Ask a company how it hires and you will get a process: requisition, interviews, scorecards, offer. Ask how somebody leaves and you will get a description of a form.
Then look at where the complaints, the delays and the legal exposure actually come from. It is almost entirely the second.
Three places it goes wrong
Notice arithmetic. How many days were required, how many served, what basis the shortfall is recovered on. Get any of those wrong and the settlement is disputed before anything else is discussed.
Clearance. This is where the time goes. Assets, dues, handover, and departmental sign-offs that nobody owns. Most F&F delays are clearance delays, not calculation delays — which matters, because companies respond by trying to compute faster.
The settlement itself. Unpaid salary, leave encashment, gratuity if eligible, reimbursements, bonus, minus notice shortfall, advances and recoveries. Six or seven calculations that all have to agree with each other and with the records they came from.
Treat it as a case, not a form
A case has an owner, steps, dates and a state. A form has a person who is meant to remember.
Running exit as a tracked case means clearance requests go to the departments holding property or dues with dates attached, the notice computation derives from the actual joining date and contract, and the settlement is computed from the same records that produced every payslip — rather than assembled in a spreadsheet at the end.
Why the last payslip matters more than the others
An error in March is corrected in April. An error in the final settlement is the last interaction the person has with your company, and it is the one they describe to everybody who asks.
It is also the one they are most likely to challenge formally, because there is no ongoing relationship to preserve.
Commit to a timeline and measure the right thing
Many employers commit to 30 to 45 days from the last working day. If you commit to something, measure clearance turnaround rather than calculation time — that is the constraint, and it is the one you can actually improve.
And do not use the settlement as leverage
Recovering the value of unreturned assets against the settlement, where the contract provides for it, is ordinary. Withholding the whole settlement indefinitely until something is returned is a much weaker position and a reliable source of complaints — including to authorities who take a dim view of it.