Unlock the full potential of Bitwarden: five essential password manager features tips for users

Bitwarden offers a flexible solution for password management for both businesses and individuals. With its many features, users may have their own unique way of leveraging this tool. To make the most out of Bitwarden Password Manager, consider the following five tips for organizing and managing your vault.

Have you ever opened a password manager vault item, only to find that you'd edited it at some point and can't remember when the change happened? Because of the importance of these entries, you should always document changes because knowing when a change is made can sometimes be just as important as what was changed. 

For example, you might have a service that requires a password change every year. In those cases, it's always good to know when the next change will be required. 

To make this work, add a custom text field and use it to add the date of the upcoming change. The next time you have to change the entry, update that field to reflect the new date.

Do you use your email addresses as usernames for many of your accounts? The challenge with this is that you may also have vault entries for email addresses, so when you have to set up an email account on a new machine or device, you can quickly copy and paste the account password.

However, when you use your email address as a username, finding the vault entry with your email account password can become difficult. To avoid this confusion, add EMAIL (or something similar) to the vault entry name for those accounts. That way, you can search for the unique identifier, so it's easier to find those entries.

Along the same lines as customizing an item’s name, you can also create folders to organize different types of accounts. Consider setting up folders for email accounts, social media, financial accounts, clients, CMS tools, and more. This way, you can better organize your vault and more easily (and quickly) find what you're looking for. Instead of scanning through an entire vault, which may contain hundreds or thousands of entries, you can narrow the search to just a handful of items.

The following example is outside the standard use-case of custom fields, which are normally used to autofill fields outside the standard username and password. 

You'll find Boolean listed as an option when creating a custom field. A boolean field is essentially a value and a checkbox, which can be used for checklists. For instance, you might create a collection of boolean fields like this:

• LAN

• WAN

• DEV

• CLIENT

• 2FA ENABLED

Once you've created the list, you can check those that apply to the entry. This is a great way to get an at-a-glance list of information that doesn't belong anywhere else.

You've probably experienced this a few times over the years: a service suggests (or requires) a password change. Or maybe your saved password isn’t working, and the only way to log into your account is to reset your password.

Fortunately, Bitwarden has a password history feature that will show you the previous passwords you've used for an account and the dates they were changed. This feature gives you a clear list of the passwords you've used for the service. Should the service require you to type the current password before changing it to the new, randomly generated one, you'll never be at a loss.

Ready to simplify your online life with a password manager? Start a free business trial to help your team and company colleagues stay safe online, or register for a free individual account.