Ending Employment and Erasing Personal Data (GDPR)

When someone leaves you there are two actions, and they happen at completely different times. They are easy to confuse – and one of them cannot be undone.

Both require the permission to manage users.

Ending an employment

Open the person's staff record under Personal ▸ Personal, click edit and then Avsluta anställning.

What happens:

• The person is marked inactive and the end date is set to today
• The login is closed – all permissions disappear immediately
• Open punches are closed
• Future shifts are cancelled

One warning matters: if the person is the restaurant's only administrator they keep their login. Vendion says so, and you must appoint a new administrator before the account can be closed. Otherwise you lock yourselves out of your own restaurant.

Re-hiring someone

An ended employment can be brought back. Open the record and click Återanställ. The person becomes active again, the end date is removed and the login is reopened.

What does not come back: the PIN (set a new one in the form), the till permissions and the shifts that were cancelled when the employment ended. Those must be entered again.

A recruitment whose offer was withdrawn cannot be reactivated here – recruitment has its own route back.

Erasing the personal data

Once the retention period has passed, the button Anonymisera personuppgifter appears at the top of the staff record. It is shown only for inactive staff and disappears once the data has already been erased.

What is permanently erased:

• Identity number, bank account, name, email address and phone number
• The name in the staff register is replaced with "Anonymiserad användare"
• The calendar link to the person's schedule stops working

There is no automatic nightly erasure. Permanently destroying personal data should be a deliberate decision by a human, not something that happens quietly at three in the morning. The action cannot be undone.

What remains – and why

Erasure removes the link to the person, not the history. This remains:

• Hours worked and punches – the basis for pay already made
• Payroll data and payroll exports
• The staff register's timestamps – clock-ins and clock-outs, but without name and identity number
• The employment contract – it is accounting information covered by the Bookkeeping Act's retention period

That these remain is therefore not a gap in the erasure. The Bookkeeping Act and the Tax Procedures Act require the material to be kept, and that obligation outweighs the right to erasure while the period runs.

When erasure is permitted

The system refuses to anonymise before the staff register's retention period has passed, and the error message states the exact date on which it becomes permitted.

The rule comes from the Swedish Tax Procedures Act (2011:1244) chapter 39 section 12: staff register data must be kept through two years after the end of the calendar year in which the tax year ended. In practice that means 1 January three calendar years after the employment ended.

An example: an employment ending in May 2024 can be anonymised at the earliest on 1 January 2027 – not in May 2026. The law counts calendar years, not months from the end date.

People without an end date – that is, ongoing employments – can never be anonymised.

Employment contracts are not covered by the anonymisation. Under the Bookkeeping Act chapter 7 section 2 they must be kept through the seventh year after the end of the calendar year in which the financial year closed, and Vendion never removes them automatically.

The employee's own rights

An employee can retrieve everything Vendion stores about them themselves. In the staff portal there is a Ladda ner min data button, which generates a file with personal details, schedule rows, punches, absences, holiday data, tip distributions and employment contracts. Every such export is logged for traceability.

This corresponds to the subject access request under GDPR article 15, so the employee does not need to ask you for it.

Before you erase

Erasing personal data has legal consequences in both directions: erase too early and you breach the retention obligation, never erase and you breach data minimisation. Vendion helps you with the first – the system simply refuses – but the second is your own responsibility.

This article describes what the product does, not what your particular business should do. If you have questions about which data you must or may keep, check with your accountant or data protection officer before erasing.