Facebook Business Manager: How to Set Up a Business Portfolio, Give an Agency Access and Keep Ownership

Facebook Business Manager is where a business holds its Facebook Page, its Instagram account and its ad account. Today Meta calls it a business portfolio, and the tool you manage it with is called Meta Business Suite. Which is why most of the guides you will find on Google look nothing like the screen in front of you. In this article we show how to set up a business portfolio properly from the start, how to give an agency partner access without handing over passwords, which assets have to stay in your ownership, and what to do when the ad account is disabled or restricted.

Business Manager, Meta Business Suite and a business portfolio: the same thing under different names

The names have changed several times, and the old documentation is still alive on Google. Here is how it looks today in Meta's own help pages:

• A business portfolio is the container. That is where the business assets sit: a Facebook Page, an Instagram account, an ad account, an app and a Meta Pixel. We used to call it Business Manager.
• Meta Business Suite is the tool you manage the portfolio with: posts, messages, settings and permissions. The address is business.facebook.com.
• Ads Manager is the screen where you build campaigns and check performance. It is part of that same business portfolio, not a separate system.

Two rules are worth knowing before you touch any settings. First, according to Meta, a business asset can belong to only one business portfolio. Which means a Page or an ad account sitting in someone else's portfolio cannot sit in yours at the same time. Second, you can personally create up to two business portfolios, but there is no limit on the number of portfolios you can belong to as a person or as a partner.

The first rule is the reason this whole article exists. If your agency opened the ad account inside its own portfolio, that account belongs to them, not to you.

How to set up a business portfolio and connect a Page, Instagram and an ad account to it

The set-up itself takes a few minutes. The steps according to Meta's help page:

1. Go to business.facebook.com with your personal Facebook profile. The profile is only the way in, not the owner of the business.
2. Open the dropdown menu below Home and choose to create a business portfolio.
3. Give it a name identical to the public name of the business. The name is displayed across Meta's platforms and cannot contain special characters.
4. Enter a full name and a business email address. Meta will send a request to confirm the address. Use an address the business owns, info@ for instance, and not the private email of an employee who will leave in a year.
5. Add the assets in settings: the Facebook Page, the ad account, the pixel, and then the Instagram account.

You add the Instagram account in settings, in the accounts section, logging in with the username and password of the professional account. After it is connected, new campaigns will automatically include Instagram as an ad placement. Note that the single-portfolio rule applies here too: an Instagram account can be linked to only one business portfolio.

One point that surprises new businesses: Meta notes that a new business portfolio or a new ad account may not get access to all advertising features straight away, as part of protecting the platform. So it is worth setting up the portfolio before you plan a launch, rather than on the same day. We will not go into the measurement side here, because we covered it in our guide to implementing conversion tracking.

Partner access for an agency versus adding a person: the difference that decides who owns what

There are two ways to let an agency work on your account, and they are not equivalent.

The common, wrong way: you add the campaign manager as a person in the business portfolio, with their personal profile. It works, but the access is tied to an individual rather than to a company, and nobody ever remembers to remove them when that person changes.

The right way: partner access. The agency has a business portfolio of its own, and gives you its portfolio ID. According to Meta's instructions, the process on your side is: Settings in Meta Business Suite, the Users section, Partners, Add, and then "Give a partner access to your assets". You enter the agency's portfolio ID, choose which assets to share and at what level of access, and click Assign assets.

Three facts worth knowing from that same page:

• Only someone with full control of the business portfolio can add partners. If the "Partners" option does not appear for you, that is a sign you do not have full control.
• Meta asks you to turn on two-factor authentication for the business portfolio before you share assets.
• A partner given full control of an asset cannot share it onwards with another business. Only the organisation that owns the asset can do that.

That last sentence is your insurance policy: as long as the assets sit in your portfolio, the agency works on them rather than holding them. In addition, Meta distinguishes between full control and partial access, in which specific tasks are assigned, such as managing ads or responding to messages. There is also finance access, which allows someone to see transactions and invoices, and temporary access, which expires on its own after between 3 and 75 days. For a freelancer taken on for a fortnight, temporary access beats a permanent permission that nobody remembers to cancel.

