Auditing your messaging in 15 minutes

You can't fix what you can't see. Most teams know their setup is "a bit messy" but have never sat down and named the specific holes. This takes about fifteen minutes and gives you a concrete picture of where you stand.

1. Attribution — who said what

• I can tell who sent any given message. Pick a thread from last week. Can you name the exact teammate who sent each outgoing reply — without asking around?
• Attribution is automatic, not manual. If your answer relies on people remembering to type their initials, it will fail exactly when you need it most.
• I can prove who quoted a price. A customer says "$300 was the offer." Can you produce a record showing who made that quote, and when?

2. History — the record itself

• Message history lives somewhere other than one handset. If the phone is lost, wiped, or factory-reset, do you still have the conversations?
• History can't be quietly edited or deleted. Can any single person delete a thread and leave no trace? An audit trail you can tamper with isn't one.
• I can export a clean record on demand. If a carrier, platform, or lawyer asked for the full history of a conversation, could you produce it in minutes?

3. Access — who's holding the keys

• Each person has their own login. No shared password that "everyone just knows."
• I can revoke one person's access without disrupting everyone else. Off-boarding shouldn't mean changing a password the whole team has to relearn.
• Customers reach the business, not an individual. When someone leaves, do regular customers keep texting the shop — or do they follow the person to their personal number?

4. Channels & compliance

• My SMS number is properly registered (10DLC or toll-free). Unregistered A2P traffic gets filtered or blocked by carriers.
• Opt-outs are tracked. When a customer replies STOP, is that honored and recorded automatically?
• WhatsApp runs on the official Business API, one identity per person. Not a shared login passed between phones. (See our WABA walkthrough.)

5. Continuity

• Threads can be handed off mid-conversation. When someone's out, can a teammate pick up a live chat with full context?
• Internal notes stay internal. Can your team leave notes on a thread that the customer never sees?

Every gap on this list traces back to the same root cause — many people behind one anonymous identity. We unpack why that's so hard to patch in Why the shared phone has to go.