System catalog
One catalog for every system you have to govern
You can’t review, approve, or offboard access to systems you haven’t written down. Most 30–200 person companies discover this the hard way: the list of “apps we use” lives in three different spreadsheets, a procurement folder, and several people’s heads. A system catalog is the single source of truth that fixes that — every SaaS app, vendor, and internal resource, each with an owner and defined access levels. In Useboards it’s not a static inventory; it’s the record everything else in access governance runs against.
What lives on a system record
A catalog that only lists names isn’t much use. Each Useboards system carries the context you need to govern it — who’s accountable, what access exists, when the contract renews, and how sensitive the data is:
- Ownership: business owner, IT admin, finance owner, security owner, and UAR approver — plus backups, so accountability never has a single point of failure.
- Access levels: the tiers a user can hold on the system (e.g. read-only vs admin), which drive approval flows and reviews.
- Finance: contract dates, renewal dates, and cost — so spend and expiry aren’t a surprise.
- Compliance posture: data classification, SOC 2 status, and frameworks the system falls under.
Owners are the backbone of governance
Naming an accountable owner per system is what makes the rest of governance work. The owner is who approves access requests to that system, who reviews access during a UAR, and who receives a replacement ticket when someone who held a role on the system leaves. Without a designated owner, approvals stall, reviews have no reviewer, and offboarding leaves orphaned responsibilities. The catalog is where that accountability gets assigned once and reused everywhere.
Start fast, without hand-typing everything
Building the catalog doesn’t have to be a data-entry project. Useboards ships a curated quick-add catalog of common tools — M365, AWS, Slack, GitHub, Datadog, 1Password, Stripe, and more — pre-mapped to standard access levels, so you can stand up recognizable systems in a couple of clicks. For everything else, a bulk CSV import handles the catalog in one pass. (By design, only catalog data imports — operational history like past approvals stays out, to keep the audit trail authentic.)
The catalog is what everything else reads
The reason the catalog matters is leverage. Access requests route to the owners defined here. User access reviews scope to the systems listed here and snapshot access against their access levels. Onboarding and offboarding fan out grants and revocations across these systems, routing replacement tickets to their owners. And every change is captured in the tenant-isolated audit log. Get the catalog right once, and provisioning, review, and deprovisioning all have a foundation to stand on.
Frequently asked questions
What is a system catalog?
A system catalog is a single, maintained inventory of every SaaS app, vendor, and internal resource an organization uses — each with an accountable owner and defined access levels. It’s the source of truth that access requests, reviews, and offboarding all reference.
How is it different from a spreadsheet of our apps?
A spreadsheet is a static list. The Useboards catalog is a live record that other workflows read: owners defined here approve requests, reviews scope to these systems, and offboarding routes revocations across them — with every change captured in an audit log.
Do we have to enter every system by hand?
No. A curated quick-add catalog of common tools (M365, AWS, Slack, GitHub, and others) comes pre-mapped to standard access levels, and a bulk CSV import loads the rest in one pass. Only catalog data imports — operational history is deliberately excluded to keep the audit trail authentic.
Why does each system need an owner?
Because the owner is who approves access to the system, reviews it during a user access review, and inherits replacement tickets when someone leaves. Ownership defined once in the catalog is reused across every governance workflow.
Related
Build your source of truth first
Quick-add common tools or bulk-import — then run governance off one catalog.