Access should follow the work someone needs to do, rather than how long they've been around.
Small businesses accumulate accounts quietly: an old contractor's login, a shared administrator password, an integration that still belongs to a former employee. Each one began as a practical shortcut. Together, they become difficult to manage.
Make the list before buying another tool
List your critical services, their owners and who can administer them. Include domain registration, DNS, cloud billing, backups and your password manager. For each service, check that you can reach an account owner and recover access if that person is unavailable.
Separate everyday work from administration
Use named accounts and give people the access they need for their role. Keep administrator access separate from ordinary email and browsing. Enable multifactor authentication on important accounts and keep recovery methods current.
Shared accounts make it harder to remove access cleanly and understand what happened when something changes. Where a service genuinely requires one, keep it in an access-controlled password manager and document the owner.
Give departures a simple checklist
Remove active sessions, review API tokens and integrations, transfer ownership and revoke access. Do the same review when someone changes roles. A short checklist used every time is better than relying on memory during a busy week.
Once a quarter, spend half an hour reviewing the list. Remove accounts nobody can explain. The goal is a smaller, understandable set of keys.