Quick summary
All directors share legal responsibility for a company's filings, so records, registers and reminders that only one person can see leave the rest of the board unable to actually discharge that duty. Shared access, not a single person's inbox, is the fix.
The usual failure comes down to one person holding all the knowledge of where anything lived. That director moves away, goes quiet, or simply forgets, and the rest of the board is left piecing together what's been filed, what's overdue, and where on earth the paperwork actually sits. It's also usually the same person doing all the actual work in the first place, worth reading alongside our piece on when to outsource the company secretary role entirely if that's the root of it.
Why this is a legal problem worth taking seriously
All directors share legal responsibility for the company's filings, even when one person does most of the actual clicking. If only that person can see the filing history, the registers, the correspondence with Companies House, the rest of the board is simply trusting one person's diligence and hoping for the best, right up until someone's needed to help with the confirmation statement and only one person knows where anything is.
What shared access should cover
- Filing history and what's coming up, covering both what's been done and when the next one's due.
- The registers themselves, directors, members, PSCs, checkable by anyone on the board, not just whoever holds the spreadsheet.
- Key documents, the lease, buildings insurance, AGM minutes, major works notices, plus any AI-answered questions about the lease worth keeping on record.
- Reminders, reaching more than one inbox rather than resting on a single person checking theirs.
Setting this up properly
Records currently living informally, a spreadsheet, a folder of PDFs, one person's inbox, get fixed fastest by agreeing where the real version lives and giving every current director genuine access to it, beyond a promise to forward things "if needed." Using software for this is worth checking on two fronts: whether access can be shared without handing over someone's personal login, and whether removing someone later is straightforward without losing the underlying records.
When a director steps down
Review access at the same time you file the resignation, see our guide on recording a director resignation. A departed director keeping access indefinitely carries a small risk. Losing the records because the one person who held them has left carries a much bigger one. Shared access, rather than single-point access, solves both.
Access is one strand of a bigger handover problem, and the documents are the other: see handing the company over to the next board and where do your building's documents live.
Frequently asked questions
Should every leaseholder get access, or just directors?
Up to the board, though every current director should have real access at minimum. Leaseholders who aren't directors typically have a right to see certain records on request, a separate matter from day-to-day access.
What if the only director with access leaves without handing anything over?
Exactly the scenario shared access is meant to prevent. Where it's already happened, the remaining board will likely need to rebuild records from Companies House's public filing history and start again from there. Building on software with proper multi-user access from the start, which is what FreeholdMate's Team tab is for, is the cheaper way to avoid ever getting here.
Is sharing access to one account risky?
Done properly, everyone gets their own login rather than one shared password, which stays auditable and can be revoked person by person as the board changes, exactly how FreeholdMate's Team invites work.