A business portfolio is the account in Meta’s business tools that holds everything a business uses for advertising and managing its presence: ad accounts, Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, pixels and datasets, catalogues, WhatsApp accounts and verified domains. It also records who can use each of those, and at what level. Meta called it Business Manager until 2023, and many people still use the old name.
How a business portfolio works
You create a portfolio from Meta Business Suite using a personal Facebook or Instagram login, since Meta ties all business access to real people. Inside the portfolio’s settings you add assets, either by creating them there (a new ad account, for example) or by claiming ones the business already owns, such as an existing Page.
People are then given access. Someone can have full control of the portfolio, or partial access to only certain assets, with permissions for each, such as being able to create ads but not see billing. Other businesses, such as an agency or freelancer, can be added as partners and given access to specific assets without being added as individuals. At the time of writing (October 2026), settings such as requiring two-factor authentication for everyone in the portfolio are also managed here.
Some assets can only be owned by one portfolio at a time, while others can be shared. An ad account owned by your portfolio can be shared with an agency’s portfolio, so the agency works in it without owning it. The same applies to Pages, datasets and catalogues. Ownership and sharing are shown separately in the settings, and the difference is easy to miss when you glance at a list of assets you can see.
Why it matters
The portfolio decides who owns the business’s advertising history. Whoever owns the ad account owns its spend history, its campaigns and, in practice, much of what the pixel has learned. Whoever owns the Page controls the brand’s public face. If those sit in someone else’s portfolio, a falling-out or a former employee leaving can lock the business out.
This happens often with small UK businesses. A marketing contractor sets up an ad account in their own portfolio to get started quickly, the relationship ends, and the business discovers it cannot take the account or the pixel with it. Starting again means losing past data and audiences, and sometimes an awkward exchange with Meta support.
Common mistakes
- Letting an agency or freelancer create the ad account or pixel in their own portfolio instead of yours.
- Relying on a single admin. If that person leaves or loses their Facebook login, nobody can manage the portfolio.
- Giving everyone full control when they only need to run ads.
- Creating several portfolios for the same business by accident, scattering assets between them.
- Never removing people who have left, which is both a security and a data protection risk.
How to act on it
Check what you own today. Open the portfolio’s settings and list every ad account, Page, Instagram account, dataset and catalogue, noting which are owned by your portfolio and which are only shared with you. Anything important that is owned elsewhere should be transferred, or rebuilt in your portfolio, while relationships are good.
Then tidy access. Have at least two trusted people with full control, both using two-factor authentication. Give staff and suppliers only the permissions they need, and give agencies partner access rather than personal admin rights. Complete business verification if you need features that depend on it. When I start Facebook and Instagram ads management, I work inside the client’s own portfolio for exactly these reasons.