Access Review Template: Free Quarterly Excel Download for SaaS Teams

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Related guides:

• soc 2 requirements
• comprehensive guide to soc 2 background check requirements
• risk assessment template
• how to perform quarterly access reviews
• the best access control software

Key takeaways

• Quarterly access reviews are a core SOC 2 and ISO 27001 control. Auditors expect proof that privileged access is justified and stale accounts are removed.
• This workbook includes a user review log, role access matrix, and removals log for deprovisioning evidence.
• Action column supports Retain, Revoke, and Downgrade decisions with named approvers.
• SecureSlate automates access review workflows and evidence exports.

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Overview

Access creep is one of the fastest ways to fail a SOC 2 audit. SaaS teams add tools quickly; without a structured review, ex-employees, contractors, and over-privileged accounts accumulate silently.

What a user access review is

A user access review, sometimes called a user access recertification or entitlement review, is a periodic check that every person's access is still justified by their current role. Someone who owns the system confirms, in writing, that each account should keep the access it has. Anything not confirmed gets revoked or downgraded.

It answers three questions per account:

1. Should this person still have access at all? Have they left, changed team, or finished the project?
2. Is the level of access still right? Admin granted for a one-off migration that ended eight months ago is the classic finding.
3. Who says so? A named approver, with a date. An unapproved review is not evidence.

Why auditors care so much. Access control is the largest criteria series in SOC 2 (CC6, eight criteria) and one of the most heavily weighted areas of ISO 27001 Annex A. The access review is the control that proves the others are maintained rather than configured once. It maps to SOC 2 CC6.2 and CC6.3 and ISO 27001:2022 controls A.5.18 (access rights) and A.8.2 (privileged access rights).

The distinction that matters: access reviews are detective, not preventive. They catch what provisioning and offboarding missed. If your reviews keep finding departed employees with live accounts, the review is working and your offboarding is broken. Fix the offboarding rather than reviewing more often.

Which systems to put in scope

Scoping too narrowly is the most common reason a review passes internally and fails in an audit. Work outward in this order:

Tier	Systems	Review cadence
Tier 1: critical	Production cloud consoles (AWS, GCP, Azure), production databases, source code repositories, secrets managers, CI/CD, the identity provider itself	Quarterly, or monthly for privileged access
Tier 2: sensitive business	CRM, HR system, finance and billing, support tooling with customer data access, email admin	Quarterly
Tier 3: supporting	Project management, documentation, analytics, design tools	Semi-annual or annual

Three categories teams routinely forget, and auditors routinely find:

• Accounts outside SSO. Local database users, service accounts, break-glass credentials, root accounts. These are the highest-risk accounts and the least likely to appear in an SSO export.
• Non-employees. Contractors, agencies, auditors, and vendor support accounts with production access.
• Machine identities. API keys, service principals and CI tokens. They do not leave the company, so nobody offboards them, and they frequently hold broader access than any human.

What makes it useful

• Quarterly review log: System, role, access level, business justification, approver, and review date per user.
• Role matrix: Maps departments and roles to expected access per system (AWS, GitHub, Salesforce, etc.).
• Removals log: Tracks deprovisioning with ticket references for audit trail.
• Approval sign-off: Version history and management sign-off on the Version & Approval tab.

Download the template

• Download: Access Review Template (XLSX)

Run reviews for all in-scope systems each quarter. Export IAM lists before the review meeting.

Tab-by-tab walkthrough

Overview and Version & Approval

Document control, review period (e.g., Q2 2026), and sign-off from security lead and system owners.

User Access Review

Primary working tab. For each user and system, confirm access is still required, document justification, record approver name, and set Action Required (Retain, Revoke, or Downgrade). Flag admin access on non-production roles.

Role Matrix

Define expected access by department and role. Use it to spot outliers during the quarterly review (e.g., Sales with AWS Admin).

Removals Log

Record every access removal: username, system, role removed, date, reason, ticket link, and who completed the change. Auditors often sample this tab directly.

Running a quarterly review step by step

A review that produces clean evidence follows the same seven steps every quarter. Budget one to two weeks end to end.

