The complete guide to user management for B2B SaaS

User management is a foundational pillar for any B2B SaaS product. While it might start with a simple login screen, it quickly expands to encompass a range of complex, enterprise-grade requirements: organizations, roles, SSO, SCIM, audit trails, and more.

This guide walks through the core building blocks of user management for B2B SaaS—from basic authentication to scalable multi-tenant architecture. Whether you’re building your first user system or modernizing an existing one, this article will help you think through the pieces and tradeoffs.

1. Authentication (AuthN)

Authentication is the entry point to your product. In B2B SaaS, you're not just authenticating individuals, you’re authenticating users within the context of their organizations, often governed by their IT departments. This has major implications on how you design your auth system.

Single Sign-On (SSO): The standard in B2B

SSO is the default expectation for mid-market and enterprise customers. Rather than creating a new set of credentials, users authenticate via their company’s identity provider (IdP).

• Protocols: SAML 2.0 (most common), OIDC (gaining popularity).
• IdPs: Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, OneLogin, PingIdentity, and more.
• Implementation needs:
  
  • Metadata exchange (SSO URL, Entity ID, certs)
  • Assertion Consumer Service (ACS) endpoint in your app
  • Token validation and error handling
  • Just-in-time provisioning (create users on first login)
  • Organization-aware routing (/sso/:org_slug or domain-matching)

SSO simplifies onboarding for IT teams, centralizes access control, and is often a security and compliance requirement.

Email and password

Not all customers will start with SSO on Day 1. For small businesses, self-service signups, or internal use, email/password can still be relevant. Some security essentials to keep in mind:

• Use bcrypt or argon2id for password hashing
• Enforce email verification before account activation
• Rate-limit login attempts to prevent brute-force attacks

Use this path as a fallback or a way to get users started before an IdP is connected.

Magic links and social logins

These are more common in B2C, but occasionally useful in B2B:

• Magic links for frictionless login during trials or accessing shared resources.
• Social OAuth (e.g., Sign in with Google) for developer tools or early-stage startups.

However, most enterprise customers will expect these to be disabled or restricted once an SSO integration is active. They should never be the primary auth path in production for secured B2B apps.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

MFA is often enforced upstream by the customer’s identity provider (IdP). But if you're offering direct login (e.g., email/password), you may need to implement it yourself.

• Support TOTP (Google Authenticator, Authy), WebAuthn, or backup codes.
• Trigger MFA on:
  
  • First login from a new device.
  • High-risk actions (e.g., permission changes, billing updates).
  • Specific roles or organization settings.

2. Authorization (AuthZ)

Once a user is authenticated, the next question is: what can they access?

In B2B SaaS, authorization tends to be multi-layered and hierarchical, reflecting the organizational structures of your customers.

You need to support everything from basic user roles to fine-grained, resource-level permissions, and ideally, offer a model that can evolve with customer complexity.

In B2B SaaS, authorization is where access control meets customer trust. Start with roles, design for extensibility, and be explicit about who can access what, and why.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): The starting point

Most B2B apps begin with some version of RBAC:

• System-wide roles: admin, editor, viewer, etc.
• Org-scoped roles: The same role types, but tied to an organization (org_id + user_id + role).
• Per-resource roles (optional): E.g., a user might be an editor in one project, but only a viewer in another.

Implement roles as data, not code. Define a permission matrix (e.g., what each role can do), and store role assignments in your DB, not hardcoded logic.

Resource-level permissions: For granular access control

As customers scale, they’ll want to control access at the level of:

• Projects
• Documents
• Pipelines
• Accounts
• Teams within orgs

You’ll need to model ownership and access control lists (ACLs) for resources. This often requires:

• A resource_permissions table or a relationship model (e.g., user → role → resource)
• Enforcement at the query or API layer
• Optional: group-based or role inheritance systems

This adds complexity, but also flexibility, and becomes essential when multiple teams collaborate within a single tenant.

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC): For dynamic logic

In some advanced cases, you might need logic like:

• “Only users from the Finance department can see this report”
• “Only US-region users can export this data”

ABAC uses metadata (attributes) from users, orgs, or resources to drive decisions. It’s more flexible than RBAC but harder to test, explain, and audit.

Only reach for ABAC when RBAC and resource ownership aren’t sufficient.

