The average employee juggles somewhere between 50 and 100 work logins. No human can remember 100 strong, unique passwords, so nobody does. Instead they reuse one good password everywhere, add an exclamation mark when IT makes them change it, and keep the important ones in a spreadsheet named, helpfully, "Passwords".
Attackers know this. When any website you've ever signed up to gets breached, your email and password land in a list, and automated tools try that combination against Microsoft 365, your bank, your Xero. It's called credential stuffing, it costs the attacker nothing, and it works precisely because of password reuse. Your firewall never even gets a say.
What a business password manager actually does
One vault, one strong password each. Every user remembers a single master passphrase (protected by MFA). The manager generates and fills a long, random, unique password for every site, so a breach at some forum in 2019 can't unlock your accounting software today.
Sharing without sticky notes. Team logins, like the shared social media account or the courier portal, live in shared folders with controlled access, instead of being texted around or taped to a monitor.
Offboarding in one click. This is the part businesses underrate. When someone leaves, you revoke their vault access once, instead of wondering for months which passwords walked out the door with them. For a 20 to 200 person business with normal staff turnover, this alone justifies the cost.
Visibility for the boss. Admin reporting shows weak, reused or breached passwords across the company, so you can actually measure the problem shrinking.
Why not just the browser's built-in one?
Browser password saving is better than nothing, but it follows the person, not the business. It has no shared vaults, no admin controls, no offboarding, and it happily syncs company credentials to someone's personal laptop at home. Fine for your personal Netflix login. Not fine for the login that moves company money.
What it costs
On the Otterly menu, a business password manager is $11 per user per month as an optional add-on: a business-grade password vault for every user: strong unique passwords everywhere, safe team sharing, and one-click offboarding when someone leaves the raft. Add it in the pricing calculator and watch it barely move the total, then compare that to one afternoon of invoice fraud.
Pairs well with the 5-minute phishing check: strong unique passwords mean a phished credential unlocks one door, not all of them.