Tag Archives: Digital Estate Planning

10 Reasons Why Businesses Need a Digital Estate Plan

digital estate plan
Data Backup, Security, Technology, , , , ,

In the last two weeks, we have talked about digital estate plans and why it is crucial for businesses today to have one. Since most business data is now stored digitally, it makes sense to protect these digital assets in the event the business owner passes away.

If you still don’t have one and are still on the fence about whether creating one is worth your time and effort, we have listed 10 excellent reasons to encourage you to get started soon.

1. Protection of Digital Assets with a Digital Estate Plan

This step is the primary purpose of planning—it ensures that your business and all its digital assets are adequately protected after the owner dies, especially if they are the only ones with access to the business accounts and other online information. Instead of being lost in cyberspace, they will pass the digital assets on to the owner’s chosen successor.

2. Business Continuity with a Digital Estate Plan

The death of the owner doesn’t mean the end of the business. With a well-prepared digital estate plan, you can show your long-term goals for your business and assign individuals to carry on these goals. Hence, your business can continue to prosper years after you are gone.

3. Better Control of the Business

Sometimes a business may carry on after the owner’s passage, but in a direction that differs from what the owner had originally intended. You can prevent this so your business follows your intended path by specifying how you want your digital assets managed in the digital estate plan.

4. Legal Compliance

The law requires businesses to follow specific regulations regarding data protection and privacy. Compliance with these legal requirements is one of the high-priority items in a digital estate planning checklist. When creating your plan, check for local regulations that might apply to your business.

5. Intellectual Property Protection

Most businesses own several digital assets that are intellectual property. These include company logos, brand names, trademarks, and patents. Digital estate planning ensures the protection of all these intellectual properties by enabling the business owner to decide on the manner of their eventual management or distribution.

6. Identity Theft Prevention through Digital Estate Plan

When a business owner dies, the company’s digital assets might become susceptible to data breaches or identity theft unless there is a proper delegation of management roles, which a digital estate plan can help ensure.

7. Dispute Prevention

Just like in a regular will, those left out sometimes fight over the inheritance. The same can happen in a business when the owner passes. As a business owner, you can prevent these kinds of disputes by creating a digital estate plan that shows the roles you want your business partners, stakeholders, and family members to play in the business after you have gone.

8. Tax Liability Reduction

Turning over the ownership of a business can come with hefty taxes, but a plan can significantly help reduce these taxes.

9. Legacy Preservation

Even if you completely trust your successor to do well in your business, it is still something else to preserve your legacy after your death. A plan lets you specify the direction you want to go with your business and gives your successor a guide on managing the business how you would have wanted them to.

10. Smooth and Seamless Transition

With everything laid out in the plan, transferring ownership can go on without hiccups. There will be no wasting of time, money, and other resources. All that has to happen is the execution of the estate plan.

Create Your Digital Estate Plan with Our Help Today

There they are – 10 compelling reasons to prepare a digital estate plan for your business. If you are ready to take the next step, we are always here to assist in any way we can.

For more information, download our free Digital Estate Planning Checklist and Password Cheat Sheet right here. Contact us if you have questions! We will help you ensure that your business stays protected, now and after your passing.

Protecting Your Business in Case of Death

Protecting Your Business
Data Backup, Security, Technology, , , ,

It would be a shame and an unfortunate waste if a business cannot continue operating after the owner’s death. Fortunately, we have ways to circumvent this, beginning with a highly efficient thing called digital estate planning. When protecting your business, this is an effective way to prepare before death.

There are a few scenarios where the business can continue past the owner’s death. For example, we have sole proprietorships and traditional partnerships, where the dissolution automatically happens when the owner dies. But for many other cases, digital estate planning plays a role in ensuring the business will continue running under new management in the coming years.

Why Protecting Your Business & Digital Estate Planning Is Important

The main reason digital estate planning is now a critical element for businesses is that most business transactions and operations are processed digitally. Correspondence, marketing, and sales all happen online. This means that the wealth of a typical business’s assets is now digital. That is why protecting your business digitally is now also crucial.

