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Shared Accounts / System Accounts MFA for Team - Best Practices on Onboarded New Account Maintainer

Zachary 0 Reputation points
2025-12-04T01:48:18.2833333+00:00

This is a repeat of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5546078/how-do-i-transfer-share-a-qr-code but no one is replying to my bumps. So trying again.

There is a clear business case for companies to use system accounts (aka faceless, service, headless, bot, shared accounts). And there is an even more clear reason as to why company policies are for these to be accessible/maintained by more than one user. Typically two users, but sometimes more if we are spread across geos.

So, how do we share this account when Authenticator-based MFA is enabled? The QR Codes seem to expire too quickly to effectively share asynchronously, and having a meeting to delete and recreate the QR Code each time we cycle to a new set of owners is extremely burdensome. Especially when you're talking about 10s of these accounts for some teams.

So, aside from disabling MFA for these account altogether, what best practices does microsoft have for such a common use case?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For business | Other
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  1. Allison-H 4,735 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2025-12-04T13:44:25.0066667+00:00

    Hi Zachary

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum 

    I completely understand the pain of sharing those QR codes every few weeks.  

    To understand your exact situation, may I clarify a few more details: 

    1.What is this shared account mainly used for? (e.g. sending automatic emails, running scheduled Power Automate flows, refreshing Power BI reports, connecting from a server, internal app, etc.) 

    2.Where does this account get used from?  

    -On a server or virtual machine in Azure  

    -On a server or computer inside the company (on-premises)  

    -On personal laptops or third-party services 

    3.Right now, how do people sign in with this account?  

    -Username + password + Microsoft Authenticator (QR code)  

    -Something else (please tell me) 

     

    The initial response may not fully address your needs, but it will help me better understand your situation and give the advice. Thank you for your patience while we work through it  

    If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".   

    Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.  

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