Most small businesses have one person at the centre who knows where everything is. Which bank account the money actually moves through. Who renews the domain. Which supplier needs a call before the 25th. Where the lease is filed, and what the accountant’s surname is. Almost none of that is written down anywhere, because writing it down has never been the most urgent thing on the list.
Then something interrupts. A diagnosis. A parent overseas who suddenly needs six weeks of care. In most of these situations the founder isn’t dead, only unreachable, and the business still has salaries to pay and a client waiting on a quote.
An Entrepreneur Legacy Binder answers a fairly ordinary question: if you were out of contact for a month, could the people around you keep things running without guessing?
What a Legacy Binder is, in plain terms
It’s one organised, encrypted place holding two kinds of thing.
The first is documents. Company registration, contracts, insurance policies, tax records, the lease, the shareholder agreement. The proof that things are what you say they are.
The second is operating knowledge. Accounts, logins, names, numbers, and a short explanation of what happens in what order.
A Business Legacy Binder is not a will and doesn’t replace one. A will deals with ownership after death and should be drawn up by a qualified professional, along with anything else binding: shareholder arrangements, buy-sell agreements, key-person cover. The binder deals with the practical weeks, when someone has to keep the lights on while the formal side is still being sorted out.
What actually goes in it
Work backwards from what would stop working first.
- Money. Bank accounts, payment processors, debit orders that run automatically whether anyone is watching or not, outstanding invoices and who still owes them
- The stack. Domain registrar, hosting, business email, point-of-sale, code repositories, and where the backups actually live
- The paperwork. Company registration, tax reference numbers, VAT registration, insurance policies, leases, supplier contracts
- The people. Your accountant, bookkeeper, attorney, insurance broker, landlord, and the staff or suppliers who need to hear from a human being quickly
- Anything held in crypto. Wallet details, plus a blunt note that a lost seed phrase is a permanently lost asset
In Vaultneur these map onto record types you’d expect: Financial, Login, Crypto Wallet, ID, Medical, and Other for whatever doesn’t fit.
The part almost everyone skips
Credentials without context aren’t worth much. Someone holding your banking login, with no idea which of four accounts pays salaries, is still stuck on the 24th.
So write the short note. What happens in the first week. What can safely wait a fortnight. Which invoice is disputed and why. Which supplier stops shipping the moment an account goes 30 days overdue. One page of that is worth more to whoever comes after you than another folder of PDFs.
Why the usual hiding places don’t hold
A spreadsheet in a cloud drive is readable by anyone who gets into your email, which is a fairly low bar for an attacker and a very low bar for a disgruntled ex-employee. A notebook in the office safe survives most things except fire, theft, and nobody knowing the combination.
Password managers do their job well, but their job is logins. They don’t hold the lease, the certified ID copies, or the explanation of which client relationship is fragile. And all of these share a quieter failure: they assume you’ll be around to explain them.
How Vaultneur handles it
Vaultneur is a mobile-only encrypted digital vault built for exactly this problem, using on-device envelope encryption.
Every file is encrypted on your phone before it goes anywhere, with its own AES-256-GCM key. That key is wrapped by a master key derived from your passphrase using PBKDF2-SHA256 at 310,000 iterations. The keys themselves sit in the iOS Keychain or Android Keystore, behind Face ID, Touch ID or your fingerprint.
The practical consequence of that design matters more than the acronyms. Vaultneur holds no key that can decrypt your vault. We can’t read your data, and we can’t produce it under subpoena, because there’s nothing readable on our side. That’s what zero-knowledge encryption means in practice.
Two features do the founder-specific work:
Family Vault shares selected records using per-recipient key wrapping. Your co-founder can hold the banking and supplier records without seeing your medical file or your personal documents. You choose per record, not all or nothing.
Legacy Vault Release is optional and switched off unless you turn it on. You nominate an heir and set a check-in interval between 30 and 90 days. If you go silent past that window, access transfers through a physical Legacy Card carrying a claim code that Vaultneur never sees or stores. If you’re travelling constantly, Emergency QR is worth setting up too: blood type, allergies and emergency contacts readable by a paramedic without your vault being unlocked.
The tradeoff to understand before you start
There is no password reset. None. If you forget your passphrase, the vault is unrecoverable, by you and by us, because we never held anything that could open it.
That’s the honest cost of a system that can’t be compelled to hand your business records to anyone. Write the passphrase down somewhere physical and sensible before you fill the vault, not after.
An hour is enough to begin
The free tier gives you five documents and five records, and the encryption is identical to the paid one. That’s enough to cover the things that would hurt most on day one.
Start here:
- Photograph your company registration and current lease
- Add the bank and payment processor logins as records
- Write the one-page “first week” note and save it as a document
- Decide who the note is for, and tell that person it exists
The last step is the one that does the real work. A binder nobody knows about is just a tidier version of the problem you started with.