Admin Left Abruptly. How do we transfer ownership to a new admin

You should contact support@airtable.com directly. I believe your former coworker needs to add you or someone else as the co-owner of the base’s current workspace, and from there you can move it to a workspace owned by your company.

Here’s an even easier & quicker method than what @Kamille_Parks suggested above:

Go to your Airtable Home Screen, click on the dropdown menu for the base (i.e. the little down arrow), and choose “duplicate base”. Then, you can duplicate the base into your own workspace, where you will become the owner of it.

This works for all collaborators, even read-only collaborators.

(This is actually extremely helpful in your situation, but it is actually a security concern for administrators who DON’T want people making copies of an entire base.)

^ That’ll work but the coworker will still have access to the existing data from the original base.

Yes, this is true. However, there was nothing preventing the former admin from already duplicating the original base in the past (for example, right before they left the organization) into their own personal & private workspace.

So it’s very likely that if they had bad intentions, then they ALREADY have access to all the existing data, and nobody can ever remove it from them. But yes, if the former admin wasn’t that technically savvy, then they might not have done that.

It will be very interesting to hear how Airtable Support handles this sort of situation, since that former admin was technically the owner of the workspace, so it’s their choice who to share their workspace with. @Lovell_Porter, definitely report back with what Airtable Support tells you!

Of course they do, it was their account and therefore had the highest permissions possible. Had they been a read-only or editor level collaborator that would be a different story.

@Lovell_Porter is the former employee refusing to grant ownership of the workspace/base to the company?

In this case, yes. In this scenario, no one else has high enough permissions to take over the account and view billing, etc. With most companies, there is a form or something we can fill out to transfer the account to a new person. I can’t find anything that says Airtable has a similar setup.

Actually, even if they were a read-only collaborator or an editor-level collaborator, they could’ve also copied the entire base for their own personal usage. This is why @Lovell_Porter can simply copy the database into a new workspace, and she will become the owner of the newly-copied base.

This is one of the 9 security flaws that I have discovered in Airtable, which I discuss in this thread, although as we have seen in this case, this “security hole” is actually a blessing in disguise because it enables anyone to take over ownership of the base at anytime.

So that solves the problem of ownership of the base.

However, as far as workspace billing continuing onwards to the old admin, that’s a completely different story. Everyone can remove themselves as collaborators from that old admin’s workspace, but that would still leave that former admin as a paid billing contact for that workspace. I’m curious to see how Airtable Support handles a situation like this!

^ when I said it would have been a different story, I meant “actually a problem with Airtable’s permission structure”. There is a considerable difference between “Owner of the workspace can duplicate their own bases” and “Anyone who has read-only permissions can duplicate a base”.

@Kamille_Parks Ah, I see… we’re both saying the same thing. Lol. :slightly_smiling_face:

@Lovell_Porter, please be sure to report back here with whatever Airtable Support tells you, because I’m extremely curious to know what their procedure is for this sort of a situation! :slightly_smiling_face:

Be aware that if you make a duplicate of the base, any links for shared views and forms will change.