Now, if the owner dies, and he is the only one with access to these digital assets, the people left in the office will have a huge problem. How can the successors of the business continue running the business when they can’t even log into the accounts in the first place?

As the business owner, when protecting your business it is your job to create a digital estate plan so that in case anything happens to you, or even if you are just temporarily incapacitated or unable to run the business for whatever reason, the person who is going to take your place would have all the data to gain access and to run the business.

How to Create a Digital Estate Plan

It might sound difficult, but creating a digital estate plan is straightforward when protecting your business. It is like making a will but for the digital assets of your business. You will begin by taking an inventory of all your digital assets. Make a list and make sure that everything is included. Anything that is in digital form should be on the list and must be planned for accordingly. This includes documents, databases, images, videos, login information for accounts relevant to the business, and so on.

After completing your list, think carefully about what you want to happen to them. In your digital estate plan, name the person you wish to entrust with each asset. Explicitly state what you want them to do to it, how you want the assets managed, and so on. Each appointee should receive a copy of all the login names and passwords needed to fulfill their responsibility.

Importance of Password Management in Protecting Your Business

This brings us to the crucial aspect of password management in digital estate planning. Turning over a list of passwords to your would-be successor is not enough when protecting your business. You must guarantee these passwords are current. Giving them a list of defunct login information is as good as giving them nothing.

The easiest way to ensure this is to use a password manager: a software application that securely keeps all your login names, passwords, and other sensitive information. Each time you change a password, which should be periodically, update the records accordingly.

Be Ready with a Well-Organized Digital Estate Plan

Having a business, you can pass on to your loved ones is a huge accomplishment. But it is just as important that you should be able to pass it on with no hitches. That is why as early as now, you should already start protecting your business and prepare a digital estate plan that will enable your loved ones to take over just as you wanted, after your death.

To help you make some of these business decisions, we’ve created two helpful downloadable infographics: A Digital Estate Planning Checklist and a Password Cheat Sheet. Pass these two resources around the office so everyone is up to speed on these important topics.

Call us any time you are ready to take the next step!

A Step-by-Step Guide to an Effective Digital Estate Planning

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Data Backup, Security, Technology, , , ,

In our previous blog, we began talking about the digital assets of a business—what they are, why they are vital to the business, and how to protect them. We have also mentioned how important it is to protect them even after you, the business owner, have passed away, through effective digital estate planning.

A digital estate plan will give authorized people access to business accounts, and all other restricted aspects of the business when you are no longer around or have become incapacitated. But how does one create an effective digital estate plan? It’s not something that you do every day. What are the things to include? How can you guarantee that the business you have worked so hard to build can go on properly? Here are the important steps that you need to take.

Take an Inventory of All Your Digital Assets

First, you need to create a list of all the digital assets of your business, which might encompass a wider range than you think. These are all the digital files that have value for your business, from photos and videos of your products to transaction records and everything in between. It also includes all accounts you maintain for your business. Taking inventory of your assets is an effective digital estate plan.

Decide How to Manage Your Digital Assets

For each item you have listed, you must specify how to proceed with it after you pass. Who will have access? What should be done with them? How do you want them managed? It is important to be clear and concise in leaving these instructions because they will be followed when you are no longer around to make clarifications.

In selecting your designated backup person, the one who will have control over the digital assets of your business when you cannot do so, pick one who is both capable and trustworthy. In addition, they should also be well-versed in the operations of your business.

Keep an Updated List of Passwords for an Effective Digital Estate Planning

Practically everything now is online and requires a login name and password. It is crucial to keep all of this login information in a place that is not only completely safe but also accessible to authorized entities when the time comes.

A great way to store your passwords as an effective digital estate plan is by using a password manager. Here, you can safely store any online credentials. It also conveniently allows any authorized entity to access the login information. With a password manager, you can also easily update the saved passwords whenever you change them.

Strengthen Your Digital Security

When a business owner passes away, there will be quite a few entities with a vested interest in the business. This people will try to get their hands on it. They might think that since the owner has died, no one would watch the gates, and getting in would be easier. This would not be true if you increased your data security as early as now.

