In most small businesses, “the IT person” is unofficially the office manager. You order the laptops, chase the printer vendor, set up the new hire, and field the “my email’s being weird” complaints — all on top of an actual job. This guide won’t make you a technician. It’ll make the IT part of your week shorter, calmer, and better documented.

Onboarding and offboarding: the two lists that prevent most problems

Nothing in office IT pays off like two boring checklists.

New hire (start a week early): the account and email created, the computer ordered or prepped, software licenses assigned, phone and door access sorted, and a first-day sheet with how to log in and who to call. A new employee staring at a dead laptop on day one is the most preventable bad first impression there is. (Full onboarding checklist.)

Departure (same day, every time): email and account access cut, passwords they knew rotated, devices collected, their files and mailbox preserved before the account is touched, and auto-forwarding checked — quiet forwarding rules are a classic thing to miss. The gap between “gave notice” and “access removed” is a real security exposure, and closing it is usually the office manager’s superpower. (Full offboarding checklist.)

Keep both lists written down, not in anyone’s head. When they’re documented, a departure during your vacation goes fine anyway.

Be the keeper of the master list

The single most valuable IT thing an office manager can own isn’t technical: it’s the inventory. One spreadsheet (or a shared doc) with:

  • Every computer: who has it, when it was bought
  • Every software subscription: what it costs, when it renews, who administers it
  • Every vendor: internet, phones, printer/copier, software — account numbers and support lines
  • Where the domain name and website are registered, and who can access them

Half the pain of switching providers, surviving an outage, or answering an insurance application is just finding this information. The business that has the list is six months ahead of the one that doesn’t. (Why documentation matters this much.)

Wrangling vendors without losing your afternoon

A few habits that save hours:

  • Get a ticket or case number the moment you call, and log it in your master list. “I talked to someone Tuesday” restarts the clock; a case number resumes it.
  • Describe symptoms, not conclusions. “Three people can’t print to the front-office printer since this morning” gets faster results than “the network is down.”
  • One escalation sentence works wonders: “This is affecting [N] people’s work — what’s the next step if it isn’t resolved today?”
  • If you have a managed IT provider, let them fight vendors for you. Vendor management is included in most plans — including ours — precisely because a technician arguing with the internet company gets further, faster, than anyone should have to on hold.

Know what to escalate — and what’s genuinely urgent

Most requests can wait their turn in the queue. A short list can’t. Treat these as call-now, not ticket-later:

  • Anyone reports clicking a link and entering their password (what that email probably was)
  • Files won’t open across multiple computers, or filenames look scrambled — possible ransomware; minutes matter
  • An email asks anyone to change payment or banking details, however legitimate it looks
  • A departed employee’s access may still be live

For everything else, batching is your friend: a tidy list of five small issues gets resolved faster than five scattered calls.

Make support work for you

If your company has managed IT support, you’re entitled to more than fixes. Ask for the new-hire process to be standardized so setup is a form, not a project. Ask for the recurring annoyances — that printer, that flaky Wi-Fi corner — to get a permanent fix instead of a monthly ritual. And if you’re the one coordinating IT anyway, ask to be included in the regular service reviews. The office manager usually knows better than anyone where technology is quietly wasting the team’s time — that knowledge is exactly what a good quarterly review runs on.

The bottom line

You don’t need to fix technology; you need to run the system around it. Two checklists, one master list, calm vendor habits, and a short escalate-now list — that’s the playbook. It turns the unofficial IT job from a daily interruption into a managed part of the week, and it makes you the person the whole company is glad is in the room.