Continuing to trade through a disruption is worth more than almost anything else you can do in the months after one. It keeps the customers, it keeps the staff, and it is the single fact that changes how a lender, an insurer, a landlord and a funder read your file. A business that never stopped is being asked to prove a smaller thing than a business asking to be restarted.

It is also the number this region is reporting on. Businesses that kept operating through the fires are the measure of whether recovery money worked, so recording it is not administration. It is the evidence base.

Decide what continuity means for you, in a sentence you could defend. It is rarely business as usual. It is more often: we kept serving our customers without a full stop, at reduced volume, from somewhere else.

Start the log now rather than reconstructing it later. Date, what was unavailable, what you did instead, what you delivered, what came in. Six months from now you will not remember week three, and week three is usually the part that proves the point.