How to Manage Your Business Passwords

Many people tend to use the SAME password over and over for all their accounts. Most of the time, it is something very easy to remember too. Using insecure passwords could mean a load of trouble for your business. It is important to manage your business passwords and sharing them with your team members, agencies, and contractors while staying safe.
An effective and reliable tool for managing and sharing secure passwords for your entire team is Last Pass. Your business activity will be easier to manage since you will be able to create different passwords for various accounts and manage them from the same place. Also, you will have extra security to prevent hacking.

Signing Up for LastPass

The first task is to create a team account. You can either choose a free 14-day trial account or a paid one. Once you have activated your account, the first thing you set up is a Master Password.
The Master Password should be unique and easy to remember—this will be one of the LAST passwords you will need to remember.
After you have set your Master Password, download the LastPass extension for your browser from here.
Create secure passwords with LastPass

Learn how to use LastPass with both new and old accounts.

Try using the LastPass extension for a new account! Choose an online app to create a new account with. Let’s create a new Buffer account.
Enter your email address. Now click on the browser extension of LastPass and select “Generate password”, then copy the password.
Paste the newly generated password and create your account.
Next, you will see a LastPass popup asking you if you want to add your account to the app. Click “Add”.
For your existing accounts where you have unsecured or shared passwords, you will need to update them. Go to one of your existing accounts. For this exercise, we will use our Google account.
Click on your account settings.
Click on the LastPass browser extension and select “Generate secure password”, then copy the new password and update.
The LastPass popup will appear. Click “Add” to add your account to LastPass or “Update” if your account is already in LastPass.
Log in to your accounts with LastPass
Choose one of your accounts (a new one or an updated one) to log in with LastPass. For this part, we will use the Buffer account we have just created.
Go to the website where you want to log in. In the form field you will see the LastPass icon. Click on it and choose your account.
Select the account you want to log in with.
LastPass will automatically fill in the email & password fields for you.

Sharing login information with your team

The last part in learning how to use LastPass is finding out how to share login information with the members of your team. To begin, let’s create a shared folder in LastPass.
Open your LastPass dashboard
Go to the “Sharing Center” and click on “Add a new folder” at the bottom right of your page.
Use this new folder to share accounts that several people need to have access to. For example, it wouldn’t be of any use to have your social media accounts and your billing app in the same folder so we recommend you to group these folders by departments in your company and name them accordingly. We will name ours “Social Media”.
Create the folder.
Once you have the folder, it’s time to manage it and invite your team members to it.
Click “Manage” to open the settings for your folder.
Invite users (your team members) and send them an email (tick the “Send email” box to enable this option). Before sending the invite, make sure you have ticked the appropriate boxes:
“Read Only” access is for the users you want to enable to just use the logins in the folder.
“Admin” access is for the users you want to enable to add and edit the logins in the folder.
After you click “Invite”, there are two options:
The team member you have invited to your shared folder is not a LastPass user, in which case they will be prompted to join. They are already LastPass users, in which case they will be prompted to join the shared folder. After you are done with inviting your team members to your LastPass folder, it’s time to add the sites to the folder. In the LastPass dashboard, go to “Sites”.
Select the accounts you want to add to the shared folder.
Click on “Actions” ⇒ “Move to folder” and choose your folder. In our case, it’s “Social Media” shared folder.
Save the changes.
And that’s it. Everybody with access to the LastPass shared folder will also have access to these accounts and you will be able to manage passwords more easily and securely.