BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING AND WHY THE RIGHT ACCOUNTANT MATTERS

Sadler Advisory
May 25
6 min read

Businesses face disruptions of every size, whether it be a cyber attack that locks your systems, a key supplier going under, a flood or fire at your premises, the sudden loss of the one person who runs your finances. Most of these you can't prevent. What you can do is decide in advance how you'll keep going, so a bad week doesn't turn into a bad year or worse.

That's what a business continuity plan is for. At Sadler Advisory, we are Chartered Accountants, so our part isn't the fire drills or the IT issues, it's the financial side that sits alongside the plan: knowing what downtime actually costs you, keeping payroll and tax obligations up to date when everything else stops, and making sure your numbers hold up long enough to recover. That's usually the part that decides whether a business survives a disruption or doesn't.

WHAT A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN COVERS

A business continuity plan (BCP) sets out how your business keeps its essential work going during and after a disruption. It identifies what could go wrong, works out the impact on each part of the business, and sets out who does what to keep critical operations running and get back to normal.

A good plan should answer a handful of practical questions:

Which functions, people and resources can the business least afford to lose?
What could realistically disrupt them, and how likely is each?
How do we keep operating if a key system, supplier, site or person is unavailable?
Who is responsible for what while normal working is disrupted?
How and when do we communicate with staff, clients, suppliers and HMRC?

It's broader than disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is mainly about restoring IT systems and data; business continuity covers the whole organisation – finance, people, premises, suppliers and customers – so every part can keep functioning while the technical fix happens. A plan that only covers IT leaves most of the business exposed.

THE DISRUPTIONS WORTH PLANNING FOR

It's almost impossible to plan for every conceivable event. So, you need to plan for the handful that would genuinely hurt. For most businesses that means situations like:

A cyber incident. Ransomware or a serious breach can lock you out of your own systems and data for days, and may bring reporting obligations and lost trust to manage on top of the disruption itself.
Losing a key supplier or client. If one supplier is hard to replace, or one client makes up a large share of your revenue, their problem quickly becomes yours.
Losing access to premises. Fire, flood or a burst pipe can shut a site with no notice. The real question is whether your employees can still work, and your business can still trade, from somewhere else.
Losing a key person. If one person holds the passwords, the supplier relationships or the knowledge of how the finances run, their illness or departure should be considered a continuity risk, not just one for HR.
Losing a critical system or service. A critical cloud tool going down or stops operating, an account being suspended, a payment provider failing – any of these seemingly smaller issues can have a big impact and can stop you invoicing or getting paid.

WHY IT'S WORTH DOING

It limits the financial damage. When trading stops, revenue stops – but most of your costs don't. Rent, salaries, software and finance repayments keep coming. A plan shortens the gap between disruption and recovery, and helps you cover fixed costs in the meantime, which is often the difference between a setback and a serious problem.

It protects client trust. Clients remember who kept delivering when things went wrong. A business that carries on through a disruption looks reliable; one that goes silent gives clients a reason to look elsewhere. In a tight market, that memory has real value.

It helps with compliance. Some sectors are expected to have continuity arrangements in place – financial services firms in particular face requirements around operational resilience. Even where it isn't mandated, being able to show a plan and the records behind it helps with contracts, tenders and insurance renewals.

It exposes your weak points. Building the plan prompts an honest and detailed look at where you're exposed – the single supplier, the undocumented process, the one person who knows how something works. Finding those in a planning session is far cheaper than finding them in a live crisis.

It also steadies your people. In a disruption, staff want to know what to do and that someone is in charge. Clear protocols for safety, communication and continued work reduce panic, hold morale together, and show you've thought about them.

WHAT THE FINANCIAL SIDE ACTUALLY INVOLVES

This is our part, and it's where a lot of plans are thinnest. A continuity plan that reads well but hasn't been costed tends to fall apart under real pressure. The work we do on it:

A business impact analysis, in money. We help you look at each part of the business and put a figure on what a disruption would cost – lost revenue, the fixed costs that continue regardless, the price of recovery. That turns a vague sense of risk into a ranked list, so effort and spend go where the financial impact is greatest rather than being spread evenly across things that don't matter equally.
Keeping the money side running. Payroll still has to be paid. VAT, PAYE and tax return deadlines don't move because your office is flooded or your finance manager is off sick. We help you set up so these keep happening under disruption – who can reach the accounting system, who is an authorised signatory on the bank, where the records live, and how someone else could step in if the usual person can't.
Protecting access to your records. If your systems or premises are unavailable, can you still reach your accounts, payroll data and key documents? Cloud-based accounting and off-site copies make this straightforward, but only if it's set up deliberately. We check that it is.
Sizing your exposure for insurance. Business interruption and related cover only helps if it's set at the right level. Using your actual numbers, we quantify the financial gap a serious disruption would open up, so you and your broker can arrange cover that reflects reality. We size the risk and get the tax treatment right; an FCA-authorised adviser or broker arranges the policy itself.
Stress-testing your cash. We model how your cash position would hold up through a period of reduced or no trading, so you know how many weeks you could keep going and what a sensible reserve looks like. Knowing your runway before a crisis is worth far more than working it out during one.

HOW TO BUILD ONE, IN PRACTICE

You don't need a hundred-page document. You need something clear, owned and up to date.

List what matters most. Identify the functions, people, systems and relationships the business can least afford to lose.
Work out the impact. For each, estimate what a disruption would cost and how quickly it would bite, then rank them.
Decide your responses. For the ones that matter, agree what you'd actually do – the workaround, the backup supplier, the alternative site, the cover arrangement.
Assign owners. Every action needs a name against it, and a deputy in case that person is the one who's unavailable.
Sort access and backups. Make sure records, systems and bank access don't depend on a single person or a single location.
Test it, then review it. Walk through a scenario on paper at least once. A plan no one has ever tested is only a guess.

WHERE PLANS CAN GO WRONG

These are the common failures are worth knowing, because they're all avoidable:

Written once, then shelved. A plan from three years ago describes a business that has changed significantly.
No clear owner. If it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
No off-site access. Records and passwords that live only on the affected system or site disappear at the exact time you need them.
Insurance sized on a guess. Cover set without doing the numbers is usually either wasteful or badly short.
Never tested. Most of the gaps only show up when you walk the plan through.

KEEPING IT CURRENT

Treat the plan as a living document. Review it at least once a year, and whenever something significant changes – new premises, a new major client or supplier, a system migration, a change in key staff, or growth that shifts what "critical" means. A short annual review keeps it useful; neglect turns it back into a filing-cabinet exercise.

TALK TO US

If you don't yet have a continuity plan – or you have one that hasn't been looked at in a while – the financial side is a sensible place to start, because it's the part that decides whether you can keep going. We'll help you cost the risks, protect payroll and your tax obligations, size your exposure properly, and understand your cash runway, then work alongside your other advisers on the rest.

This page is general information, not personal financial, tax or insurance advice. Sadler Advisory is not FCA authorised to advise on or arrange insurance – an authorised adviser or broker arranges cover. We help with the numbers and the tax treatment around it.