Your office shuts for a fortnight. Nothing in your systems knows

The last person out on Christmas Eve turns the lights off, and for the next ten days the only things still working in your business are the ones that bill, renew, expire, and fail quietly.

None of them have been told the office is shut. That is the whole problem, and it is a short list once you look at it properly.

This year the gap is wider than usual

Christmas Day 2026 falls on a Friday. Boxing Day lands on the Saturday, so its bank holiday moves to Monday 28 December. New Year's Day is the Friday after.

Which leaves the 29th, the 30th and the 31st as ordinary working days that almost nobody treats as working days. Your suppliers are half-staffed, your bank is open, your direct debits run, and your support contract is counting those three days as business days whether anybody is at a desk or not.

Worth getting the dates from your own calendar rather than mine before you plan around them. The pattern is the thing: two separate holiday weekends with three live working days wedged between them.

Five things that carry on regardless

Money moves on its own dates. Card-on-file renewals, direct debits, annual licences and certificate expiries have no view on whether anybody is in. The one that actually hurts is a company card that expires in December, because the domain renewal and the hosting invoice both quietly fail and nobody sees the warning email for a week and a half.

Alerts arrive somewhere nobody is looking. The backup report, the failed-sync notice, the disk-space warning. In most small firms these go to one person's mailbox, or to a shared one that gets read in passing. A backup that stops on the 27th is discovered on the 4th, which means the gap in your recovery position is exactly as long as the holiday.

One account does a job nobody else can. Resetting a locked-out login, approving a payment, unblocking a mailbox. Holiday cover is usually planned around who covers which customer, not around who can get into what, and those are not the same list.

Your out-of-office tells strangers more than you think. The standard version names who is away, says how long for, and helpfully supplies the name and address of whoever is covering. That is the research step of an invoice-redirection attempt, done for free, to anyone who emails the office over Christmas. Say you are closed, give the reopening date and one general address. Do not name the person who is away or the one holding the fort.

The clock on your support contract is probably counting working days. A ticket raised on 29 December may barely age at all until January. That is usually correct behaviour rather than a stitch-up: a supplier who counted calendar hours over a public holiday would be promising something nobody is staffed to deliver. The point is to know which of the two your agreement does before you lean on it.

The afternoon that covers most of it

Not a continuity project. One sitting, early December, in this order.

1. 01List what renews or expires in the next six weeks, and check the card behind each one is still valid
2. 02Find every automated alert and decide, for each, who reads it over the break or whether it can wait
3. 03Write down which account can reset a password or approve a payment, and who holds it over the holiday
4. 04Rewrite the out-of-office so it names nobody and gives a reopening date
5. 05Decide what the main number does out of hours, and tell the person whose mobile it reaches

The phone one catches people out. A number that diverts to a handset in a drawer is worse than a number that rings out, because the caller believes they got through.

The morning back

The reopening list is shorter and it has an order, because the first thing most offices do on the 4th is start trusting numbers again.

Check the backup ran, every night, not just last night. Open the alerts folder and read it properly rather than clearing it. Look at what renewed and what failed to. Take the holiday greeting off the phone, which otherwise stays on until somebody rings in February to mention it. And look at whatever runs on a schedule in the background, the overnight export, the sync at six in the morning, because a job that has been failing since the 23rd will have been failing silently and will not announce itself.

A fortnight of unattended systems is not a risk you manage. It is a list you check twice, once before and once after.

Most of this list is not your list

Here is the unhelpful part, and it is the reason the afternoon is worth doing at all rather than buying something.

For a lot of firms the honest answer is three items, not thirty. The card that pays for the domain and the mailboxes. The one alert that tells you the backup is alive. One person who can be reached and has the access to act. Everything else on the list above either does not apply or can genuinely wait until the 4th, and treating all of it as equally urgent is how a small business ends up with a continuity plan nobody reads.

The firms that get caught are rarely the ones without a plan. They are the ones where a renewal failed, the notice went to a mailbox belonging to somebody on a beach, and the first anybody knew about it was a customer saying the website had gone.

We will tell you which three items are yours and leave the rest alone. That is a short conversation in early December and a much longer one in January.

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We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.