Multi-factor authentication is one of the most popular methods people are using today as a login procedure. This is because it can add a robust layer of security to any account. Besides traditional passwords, you should also activate the use of one-time passcodes. This is to ensure that only authorized individuals will gain access to your digital assets.

Final Thoughts for an Effective Digital Estate Planning

Preparing in the event of death is no different with a company’s digital estate. To help you prepare for the inevitable, we have created a Digital Estate Planning Checklist and Password Cheat Sheet that you can download for free.

This guide contains a lot of useful information that you would need to organize a complete digital estate plan. This is one of many things you can do to protect your digital assets. If you have questions or need further assistance, our team is just a call away!

Protecting Your Business through Digital Estate Planning

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Cybersecurity, Data Backup, Security, Technology, , , ,

Keeping your business protected is very important. But you should ask yourself if you have all areas covered. Security cameras and restricted entry areas are vital for protecting the physical location. To protect employees, implement all their necessary rights and privileges, and so on. All this is important, but one thing to prioritize as a business owner is protecting your digital assets through digital estate planning.

What Are Digital Assets?

Digital assets comprise everything in your business that is, well, digital. These include data, software, applications, and intellectual property. If you are like most businesses today, your daily operations rely heavily on these digital assets. It makes sense that you safeguard them to the best of your ability with digital estate planning.

Effective Strategies for Protecting Digital Assets Using Digital Estate Planning

Cybercriminals are now very creative in launching their attacks, so business owners must be extra vigilant and meticulous in protecting digital assets. Here are some of the most effective strategies for digital estate planning that you can use.

Strong Passwords

It is surprising how many businesses today still use passwords that are so easy to crack. Hackers might have advanced strategies for infiltrating your system, but you can make their job much more difficult by using unique, complex, and strong passwords. Also, be sure to change passwords periodically to minimize the risk of a data breach. This is common practice for digital estate planning.

Access Controls

One of the easiest but most effective ways to protect your digital assets is to restrict access to them. This step will drastically reduce the risk of data falling into the wrong hands, and should there be a leak, it will be easier to trace where it originated.

Digital Estate Planning – Data Encryption

No matter how confident you are in your data security measures, you should never underestimate the capabilities of cybercriminals. In case they steal your data, high-level encryption will protect it from being exposed or used for illicit purposes. That is why a part of digital estate planning is always encrypting your data.

Biometrics

Biometrics is now a popular alternative to conventional sign-in methods. Not only is this more convenient for the users, but it also offers more security. Using fingerprints or facial recognition ensures that no one other than the allowed individual can log in. Also, people would no longer need to remember passwords or write them down, which only adds to the vulnerability of the old method.

Backup and Recovery

If anything happens, you should have a reliable data backup and recovery plan, which is essential for protecting digital assets. You must save and store backups regularly in multiple secure and protected locations.

Employee Training

Your employees can be valuable in protecting digital assets, but ironically, they are also usually the weakest link. With regular employee training, however, you can turn them into a robust first line of defense and circumvent most security threats.

Security Software

There is a wide range of software created for protecting digital assets, firewalls, threat detection applications, antivirus software, and so on. If you are unsure of which software to get, you can always enlist the help of an MSP who will recommend the best security solutions to match your needs.

Importance of Digital Estate Planning

An element of protecting digital assets is that many companies do not even think of digital estate planning. It is simply preparing your digital assets. This is so that an authorized person gains access to everything in the event of your death.

This might sound morbid, but it does not differ from other forms of estate planning. It also makes it easier for your business partners, beneficiaries, or heirs to continue the business when you are gone. As this could still be a new concept for some business owners, we have prepared a Digital Estate Planning Checklist and Password Cheat Sheet, both of which you can download for free.

In this, we delve into the advantages of having a digital estate plan, how to go about it, and why password management is a very important part of it. Our team is also ready to help you create a comprehensive digital estate plan, which is crucial for protecting your digital assets, even long after you are gone.