Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to your weekly episode of Financial Snickens, and you are gonna be shocked at what you learned today. We are talking about why you should own your own software and anything else you have online access to. So this comes from lessons learned. Recently we discovered an issue with one of our clients.
And they were not the master administrator or the primary admin on their software. And you might think it's no big deal because hey, I trust the person that's in charge that's running the software. But as we know, trust is not a plan. This doesn't mean you can't trust your people, but look, you gotta have systems in place that allow you to have access to what you need in case your trusted person leaves.
So recently we were onboarding a new client and we're working in their [00:01:00] QuickBooks online file. We found out they're not the primary administrators on the QuickBooks online file. In fact, the person who is the primary administrator hasn't worked there in years and they can't get in touch with them. The file is owned by this phantom person who could actually come in and wreak havoc if they wanted to.
They could literally kick everybody else out of the company. And to remove this person is a long and complicated process, which the owners are going to have to do. In another case, we had a client who wasn't the primary admin on their payroll. Their bookkeeper was. Everything was in her name.
She got sick and couldn't be reached. Payroll could not be run because she was the primary administrator and the owner had no access. We were eventually able to help the owner get access, [00:02:00] but it created so much stress, as you can imagine, and we ended up having to run a late payroll so all the employees knew all these issues that were happening.
Again, we had another client that was not able to access their own credit card information or their healthcare information when they had set everything up. They let their assistant set up all the information. He used his personal information, and the assistant decided he wanted to retire, and the owners realized.
They had no access to any of the accounts. Lucky for them. The person who was retiring was give, gave them all the information and helped transition all the accounts over to them. And after they reviewed all the accounts, they realized that all the transaction transactions were legitimate, but it really could have gone very differently.
I have to tell you, we have come into situations where we have seen people take advantage of the situation and [00:03:00] commit fraud. So look, how can you prevent these things from happening? I have four small rules, short, easy to do rules, so you will not have the shock of your life when you realize you don't have access to your own stuff.
Look any software that you have, and this includes QuickBooks Online, your website, bank accounts, anything that you use online. It should be under your name. Go in, check under user user management and make sure that you have the highest level of access and that no one can kick you out or change your access.
You personally need to keep track of your usernames and passwords. You can use Last Path or some other secure portal for this. Three. If you are implementing new software, find it with a hierarchy. Hierarchy of access is and make sure that you have the one [00:04:00] access that no one else can change. Four. Don't share your access with anyone.
Look, there is, there are cases where you know, if something happened to you, you do want someone to have access. In that case, you can put a plan in place where two separate people, maybe on your team have access to that, to one piece of information. Maybe one person has access to your username and one person has access to your password so that they might be able to go in and take care of you, your business, if you're sick or, or hurt.
And your business still needs to run for a short time without you. Look, this happens to all of us, including me. This is a hard lesson learned. When I first started my company, I hired someone to create a website. It was beautiful. I loved it. And then I realized that one of my own personal clients was monitoring websites and offered to do updates [00:05:00] on my website.
I was so excited. I love using my clients to do work for me because I know the inside of their business. I know how good they are. So I told my original website designer that I just wasn't gonna work with them, and I was gonna work with one of my clients on my website. He didn't take too kindly and he took down my website.
I realized I had no access to the website. I couldn't do anything to retrieve the information. I had to start my website over. From scratch. Inet was unethical of him to do it, but that doesn't matter. I had no access whatsoever. I couldn't do anything about it, and so I had to recreate the whole website, and this was an incredibly valuable lesson for me.
And so make sure you have the highest accessibility to all of your software, your websites, your bank accounts, anything else that you need to [00:06:00] run your business. Most systems allow users with different levels of access and has one or two people as the super users look, take time to check and make sure that you're the owner of your software.
I guarantee it'll be time well spent and will also give you peace of mind.
