Keeping a Record of Your Office's Online Accounts

A small office can easily use dozens of online services. An account register, kept up to date, turns a scramble into a five-minute lookup.

Ask a small business how many online accounts it has and the honest answer is usually a guess. Banking, email, the domain name, the website host, accounting software, payroll, suppliers, delivery services, social media, file sharing and a long tail of free trials that became paid subscriptions. When someone leaves, a card expires or a service sends a worrying email, the first question is always the same: do we even have an account there, and who controls it?

What an account register is

An account register is a simple list, kept as a spreadsheet or in the notes field of your password manager. It does not hold passwords. It holds the facts around each account so anyone authorised can find their way:

• Service name and web address.
• What the office uses it for.
• Login email or username (not the password).
• Who is the owner or administrator.
• Whether a second factor is on, and where recovery codes are kept.
• Billing: which card or account pays, how often, and the renewal date.
• Date added, and date last reviewed.

Building it the first time

Go through card and bank statements for the past year and note every recurring payment. Search the shared mailbox for words like "welcome", "verify your email" and "receipt". Ask each person which services they log into for work. The first pass takes an afternoon; keeping it current takes minutes.

Services change names

Companies rebrand, merge and move to new web addresses. A register that only records today's name can leave you unable to match an old invoice or email to the account it belongs to. Add a column for previous names and old addresses, and note the date you noticed the change. Third-party review pages sometimes track this kind of history when a brand is renamed; for example, a Traditional Chinese review page that looks at whether one gaming brand is a renamed version of an earlier one, and lists its trial-credit and withdrawal-limit rules from the platform's own pages (玖發娛樂城評價) starts from exactly that question. For your own register, the lesson is simpler: when a provider writes to say it has a new name, update the entry the same day.

Review it on a schedule

1. Every quarter, check renewal dates for the next three months.
2. Cancel what nobody uses.
3. Confirm the owner of each account still works for you.
4. After anyone leaves, review every entry they owned.

Keep it safe, keep it findable

The register is sensitive because it is a map of your business. Store it where your backups reach and where only the right people can read it, and keep one printed copy with your office records in case the computers themselves are the problem.

Filed by Harriet Lowell · revised 2026-11-09