It usually starts with a small, reasonable question. An insurer’s renewal form wants to know who administers your systems. Somebody needs an email address for a new starter, or the website is moving to a different designer. You know exactly who to ring, and they’ll sort it that afternoon. Then somebody asks whose name it’s all actually in, and the room goes quiet.
The short answer is that it depends on how things were set up, and the answer for your business is already written down somewhere. Microsoft 365 tenants, domain names and DNS records each have a registered owner and a day-to-day administrator, and those are often different parties. Both arrangements are normal. What’s less normal is a business that can’t describe which one it has.
That description fits on one page. Five rows: Microsoft tenant, domain name, DNS, licence agreements, handover route. Fill in every row you can answer from memory, and mark the rest unknown.
What should be on a one-page IT ownership sheet?
The tenant is the Microsoft account your whole business lives inside: your people, your mail, your files, your settings. It has a technical name of its own, usually ending in onmicrosoft.com, behind the friendly domain you actually use. The row wants two things: which organisation the tenant is registered to, and which account holds top-level administration. In plenty of small businesses that account belongs to the IT provider, which is the sensible way round.
The domain name is the part after the @ in your email, and the address people type to find you. It’s rented rather than bought, from a registrar, and the rental is recorded against a registrant: the legal name the domain belongs to. That’s often the business. It’s sometimes the provider or the web designer who set it up years ago on your behalf. So the row wants the registrant, the registrar, and who gets the renewal notices. Renewal notices matter more than they look. A domain that lapses takes the email with it.
DNS is the address book for your domain. It’s the set of records saying which mail service your email should arrive at, where the website is hosted, and which senders are allowed to use your name. Moving either your email or your website means changing DNS, so whoever holds DNS holds the steering wheel for both. It’s frequently hosted somewhere different from the registrar, which surprises people, so the row wants that service’s name and who can sign in.
Licence agreements are what your Microsoft 365 subscriptions sit on. Some businesses buy licences directly. Many buy them through their IT provider, on the provider’s agreement, which usually puts support and subscription on one bill. Both are ordinary. The row wants which of the two you’re on, how many licences of what type, and whether the term runs monthly or annually. That last one decides how quickly the number can move.
The handover route gets its own section below, because it’s the row everybody leaves blank.
Isn’t it safer for our IT company to hold the admin accounts?
Yes, generally. None of this is an argument for taking the keys back.
Top-level administration in Microsoft 365 can do almost anything to almost anything, so the fewer people holding it the better, and the ones who do should use it daily and secure it properly. A provider does both. The alternative, one all-powerful password shared round the office, is what actually gets companies hurt. Locked-down admin held by the people you pay to run your systems is the right call, and it’s how we’d set it up ourselves.
The gap isn’t the arrangement. It’s that the business often can’t describe it. Saying in one sentence who holds what, and why, costs the provider nothing and takes nothing away from them.
What does the handover route mean if we’re not leaving?
It isn’t about leaving, and writing it down doesn’t make leaving any more likely. Most businesses stay with a provider they get on with for years, and that’s usually the right outcome for everyone.
Things change for reasons that have nothing to do with being unhappy. Providers retire, merge or get bought. Businesses get bought too, and the acquirer’s due diligence asks exactly these questions. An insurer or a large customer asks who controls your systems. A tender, or a new finance director in their first fortnight. In each case, the person being asked is you.
So the handover row is one or two sentences, not a project plan. What would need to move (tenant, domain, DNS, licences), and who’d have to sign it off. Most decent providers are pleased to see it written down, because the same paperwork then exists on both sides, and nobody has to reconstruct it from memory later.
How do we fill the sheet in?
Write the five headings on a single page and fill in what you know from memory, before opening anything or ringing anyone. It’s a ten-minute job and it doesn’t need a technical conversation.
Then mark the rest unknown. An unknown row is a row you haven’t got a copy of yet, and the copy almost certainly exists: tenant details, the domain registration, where DNS is hosted, the licence agreement, and a short note on how a handover would run. Requesting those is ordinary paperwork, the same as asking your accountant for last year’s accounts.
The pattern we keep meeting on discovery calls
We run a discovery call before we quote for anything, and the same thing happens over and over. We ask who holds the Microsoft tenant, whose name the domain is in, and how the licences are bought. The provider holds all of it, in full, and typically holds it well: administration locked down, licences on their agreement, everything running quietly. Then we ask the owner which organisation the tenant is registered to, and the answer is some version of “our IT company would know”.
They’re right. The IT company does know. Nothing has gone wrong in these businesses, the arrangement works, and in most cases we’d leave the shape of it exactly as it is. The only thing missing is a page in the owner’s own files, because until somebody outside asked, nothing ever required one. And the person who gets asked is never the provider.
A business should be able to describe its own IT arrangements in five lines. That’s the ownership sheet: who holds the tenant, the domain, the DNS and the licences, plus one line on what a handover would involve.
Write it this week, and keep the page with the lease and the insurance schedule, where a business keeps what it might one day be asked to produce.
Quick answers
Can the tenant belong to us and still be run entirely by our provider?
Yes, and it’s the common arrangement. Whose organisation the tenant is registered to, and who’s allowed to administer it, are two separate facts, which is why that row has room for both. Providers normally administer client tenants through their own accounts rather than yours. Record both lines.
What happens to our email if we change web designers?
More than people expect. Designers often hold DNS because they needed it to launch the site, and DNS also carries your mail records. A website move can touch email without anyone intending it to. Naming the DNS holder at the start of a web project, rather than halfway through, is worth the two minutes.
Our licences are bought through our provider. Is that a problem?
No. It’s the usual arrangement for a small business. The detail worth recording is the term. Annual commitments typically can’t be reduced part-way through, so a change in headcount lands differently depending on how you buy. Monthly terms flex faster and usually cost a little more.
We’ve been with the same provider for ten years. Does this still apply?
Especially then. Long relationships run on conversation, which works fine right up until somebody needs the detail in writing. Things set up a decade ago also sit in accounts nobody has revisited since. A ten-minute page catches up on ten years of informality, and it implies nothing about the relationship.
Where should the sheet live?
With the company’s other papers: the owner, the finance lead, whoever keeps the lease. Keep one copy outside the systems it describes, because the day you most want it is the day something isn’t reachable. Then update it when something changes: a new domain, a website move, a new provider.
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