Free Handover Document Template

A handover document (also called a transition document or knowledge transfer document) is a structured summary of your role, responsibilities, and active work — written to help your replacement or team get up to speed after you leave.

Most people hate writing them because they don’t know where to start. This page gives you a free template to copy, plus a smarter option: letting AI write it from your actual data.

Free template — copy and use

HANDOVER DOCUMENT
Name:
Role:
Department:
Last Day:
Prepared for:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

ROLE OVERVIEW
[2–3 sentence summary of what this role does and why it matters]

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
• [Responsibility 1]
• [Responsibility 2]
• [Responsibility 3]

ACTIVE PROJECTS
Project: [Name]
Status: [Where it's at]
Next steps: [What needs to happen]
Contact: [Who else is involved]

KEY RELATIONSHIPS
[Name] — [Company/Team] — [Why they matter]
[Name] — [Company/Team] — [Why they matter]

RECURRING COMMITMENTS
• [Meeting/report/process] — [Frequency] — [What it involves]

TOOLS & ACCESS
• [Tool name] — [What it's used for] — [Who to contact for access]

CRITICAL KNOWLEDGE
[Things not documented elsewhere that the next person must know]

SUGGESTED FIRST 30 DAYS
• [Priority 1 for the incoming person]
• [Priority 2]

Why the template alone isn’t enough

Templates give you structure. They don’t give you content. Most people sit in front of this and still don’t know what to write — because the knowledge is spread across hundreds of emails, docs and meetings, not sitting in your head in an organised way.

The projects you’ve been working on are in your inbox. The recurring meetings are in your calendar. The files you’ve been editing are in Drive. The template can’t see any of that — but we can.