How are you managing passwords in your studio? Do you have it written down in a little log book somewhere? Do you have it on some post-its on your computer?
You want to be really careful about how you handle passwords these days. So make sure that you have a secure way to handle it, so we suggest using LastPass. LastPass is a product that we’ve used here for years in our firm, to make sure that we keep all of our information secure. And in dealing with a lot of different passwords it’s a must for me.
There’s no way we could ever remember how to log into websites without having password managers involved. So what LastPass does is allow you to store the website, credentials for hundreds or thousands of different websites in a secure location. You can also utilize this on your phone or on a laptop or from other computers where you log in to that password manager.
So it’s really handy to use where you may have taken a password from your desktop computer, and now you need to log in from home or from your mobile device. LastPass also allows you to share passwords with other people. Now you can share them without letting them see the password, they’ll just have the credentials and it will be stored behind the little dots there so that nobody can see what it is and allow somebody to log into a website.
This way you don’t have to worry that they’re going off site and logging into your website somewhere else and taking all of your data or destroying your data or having to change passwords every time when an employee leaves. So we strongly suggest using a secure password manager.
Now let’s talk for a moment about the Google password manager or the Apple key chain. Both of those products are not in the same league as what I’m talking about here, those are accessible. If you walk away from your computer, anybody has all your passwords and can log in and go look at what they are. So those are not as secure mechanisms and I don’t recommend using them.
For true password managers use something like LastPass. There’s also a competing product called 1Password. There are a number of different products out there, but LastPass is the one we use and recommend.
So hope this helps you leave your passwords in a secure location and make sure that you are not subject to somebody stealing those.
Donna Bordeaux, CPA with PYOPAccounting.com
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