Last Saturday's quick win named a second administrator on every critical account, so no single departure or lost phone can lock the organization out. This week's twenty minutes looks at the same doors from the other direction: who else can still open them, and whether they should. Security Month has spent five weeks adding locks. The quarterly door check is how you find the keys that were handed out years ago and never collected.
Chapter 2 of the book draws one distinction this check depends on. Access is who can log in to an account. Ownership is whose name, email address, and payment card the account is registered under. On a normal day the two feel identical; on a bad day they behave nothing alike. Today's check walks the access column. The ownership flags you find along the way get written down for a slower fix, one support ticket at a time.
The check
Open the Web Account Inventory, or the closest thing you have to one, and work the access column top to bottom. For every name on every account, ask two questions: does this person still work with us, and does their role still need this level?
Website administrators. Open the content management system (CMS) users list. Anyone who has left is removed today. Anyone who only writes or edits is demoted to editor or author; publishing should never require the account that can delete the site.
Hosting, registrar, and DNS. These accounts can reset nearly everything below them. Check each user list, and check whose phone holds the second factor.
Email admin console. Look for forgotten mailboxes still carrying admin rights, and any delegate access granted to a former colleague.
Social business settings. The platform's business structure, not the app's buried menus, lists every admin. Former staff and the agency from two campaigns ago live here.
Vendors and short-term helpers. Any engagement that has ended takes its access with it, the same day you notice.
Shared logins. Every one you find is a door that cannot be closed for one person. Each gets a plan to become individual accounts.
Record each removal in the inventory with the date. Then flag, separately, anything registered to a personal email address, a former employee, or an outside vendor. Those rows need a transfer, not a removal, and the time to ask is while goodwill and reachability are at their peak.
Why quarterly
Access drifts. A contractor gets admin rights "just for the launch," a volunteer takes over Instagram and is never demoted, and a departed colleague's account survives because the offboarding happened from memory rather than from the list. Chapter 2 is plain about what happens to organizations that skip the review: they drift back into the audit's findings within a year, one shared login and one forgotten contractor at a time. A quarterly pass takes minutes precisely because the inventory exists. Without it, the same questions take an afternoon of logging into every account you can remember.
The M7.1 maintenance calendar already carries this review in its quarterly tier, next to the restore test and the hit-by-a-bus file. Put a name beside it. "Someone" is nobody.
Done looks like a dated pass through the inventory's access column, every departed person removed, every role at the least level the work allows, at least two named administrators on every critical account, and a short list of ownership flags with a next action beside each.
The departed-today emergency exists because this review usually does not. An organization that runs the door check four times a year rarely needs that playbook, and on the day it does, the doors list is already written.
Get the workbook. The M2.1 Web Account Inventory Workbook has the access, ownership, and risk-flag columns this check runs against, with a completed example row. It is free with a Web Managers account at https://webmanagers.com/register, and it arrives with the weekly Web Managers letter.