An ownership checklist before you hire an agency and after you part ways

Go through these lines before you sign, and again on the day you part. A quarter of an hour of checking saves a month of correspondence.

1. The business portfolio is registered to the business and you have full control of it, not partial access.
2. The ad account was opened inside your portfolio, and the payment method is yours as well. With us the account is opened in your name and stays in your ownership.
3. The Page and the Instagram account sit in that same portfolio, and not in the portfolio of whoever built your website three years ago.
4. The pixel and the dataset are yours. That is the asset you cannot recreate, because the history built up inside it does not transfer.
5. Two people with full control, not one. If the single individual loses access, there is nobody to turn to.
6. Two-factor authentication switched on for everyone with full control.
7. On the day you part: remove the partner in settings, confirm that the payment method stays yours, and export the reports you want to keep.

What external management actually includes and how it is priced we explained in our article on social media management: what it covers and what it costs, and the questions worth asking a supplier before you commit we gathered in our guide to choosing a digital marketing agency. Want to see what your agency is running for you right now? You can check that with no permissions at all, through the Facebook ad library.

A disabled or restricted ad account: what to do

This is one of the more common calls we get, and it usually arrives in a panic. The procedure itself is orderly. According to Meta, on a computer you go to Meta Business Support Home, click the restricted account in the account overview, and look for the "What you can do" section. From there Meta asks for one or more of these actions: confirming your identity, completing verification, securing the account or requesting a review. It is important to know that to request a review you have to be an admin on the account.

Three points that save damage:

• Do not open a new ad account as your first response. It usually complicates the review rather than shortening it.
• Check first whether it is a payment failure. An expired card is an entirely different problem from a policy violation, and the fix for it is immediate.
• There is a clock. Meta notes that if an ad account is disabled for a policy violation and remains ineligible for reinstatement for 6 months, unused prepaid services may be forfeited, and after that period the account cannot be reinstated. In certain circumstances Meta reserves the right to disable an account permanently before then.

This is exactly where the separation we have been talking about pays off. When the business portfolio and the assets are yours, you can attach a new ad account or a different partner without rebuilding your presence from scratch. How that affects the budget and the cost per lead we set out in our article on what Facebook and Instagram advertising costs.

What Simple Web does about it

Simple Web is an AI-first marketing agency from Bnei Brak, certified Meta partners and Google advertising experts, working with 200+ businesses and holding 28 five-star Google reviews. In our paid social service we always work through partner access to the client's business portfolio: the ad account is opened in your name and stays in your ownership, and we receive exactly the permissions needed to do the work.

In practice, at the start of an engagement we go through the business portfolio with you, tidy up whatever is still open in previous suppliers' accounts, connect the pixel and the conversion events, and make sure there are two people with full control and two-factor authentication. In ongoing management, which also covers organic social media management, you get a monthly report with the cost per lead. As for the price, the FAQ page on our site says: "Paid social management starts from ₪3,500 a month, not including ad budget."

Summary

Facebook Business Manager is now your business portfolio in Meta Business Suite, and the important question about it is not how you open one but who holds it. Set the portfolio up in the name of the business, with a business email and two admins, and open the Page, the Instagram account, the ad account and the pixel inside it. Give the agency partner access, not ownership. And if the account is blocked, go to Meta Business Support Home before you open anything new. Want us to go over the permissions in your business portfolio and see what is open to whom today? Book a free diagnostic call with us.

Sources

• Meta: Create a business portfolio in Meta Business Suite: the set-up steps, the list of business assets, the one-portfolio-per-asset rule and the two-portfolio limit
• Meta: About business portfolio and business asset permissions: full control versus partial access, finance access and temporary access of between 3 and 75 days
• Meta: Give a partner access to business assets in your business portfolio: the route for adding a partner, the two-factor authentication requirement and the rule that a partner cannot share an asset onwards
• Meta: Troubleshoot a disabled or restricted account: the Business Support Home route, review requests by an admin, and the 6-month window