User Access Reviews

Overview

User Access Reviews lets you run a point-in-time review of who has access to each of your connected vendors. Each vendor’s owner reviews the identities Fencer has discovered for that vendor and decides whether each one should keep access, lose access, or have its access changed. Decisions are captured with an attestation, optionally filed as remediation tickets, and the whole review can be exported as evidence for audits like SOC 2 or ISO 27001.

User Access Reviews is a paid feature and must be enabled for your organization before use.

Prerequisites

Identity Management set up, with vendor identities synced from at least one connected integration.
Every vendor you want to include in a review must have an owner assigned (see Vendor Identities and Syncing). Starting a review is blocked until all in-scope vendors have an owner.
The identity_reviews:manage ability is required to start, complete, or reopen a review. The identity_reviews:review ability is required to work an assignment and sign off on it. See Roles and Permissions.

How it works

A review is scoped to a set of vendors, either picked individually or from a saved review template (a reusable scope preset). You can further narrow scope to human identities, service accounts, or both.

When a review launches, Fencer creates one assignment per in-scope vendor and assigns it to that vendor’s owner at the time of launch. Each assignment lists every identity Fencer has on file for that vendor. The assigned owner works through the assignment in a dedicated worksheet, deciding for each identity:

Retain — the identity keeps its current access.
Revoke — the identity should lose access.
Modify — the identity’s access should change (e.g., a role or scope adjustment).

Once every identity in an assignment has a decision, the owner signs off with an attestation. Signing off is final — only a user with identity_reviews:manage can reopen a signed-off assignment. After every assignment in the review is signed off, the review’s manager (the person who started it) completes the review with their own attestation, and the review moves to Completed.

A review moves through four statuses: Draft, In Progress, Completed, and Cancelled.

Usage / Configuration

Starting a review

Navigate to Identity → Access Reviews within your organization.
Click Start Review.
Give the review a title, and either pick a saved template or select vendors and an identity-type scope (human, service account, or both) directly.
If any in-scope vendor has no owner assigned, Fencer blocks the launch and lists the unowned vendors — assign an owner to each before continuing.
Launch the review. Fencer creates one assignment per in-scope vendor, assigned to that vendor’s current owner.

Working an assignment

Open an assignment from the Access Reviews list, or from a notification if you’re the assigned owner.
The worksheet presents one identity at a time. Decide Retain, Revoke, or Modify for the current identity, then move to the next.
For Revoke or Modify decisions, you can optionally file a remediation ticket directly to a connected Linear or Jira project so the change gets tracked and actioned outside of Fencer. Ticket creation is opt-in per decision and doesn’t block your review if it fails — you can retry or handle the ticket manually.
Use bulk select to apply Retain to a group of identities at once when a whole batch is clearly fine (e.g., a team you already know is current).
Once every identity has a decision, proceed to sign-off. Fencer pre-fills an attestation statement — edit it if you want to add context, then submit. Signing off locks the assignment; only a manager can reopen it.

Keyboard shortcuts (while the worksheet has focus):

Key	Action
`R`	Retain the current identity
`X`	Revoke the current identity
`M`	Modify the current identity
`J` / `↓`	Next identity
`K` / `↑`	Previous identity
`Space`	Toggle bulk selection
`B`	Bulk retain selected identities
`Esc`	Clear bulk selection
`S` / `Enter`	Proceed to sign-off
`Cmd`/`Ctrl` + `Z`	Undo the last decision

Completing a review

Once every assignment in a review has been signed off, the review’s manager sees a completion prompt. Completing a review requires the manager’s own attestation and moves the review to Completed. The manager can also monitor assignment progress across the whole review at any point from the review’s oversight view — no need to wait until every assignment is done to see where things stand.

Exporting evidence

From a review (in progress or completed), export:

PDF report — a formal summary suitable for sharing with auditors.
Excel workbook — sheets covering scope, reviewed items, attestations, and activity, for deeper analysis or archival.

Both exports are scoped to the single review they’re generated from.

Examples

Running a quarterly review of a subset of vendors:

Save a review template scoped to the vendors you review every quarter.
Each quarter, start a new review from that template rather than re-selecting vendors by hand.
Assign or re-confirm vendor owners before launch if ownership has changed since the last review.

Handling a departed employee found during review:

While working an assignment, decide Revoke for the identity.
File a remediation ticket to your team’s Jira project so deprovisioning is tracked.
Continue the worksheet — filing the ticket doesn’t block moving to the next identity.

Troubleshooting

Can’t start a review — Fencer blocks launch when one or more in-scope vendors has no owner. Assign an owner to each flagged vendor (see Vendor Identities and Syncing) and try again.
Can’t edit a signed-off assignment — sign-off is intentionally immutable. Ask a user with identity_reviews:manage to reopen the assignment.
Remediation ticket failed to create — ticket creation failures don’t block your decision; the decision is saved regardless. Check your Linear or Jira connection under Integrations and retry, or create the ticket manually.
Review won’t complete — every assignment must be signed off first. Check the review’s oversight view for any assignment still in progress.