Delegated access and impersonation

Often needed for:

• Admin tools (support teams impersonating users)
• Security audits
• Customer troubleshooting

This requires:

• Secure, logged impersonation flows (never use raw tokens or shared sessions).
• Visual indicators in the UI that a user is impersonated.
• Audit logs of when/why access was delegated.

3. Organizations and multi-tenancy

Most B2B SaaS products are multi-tenant by design. That means you’re not just managing users, you’re managing organizations, teams, and the relationships between them. Getting your data model right early on will save you significant refactoring down the line.

At the heart of this is representing the core entities: users, organizations, and memberships.

Organizations: The primary unit of access

An organization represents a company or customer account. All business logic—billing, permissions, usage limits—tends to be scoped at the org level.

Each organization typically has:

• A unique org_id
• A display name
• One or more verified domains (used for domain join logic)
• Settings (e.g., SSO configuration, feature flags, billing tier)

You’ll want to isolate all sensitive data, configurations, and resource ownership by org_id.

!!For more details and best practices, see Model your B2B SaaS with organizations.!!

Users and memberships

Users are globally unique individuals (e.g., identified by email or UUID) who may belong to one or more orgs.

Rather than storing user-org relationships directly on the user object, model a membership table:

• membership_id
• user_id
• org_id
• role or permissions
• Optional metadata (e.g., joined_at, invited_by)

This gives you full flexibility to support:

• Multi-org users
• Org switching
• Role-scoped logic (e.g., different permissions per org)

It also enables clean separation of identity (user) vs. authorization (membership).

Invitations and pending members

To onboard users into an org, most systems use email invitations.

Best practices:

• Create a pending membership record with a token
• Expire invites after a set time (e.g., 7 days)
• Auto-associate invite on sign-up (using email matching)
• Allow re-inviting or canceling old invites

This lets org admins control who joins their workspace, without manual provisioning.

Domain-based auto join

Some B2B apps allow users to automatically join an org based on their email domain, e.g., anyone with @acme.com joins the Acme org.

This requires:

• Verified domains per org (e.g., DNS or email proof)
• A domain-matching check on sign-up
• Optional: restrict this behavior to self-service orgs or free tiers

Domain-based auto join is great for viral growth.

4. User provisioning and lifecycle management

In B2B SaaS, especially at the enterprise level, identity doesn't stop at login. Your customers want automated ways to manage their users at scale, adding them, assigning roles, removing access, and ensuring that everything stays in sync with their internal systems.

SCIM provisioning: The enterprise standard

SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) is the industry-standard protocol for automating user and group provisioning. When a company assigns your app to a user in their identity provider (like Okta or Azure AD), SCIM ensures that a corresponding user is created in your system, and later updated or deprovisioned as needed.

Common SCIM functionality includes:

• Creating users when assigned in the IdP.
• Updating attributes like name, email, department, or title.
• Deactivating users immediately upon revocation.
• Assigning group memberships (and propagating group-based permissions).

Most identity providers implement SCIM using a push-based model, meaning your app must listen for incoming requests from each provider. This usually includes support for:

• /Users and /Groups endpoints
• POST, PATCH, DELETE, and GET operations
• Filtering, pagination, and schema validation
• Idempotency and rate limiting

The push model is simple in theory but complex in practice:

• Each IdP implements SCIM differently, often with quirks, bugs, or incomplete specs.
• Providers push data without context of whether it aligns with your system’s current state.
• There’s no built-in reconciliation if something goes wrong; your app must store, track, and resolve mismatches.
• You may need to handle conflicting updates, race conditions, and degraded states (e.g., a user removed upstream, but still active locally).

This is where most DIY SCIM implementations break down: maintaining correctness over time, handling partial failures, and diagnosing sync drift.

!!For more info, see Why you should rethink your webhook strategy.!!

Lifecycle events and state management

Provisioning isn’t complete without full user lifecycle awareness. Your system should be able to gracefully respond to changes in a user's state, whether triggered by SCIM or internal admin actions.

Important lifecycle states include:

• Active: Fully provisioned and allowed to sign in.
• Deactivated / Suspended: Retain the user record but deny access. This is commonly triggered by SCIM deactivation or internal admin action.
• Deleted (Soft Delete): Preserve the user record (e.g., with a deleted_at timestamp) for auditability and reference integrity, but remove access and anonymize personal data.
• Reactivated: Restore a previously deactivated or deleted user—important for onboarding reversals or mistaken removals.

