To find out who holds each key, login and account on your farm, walk the place with a clipboard and list every lock. Then sit at the desk and list every login and every account someone can pay from. Next to each item, write who has access and since what date. Also write their level: some people only use a key or a login, some can approve payments on an account, and some can give access to other people. That list is the access register. You want it filled in before anyone leaves, not on the day they are already gone. The first version takes one walk around the farm and one afternoon at the desk.
Over the years, keys and passwords get handed out on trust or to save time, and nobody writes them down. When something goes missing, nobody can say who could have reached it. When someone leaves, you may learn only later what they could still open, and you cannot take back access you do not know about.
Why do you lose track of who has access to what?
Because access is handed out one key at a time, usually on a busy day and for a good reason, and nobody writes it down at that moment. After a few years, the only record of who holds what is in people’s memory, and when a person leaves, what they remembered leaves with them. Once it is written on the register, it stays on the farm.
Writing access down also cuts the chance of fraud, meaning theft by someone you trusted with money or goods. Donald Cressey, a criminologist who studied why trusted employees steal, found that this kind of fraud needs three things at once: pressure on the person, such as money trouble, a way to excuse it to themselves, and the chance to do it. You have little say over the first two. The chance is the part you can shrink.
In a 2015 review of that work, two accounting researchers, Abdullahi and a colleague, sum up the point: in most cases, “the lower the risk of being caught, the more likely it is that fraud will take place”. When nobody has written down who can open what, that risk stays low, because if something goes missing, there is no list of who could have reached it.
In its 2024 report on 1,921 fraud cases from every industry, not farms in particular, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, a body of fraud investigators, found missing internal checks to be the most common weakness, and a typical scheme lasts 12 months before detection.
Why not just give the trusted people access to everything?
Because when someone holds more access than the work needs, one mistake, or one worker who is short of money and gives in to temptation, can end in a big loss. On a farm, the tractor driver does not need the bank login to do his job, and whoever keeps the books does not need the key to the agrochemical shed.
There is a second cost. When only one person holds a key or a login, the work that depends on it stops the day that person is sick or gone: if only one worker can open the bank app, the bills wait. Whoever covers for someone usually needs the same keys and logins. If you keep a plan of who else can do the job, a list of who covers each critical task when someone is out, add the access each task needs. On the register you can see both problems at once: access spread too wide, and access held by one person alone.
What goes on the register?
The register is a simple table on paper. Give it one row for each lock, login or account, and on that row write the names of everyone who can open or use it. The locks: the gate, the fuel shed, the agrochemical shed, the workshop, the office door, the safe. The logins: the bank app, the farm software, the co-op account, the input supplier’s website. For each login, write the name of the service and the username, never the password. The payment and sales accounts: the checkbook, the card, the online account with your grain buyer.
Give each item its own row. If the office door and the safe share one row called “the office”, you will not see that four people know the safe combination when you thought only you and your foreman did.
If you already keep a list with one row per item and a name and a date on each row, the register can follow the same layout; only the contents change. A payroll list with the date each worker started is often laid out that way, and so is a list of work areas that fall short of safety standards, where each row holds who will fix the problem and by when.
What are the levels of access, and why three?
Access is not simply yes or no. Each person holds it at a level, and once you write the level next to the name, you can see what that person can actually do. Three levels are enough for a farm:
- Uses: the person opens the shed or logs into the software to do the day’s work.
- Approves: the person signs, authorizes a payment or approves a purchase.
- Administers: the person can change the lock, reset the password, or give and take away other people’s access.
A lock usually has only the first and the third level: some people open it, and one person can change it or have a key copied. Approving belongs to the money accounts. The third level is the easiest to miss and the one to watch most closely, because whoever administers an account can give access to anyone without you knowing.
On the money accounts, split each payment between people, so that no one person controls it from start to finish. Four jobs are best kept apart: approving the payment, holding the checkbook or the cash, writing the payment in the farm’s books, and checking the bank statement against the books. The list comes from a guide by the internal auditors of the University of Pennsylvania, written for the university’s own offices rather than for farms, and the auditors accept that a small office may not manage to separate all four.
On a farm with one or two people at the desk, keep at least two jobs apart: whoever approves a payment does not check the statement of the account it came out of. On the bank account’s row, write who checks the statement. If one person has to do both, check that statement yourself.
When does the register stop matching the farm?
When you write it once and never check it again. Access changes faster than paper. A new worker gets the gate key, the sprayer operator moves to another job and keeps the shed key, a password is reset and shared to get through a busy morning. The row that was right at planting is wrong by harvest.
Change a row the day someone joins, leaves or changes jobs, and go through the whole register at least once a year, the same rule the University of Pennsylvania auditors set for the list of who may approve which payments. In that review, check each row against what you find on the farm: whether the person still works there and still needs that key or login. Cross out any name that should no longer be there. You can run the same yearly check on other written lists the farm keeps, such as the budget or the spray record; comparing what is written with what is really there is a large part of farm management.
On the register you write down who was given access, not every way someone can get in. If the bank login is on the register under one name but half the crew knows the password, those people have access you cannot see on the list. The same goes for a key someone copied. When you find one, change the password or the lock and write down the new holders. Protecting the bank login and the farm software is a separate job, and your bank, your software supplier or a computer technician can help with it.
Access is also different from the authority to decide. A manager may hold the bank login to pay routine bills and still need your approval for a large purchase. Which decisions the manager makes without asking you belongs in a separate document, a written agreement on what the manager decides alone, decision by decision. In the access register you list only what each person can open, and the same person can have the access without the authority.
Where to start
A clipboard, a walk around the farm, and an afternoon at the desk, logged into the bank app and the other online accounts so you can see who has a login on each. No software needed.
Be careful where you keep the register. If you type it up and save it in a shared folder that everyone already opens, anyone can read who holds which key and login. Keep it in a locked drawer, or in a file only you and one trusted person can open. Filling in the register does not by itself make the farm safe. With it filled in, you can say today who can open the gate and who can move money, instead of finding out one name at a time after someone has left.