Here is an uncomfortable question: if the one person who "handles the computer stuff" vanished tomorrow, could your business still log into its own systems and keep running? For a lot of small businesses the honest answer is no, because it all lives in one person's head. That is the "bus factor," and it is a risk hiding in plain sight. The fix is boring and cheap: write a handful of things down. You do not need a manual. You need a short, current record of how your business actually runs on technology.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Undocumented IT is fine right up until it is not: someone leaves, a key person is on vacation during an outage, you switch providers, or you are trying to recover from an incident and cannot even find the login. Good documentation turns those moments from a crisis into a task. It also makes everyday things smoother, onboarding a new hire, handing work to an IT provider, or proving to an insurer or auditor that you run a tight ship.
What to actually write down
Keep it to what matters. For most small businesses that is:
- Accounts and access. What key services you use (email, banking, domain, website, core apps), who owns each, and how access is managed. Note where the accounts are, not the passwords themselves, those belong in a password manager, never a document.
- Key systems and vendors. Your important tools and who to call for each: the vendor, the support contact, the account number. When something breaks, this is the page you want.
- The essentials of your setup. Your domain and who it is registered with, your website and where it is hosted, your network basics, and what devices the business owns.
- Short how-tos for the things only one person knows. The recurring task that would stall if that person were away: running payroll, closing the month, the odd bit of kit with a specific process.
- Recovery basics. Where your backups are and how to restore them, and the first steps if something goes badly wrong.
Keep it usable, and keep it safe
Documentation only helps if people can find it and trust it. Keep it in one known place your key people can reach, and make sure it survives the very outage you might need it for, a copy that is not solely on the system that could be down. Two rules keep it safe: never put actual passwords in it (link to your password manager instead), and control who can see it, since this record is a map of your business. Assign one owner, and review it a couple of times a year and whenever something changes.
Start small today
Do not wait for a perfect wiki. Open one document and spend twenty minutes listing your critical accounts and who owns them. That alone puts you ahead of most small businesses and closes the scariest gap, being locked out of your own business. You can flesh out the rest over time.