Our automations all run on one person's login. What should we buy?

The question

This isn't one letter. It's a composite of a question we get in some form every few weeks, especially toward the end of the year:

"Our office manager set up most of our automations in Zapier over the last four years. New orders go into the spreadsheet, invoices get chased, the warehouse gets a message when something's urgent. There are about forty of them. They're all on her account. She's leaving in December, and honestly nobody else really knows what they do. Should we buy something better before she goes?"

It's a good question, and the instinct behind it is right. But the first problem isn't the tool. It's whose name is on everything.

The short answer

Don't buy a new automation platform yet. First, get the automations you already have into a workspace the company owns, with someone other than her able to open, edit and switch off every one. Then write down what each one does. Only after that is it worth asking whether a different tool, or a proper integration, would serve you better.

An automation only one person can open is still a manual process. It's just hidden. Right now, your business depends on forty small programs that one person understands and one person controls. That's fine while she's there. It's a problem the week after.

What happens when she leaves depends on your plan

We'll use Zapier as the example because it's where we see this most, and Zapier is clear about it in its help center.

If you're on a Team or Enterprise plan and she's a member, not the owner, you're in decent shape. When an admin removes her, Zapier lets them transfer ownership of her Zaps and app connections to another person. It says the Zaps keep whatever on or off status they had. You choose whether her private app connections stay active for 30 days or until they expire on their own. The new owner gets an email with a list of everything transferred, and that link is valid for seven days, so download it.

If she's the account owner, or you're on a Pro or Free plan, it's harder. Zapier says it can't transfer ownership of the account, can't update its connected app accounts and can't transfer those connections. Its suggestion is that your IT administrator gets access to the email address used for the account and resets the password. That works if the address is a company one. If she signed up with a personal email, you have a much more awkward conversation ahead.

Either way, notice the connections. Many of her Zaps will be connected to your other apps using her own logins: her email, her accounting user, her spreadsheet access. When those accounts are closed, the Zaps that use them stop working, even if the Zap itself was transferred.

Buy the workspace, not more tasks

So the purchase that matters is usually the plan, not a new product. If your business automations live on someone's personal or Pro account, the first thing to buy is a team plan where the company is the owner and more than one person is an admin.

Then set some house rules:

The company owns the account. It's registered to a company email address that doesn't belong to one person, and at least two people can administer it.

Connections use shared or role accounts where possible. An "orders@" mailbox, an accounting user for automations, a service account for the spreadsheet. When someone leaves, the connection doesn't leave with them.

Shared folders by area. Orders, finance, warehouse. Every automation in a shared folder, none in personal space.

Every automation has a description. One sentence: what starts it, what it changes, who notices if it stops.

We'd suggest the same rules whichever tool you use. We haven't described other platforms' transfer behavior here, so check your own provider's documentation for what happens when a user is removed.

Before she leaves: the inventory

Use her last six weeks well. Sit with her and go through the list together, one automation at a time.

For each one, write down what triggers it, which systems it reads from and writes to, whose login each connection uses, what happens downstream, and who should be told if it fails. Mark the ones nobody would miss. Switch those off on purpose, tell people you've done it, and see if anyone notices over the next week or two. Many accounts have a handful that stopped mattering years ago.

While you're there, download the list of Zaps and connections from the Members page before she's removed. Zapier says that download is only available while the person is still a member.

A few signs that one has outgrown its no-code home: it has grown so many branches that only she can follow them, someone reruns it by hand when it fails, it breaks whenever a column in the spreadsheet moves, or a customer would notice within the hour if it stopped. Those are the ones worth a closer look once ownership is sorted.

Then look at the ones that matter most. If an automation moves money, creates orders or sends customers messages, it deserves more than a no-code step nobody monitors. Our notes on writing down what the spreadsheet already does and failure alerts for jobs that run unattended are good next steps, and the accounts nobody listed when someone leaves covers the wider offboarding picture.

Put this into practice this month

1. Find out which plan you're on and whose email owns the account.
2. If it's personal or Pro, move to a company-owned team workspace now, while she's still there to help.
3. Reconnect critical apps with shared or role accounts.
4. Inventory every automation with her, describe each one, and retire the ones nobody needs.
5. Name a new owner, and make sure a second person can switch everything off.

If some of those forty automations have quietly become core operations, and you'd like them rebuilt as something you can see, monitor and hand over, that's the business process automation work we do. Talk to us.

Related work: WorkStep.