How partner access works
Partner access is business-to-business sharing. Instead of adding a freelancer’s personal Facebook profile to your assets, you share an asset with the other company’s Business Portfolio using its portfolio ID. Their portfolio then decides which of their own staff works on your account, and you keep ownership throughout.
Sharing is granted per asset and per role. You might share the ad account with permission to create and edit campaigns, share the Page with permission to publish content, and share the dataset with permission to view events, all to the same partner and all at different levels. Removing the partner withdraws every one of those permissions at once, whoever inside their company was using them.
Why partner access matters
Offboarding is the reason. When an agency relationship ends and access was granted to individual profiles, someone has to remember every person who was ever added, and in practice nobody does. Partner access turns that into a single action performed the day the contract ends.
It also stops the ownership problem before it starts. An agency that is given partner access can run everything it needs to run without your Page, ad account or pixel ever sitting inside its portfolio. That distinction decides whether you can walk away with your assets and your history intact, or whether you rebuild from nothing.
Common mistakes with partner access
The commonest is granting admin because it is quicker than reading the roles. An admin can add other partners, change ownership settings and remove people, including you. Very few agencies need that, and handing it over converts a working relationship into a dependency.
The second is confusing the two directions. Your portfolio can share an asset with a partner, or a partner can share one of theirs with you, and the settings look almost identical. If the agency’s portfolio is the one sharing, the asset belongs to the agency; that is the arrangement to refuse.
The third is never reviewing the list. Partners accumulate: a web developer added for a pixel fix, a former agency, a tool that was trialled once. Each one is still standing access to a live advertising account.
How to act on it
Ask the partner for their business ID and add them in Business settings, sharing only the assets they actually need at the lowest role that lets them work. Give advertiser-level access to run campaigns and reserve full control for people inside your own business. Record the date access was granted and what it covered.
Review the partner list on a fixed schedule and remove anyone whose work has finished. When a contract ends, remove the partner first and change nothing else; ownership stays with you, campaigns keep running, and there is no rebuild. If you are appointing someone to take over managing your Meta campaigns, agreeing this before the work starts is far easier than unpicking it afterwards.