Lifecycle-aware systems should:

• Block access cleanly (e.g., during login token issuance or authorization checks)
• Retain ownership data for resources (e.g., “last edited by [deactivated user]”)
• Allow secure org ownership transfers if the sole admin is deactivated
• Log all state transitions for security reviews and audit trails

Data reconciliation

When syncing with an external identity provider, mismatches and sync failures are inevitable. Your system needs strategies for resolving inconsistencies between the external source of truth and your internal state.

Typical reconciliation scenarios:

• A user is deprovisioned in the IdP but remains active in your system due to a failed webhook
• Group memberships are partially updated, leaving users in an incorrect permission state
• An identity (e.g., email) is reused or reassigned, causing collision

Handling reconciliation well requires:

• Tracking sync state and deltas for each user/group
• Exposing diagnostics to admins (e.g., “user not found in directory” warnings)
• Supporting a full resync or repair process to restore alignment
• Logging failed syncs and providing retry visibility

Most SCIM implementations leave this entirely up to the application developer, yet it’s vital for trust and security.

5. Audit logging and compliance

As your B2B SaaS product scales into mid-market and enterprise accounts, you’ll need to provide visibility and traceability into what users are doing inside your application. This isn't just about operational transparency—it's often a requirement for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR.

That’s where audit logs come in.

What to log and why

Audit logs are not traditional analytics, they’re not about conversion rates or user engagement. Instead, they capture a secure, chronological record of user actions, typically related to access, changes, and security events.

Critical events include:

• Authentication and session events
  
  • Successful or failed login attempts
  • MFA prompts and outcomes
  • Token issuance and refreshes
• Permission and role changes
  
  • A user being promoted to admin
  • A role being reassigned or removed
• Sensitive data access
  
  • Viewing, exporting, or downloading private data
  • Accessing billing or admin panels
• Configuration changes
  
  • Feature toggles
  • Workspace or environment settings
  • Integrations being added or removed

Each audit event should record:

• A timestamp (with time zone or in UTC)
• The actor (user ID or service account)
• The target (resource or object affected)
• The action (e.g., user.updated, role.revoked, export.generated)
• Optional metadata (IP address, user agent, diff of changes)

Audit logs should be immutable and tamper-evident, ideally append-only, and optionally cryptographically verifiable in high-security environments.

Surfacing audit logs

Exposing audit data to your customers adds real value:

• Let admins review historical activity for compliance purposes
• Enable teams to debug permission issues (“why did this user lose access?”)
• Support incident investigations (“who changed this setting?”)

Offer audit logs via:

• UI dashboards scoped to org admins
• Exportable CSVs or JSON feeds
• Audit log APIs for integration with SIEM or compliance tooling

You may also want to expose internal-only audit trails for your support or engineering teams, while keeping tenant-facing logs scoped and sanitized.

Retention and compliance requirements

Depending on your industry and customer base, you may be required to:

• Retain logs for at least 1–2 years.
• Ensure logs are encrypted at rest and access-controlled.
• Provide searchable or filterable views by actor, action, or date.
• Offer deletion or export tooling for data subject requests (e.g., GDPR).

For regulated industries (e.g. healthcare, finance), audit logging is not optional, it’s core infrastructure.

What you can build vs. buy

Not every part of user management is worth building in-house, especially in B2B SaaS, where the table stakes are high, but rarely differentiated.

The core question to ask is: "Does this infrastructure give us a competitive advantage, or does it just need to work reliably and securely?"

Build what’s unique to your product

There are foundational pieces you should own, because they reflect your domain logic and evolve with your product:

• User and organization models: Your data model for users, organizations, and memberships underpins everything. It needs to reflect how your product works—single-org vs. multi-org users, role hierarchies, billing relationships, and more.
• Roles and permissions: Your authorization system should mirror how access is granted within your app. Whether it’s RBAC, project-based ACLs, or something custom, you need tight control and visibility into how it evolves.
• Business logic and onboarding flows: How users are invited, provisioned, and onboarded is tightly coupled with your UX. This includes things like trial setup, default roles, workspace creation, or usage metering.

These areas affect how your product feels, how it scales, and how customers interact with it. They’re hard to outsource, and often change as your go-to-market and product mature.

Buy the complex, non-differentiating infrastructure

For the parts of user management that are mission-critical but standardized, buy vs. build is often a no-brainer:

• Single Sign-On (SSO), especially SAML: Every identity provider is different, SAML is notoriously painful to implement and test, and enterprise customers expect it to “just work.” Maintaining dozens of IdP integrations is costly and error-prone.
• SCIM provisioning: The SCIM spec is verbose, underspecified, and inconsistently implemented across providers. Building support for multiple IdPs takes months, and that’s before you deal with reconciliation, retries, and drift detection.
• Audit logs: Secure, tamper-evident logging with search, export, and compliance retention policies is a feature unto itself. Customers expect it, but it rarely drives differentiation.
• MFA and session management: Implementing and securely storing TOTP, WebAuthn, or backup codes is complex, especially across platforms. Add secure cookie handling, refresh token rotation, and device tracking, and you're deep in security engineering territory.

These are table-stakes features in B2B SaaS. Your customers expect them, but they don’t care how you implement them, as long as they’re secure, reliable, and compliant.

How WorkOS helps

User management in B2B SaaS isn’t just about signing users in, it’s about scaling securely, meeting enterprise expectations, and being ready for the next big customer. That’s exactly what WorkOS is built for.

WorkOS provides the foundational building blocks for enterprise readiness, so you can focus on your product while delivering the infrastructure your customers demand, from day one.

Purpose-built for B2B SaaS

Every WorkOS feature is designed to support the workflows, security standards, and IT requirements common in modern SaaS sales and deployments:

• Single Sign-On (SSO): Integrate with dozens of identity providers using SAML or OIDC through a single, unified API. Customers get a seamless login experience, and you avoid maintaining custom logic for every provider.
• SCIM provisioning: Automate user and group provisioning from identity providers. WorkOS supports both push-based and pull-based sync models, offering greater reliability and flexibility than raw SCIM integrations.
• Just-In-Time (JIT) provisioning: Dynamically create user accounts when they first authenticate via SSO, no manual setup required.
• Session management: Securely issue, validate, and revoke sessions across web and mobile with built-in support for access tokens, refresh tokens, and expiration controls.
• AuthKit: A fully customizable UI for login and sign-up, designed for developers who want flexibility without reinventing the front end.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Built-in support for TOTP and WebAuthn.
• Passkey support: Enable secure, phishing-resistant, passwordless login experiences for modern browsers and devices.
• Domain verification: Programmatically verify email domains for org-based access control and auto-join logic.
• User impersonation: Allow admins or support staff to safely act on behalf of a user, with visibility and auditability built in.
• Audit logs: Tamper-evident logs with rich metadata, designed to meet the needs of compliance teams and enterprise security reviews.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Define custom roles and permissions, scoped per organization or resource, with enforcement baked into the API.
• Admin Portal: A WorkOS-hosted UI that allows customer IT teams to configure SSO, SCIM, and directory sync—without your team needing to build or maintain those flows.
• Feature Flags: Gate functionality by org, fully integrated with your WorkOS org model and identity layer.
• Radar: Detect and block abuse of free trials, account farms, and other suspicious login patterns with risk-scored login telemetry and heuristics.

Enterprise ready from day one

With WorkOS, you don’t have to choose between shipping fast and meeting enterprise requirements. You get everything you need to:

• Land your first big enterprise deal
• Scale to thousands of users per org
• Offer secure, compliant access to your product
• Integrate seamlessly with customer IT systems

All delivered through modern APIs, real-time webhooks, dashboard tooling, and world-class documentation.

WorkOS is how modern SaaS companies go from “startup scrappy” to “enterprise ready” without getting buried in infrastructure. If you're building B2B, it's the platform that lets you start strong, and scale with confidence.

Conclusion

User management in B2B SaaS isn’t optional plumbing; it’s part of your product’s value. It affects your security posture, user experience, sales velocity, and ability to scale.

Build the parts that differentiate your app. Outsource the ones that don’t. And if you're starting from scratch or leveling up, WorkOS gives you a clean foundation to get enterprise ready fast.

Sign up today and start selling to enterprise customers tomorrow.