1. Freeze the period and export the data. Pick a review date, then pull the current user and entitlement list from every in-scope system on that date. Export from the system itself, not from memory or an old inventory. Keep the raw exports: this is the population your auditor samples from.
2. Reconcile against the HR roster. Join the access list to the current employee and contractor list. Anyone in the access export who is not on the roster is an immediate revocation, and worth a look at why offboarding missed them.
3. Compare against the role matrix. Flag every account whose access exceeds what the matrix says the role needs. These are the rows reviewers should spend their time on.
4. Route each system to its real owner. The engineering lead reviews AWS, the RevOps lead reviews the CRM. Never let someone approve their own access, which is the single most common finding on an otherwise well-run review.
5. Record a decision per row. Retain, Downgrade or Revoke, with the approver's name and the date. Blank rows are not approvals, and an auditor will treat them as unreviewed.
6. Execute the changes, then verify. Make the changes in the identity provider and target systems, log them in the removals tab with ticket references, and re-export to confirm the change actually took effect. Decisions logged but never executed is the second most common finding.
7. Sign off and file. Management sign-off on the review, then archive the raw exports, the completed workbook, the tickets and the verification export together in one dated folder.

That last step is what turns a completed review into audit evidence. A workbook on its own proves a decision was recorded; the exports and tickets prove it was based on real data and actually happened.

How to use it as audit evidence

Control expectation	Evidence in template
Periodic access review	Dated User Access Review rows
Manager approval	Approved By column
Timely deprovisioning	Removals Log with ticket IDs
Least privilege	Role Matrix + Downgrade actions

Attach IAM exports and ticketing screenshots to each quarterly review folder.

Common mistakes

• Reviewing only SSO apps and skipping production cloud consoles
• Approver is the same person who holds the access being reviewed
• Revoke decisions logged but not executed in the identity provider
• No removals log, so deprovisioning cannot be sampled by auditors

How SecureSlate helps

SecureSlate automates access review campaigns, collects approvals, and stores evidence for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits.

Get started for free

FAQ

How often are access reviews required?
SOC 2 and ISO 27001 commonly expect quarterly reviews for critical systems. Some teams review production access monthly.

Which systems should be in scope?
All systems with customer data, production infrastructure, source code, and privileged business applications.

What is the difference between Retain and Downgrade?
Retain keeps current access. Downgrade reduces privileges while keeping necessary access for the role.

Who should perform the review?
The owner of each system, not the security team and not the account holder. Security runs the process and chases completion; the system owner makes the call because they are the person who knows whether the access is still needed. Self-approval invalidates the review.

What evidence do auditors ask for?
Four things: the raw entitlement export showing the full population, the completed review with a decision and named approver per row, tickets or logs proving the revocations were executed, and management sign-off. Missing any one of them weakens the rest.

What if we miss a quarter?
Document it as a control gap with a root cause and a corrective action rather than backdating. Auditors find backdated reviews, and a documented gap with a remediation plan is treated far more favourably than evidence that does not hold up.

Do service accounts and API keys need reviewing?
Yes, and they are frequently the biggest exposure. They never leave the company so nobody offboards them, and they often hold broader privileges than any individual. Include them as their own section of the review with a named human owner for each.

What is a user access review template?

A user access review template is a structured worksheet, often in Excel, listing each user, their access, the reviewer, and the decision to keep or revoke it. It standardizes reviews and creates audit evidence.

• Columns typically cover user, system, role, last login, reviewer, and decision.
• It documents who approved each access and when.
• Templates work for small teams but become hard to maintain at scale.

What is access review software?

Access review software automates what a template does by hand: pulling entitlements, routing reviews to owners, and logging decisions as evidence. It scales where spreadsheets break down.

• Collects access data automatically from your systems.
• Runs scheduled review campaigns with reminders.
• See our guide to the best user access review tools.

When spreadsheets stop working

This template works well up to roughly 50 people and a handful of systems. Past that, three things break down:

• Export volume. Twelve systems times quarterly reviews is 48 manual exports a year, and each one is a chance to use stale data.
• Reviewer follow-up. Chasing eight system owners for sign-off by email consumes more time than the review itself.
• Verification. Confirming that every revoke decision was actually executed becomes impractical by hand, which is exactly where the audit findings come from.

The honest signal that you have outgrown the spreadsheet is when reviews start finishing late, because a review completed after the quarter closed leaves a gap in the evidence window. At that point tooling pays for itself, either through your identity provider's access certification features or dedicated software. Our guide to the best user access review tools compares the options.

Disclaimer (legal note)

This article is for general information only and is not legal, regulatory, or professional advice. Requirements vary by framework, industry, and jurisdiction. Consult qualified advisors for your specific obligations.