The dependency list nobody has written
Ask a business what it could not trade without and you get an immediate answer for one or two systems and a long pause for the rest. The pause is the problem: dependencies accumulate without anyone tracking them.
Write the list. Every system, what it does, who provides it, and what happens if it is unavailable for a day.
Rank by what stops
| If this stops | Business impact | Plan needed |
|---|---|---|
| Payment processing | No revenue | Alternative provider or manual invoicing |
| No communication | Secondary channel agreed in advance | |
| Order system | Cannot take orders | Paper fallback and a catch-up process |
| Website | No enquiries | Redirect to a simple page with contact details |
| Accounting | Delayed billing | Usually tolerable for a day |
The exercise is quick and it sorts the systems that need a plan from the ones that merely need patience.
Manual fallbacks are legitimate
For most small businesses, the continuity plan is not a redundant system. It is a paper pad, a phone, and a documented way to catch up afterwards. Written down in advance, that is a plan; improvised on the day, it is chaos.
The catch-up process matters as much as the fallback. Twenty orders on paper are only useful if someone knows how to get them into the system without duplicating or losing any.
Plan for supplier outages too
Your payment provider, your email host, your key API. You cannot fix their outage, and you can decide in advance what you tell customers and what you do in the meantime.
Check their status page arrangements and subscribe. Finding out from a customer that your provider is down is a bad way to start an incident.
Test the assumptions occasionally
- Pick a system and ask the team what they would do without it today
- Check that the fallback still works — phone numbers change, paper forms go out of date
- Confirm the contact details you would need are available outside the affected system
- Update the page and note the date
Annually is enough. The value is mostly in having thought about it once.