their company Microsoft account, and access follows from group membership rather than from a separate account created by hand. Some applications also allow accounts to be created automatically, but this has to be checked for each one separately.

A laptop can set itself up. Windows Autopilot, together with Intune – Microsoft’s service for managing company devices – means that a new computer straight out of the box installs the company’s apps and settings after the first sign-in. Automatically enrolling a device in Intune requires Entra ID P1.

The task workflow in Power Automate and SharePoint on its own works on the standard Microsoft 365 business plans. Automatic access and device setup require additional licences. The table below shows what is needed for what.

Prices are from Microsoft’s price list in US dollars, per user per month on an annual contract, as of October 2026. If your company already has Business Premium or E3, most of these features are included.

There is no reliable general data on how long onboarding takes in Polish companies, so it is best to work it out yourself. Ask HR, the IT person and two line managers how many hours the last onboarding took them. Include the time spent chasing information and fixing mistakes.

An example with assumed values: HR 3 hours, IT 4, the line manager 2, administration 1 – 10 hours per person in total. If 4 hours remain after automation, the saving is 6 hours. With 25 hires a year that is 150 hours, and at a cost of PLN 90 an hour, PLN 13,500 a year.

With 5 hires a year, the same saving is 30 hours – not much. In that case, building full automation will not pay back, and a checklist in Microsoft Planner will work better. Alongside the amount, though, it is worth noting the things that are harder to price: fewer access errors and a better first impression for the new person.

When an employee leaves, someone has to disable their account, reclaim licences and equipment and hand over their work. If nobody keeps track of this, the former employee has access to company files for months and the company pays for unused licences. That is why it is worth building the leaver process together with the onboarding process, on the same data.

HR enters the contract end date, and on the last working day the system carries out the scheduled steps. The most important are:

The first step needs no tools at all. Write down every onboarding task and, for each one, who does it, by when and what it depends on. Usually, even at this stage, a few tasks turn up that nobody was formally responsible for.

Start with the dozen or so most important tasks and the one department that hires the most people. After a few onboardings, add whatever was missing. Typical mistakes are: