Business Continuity Plan Template

Complete the Brokerage Continuity Template

A business continuity plan (BCP) assigns the work, people and fallback steps that keep a brokerage operating during a disruption. This generator turns your answers into a completed plan with service recovery tables and a contact sheet.

Start with your practice name and the person authorised to activate the plan. Add the client services that cannot wait, then record their systems and approved file-access routes. Use role names where responsibilities survive staff changes, and identify the person currently filling each role.

Open application updates, settlement coordination and controlled client-file access are possible critical services for an Australian brokerage. Choose the work your practice actually performs. A principal, processing team and credit representative can have different responsibilities.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) discusses risk management and reviewing technological resources in Regulatory Guide 205. Its credit-licensee guidance includes disaster recovery systems and business resumption capacity. A credit representative must fit their arrangements to the licensee’s procedures and their own agreements.

Assign Recovery Priorities and Contacts

For each service, name a responsible person and a substitute, with a usable contact method for both. Enter a target recovery duration based on the consequences of delay. A settlement-critical task can need attention before routine administration.

Add up to six services in priority order. Record which systems, suppliers and approved access routes each one needs. A target such as “within 2 hours of activation” states the elapsed time the team will test, without promising that a lender or supplier will recover within it.

The plan builds its staff contact sheet from the service owners and substitutes. Separate fields cover your licensee or aggregator, technology provider, emergency contact and another supplier. Enter a phone number, business email or a directory route staff can still reach during the outage.

Use business contact details only. Leave passwords, access tokens and borrower identifiers out of the plan. Record the approved access procedure’s location so authorised staff can follow it without placing credentials in a widely shared document.

Prepare for an Outage

Select the disruption scenarios you want to include, then write the actions and their owners. The generator has separate action tables for unavailable staff, inaccessible files, failed systems and supplier disruption. Edit these instructions as your fallback arrangements change.

For unavailable staff, identify who accepts the handover and how that person gets authorised access. For inaccessible files or failed cloud services, name the approved recovery route and the person contacting technical support. For supplier disruption, record the approved alternate process and who tells clients about delays.

A fire can make the office unavailable, while a pandemic can affect several people at once. Account for a fallback that fails for the same reason as the primary process. A second person in the same inaccessible office is not an independent recovery route.

Continuity actions keep work moving. Incident assessment and notification decisions belong to your incident response procedure and authorised decision-maker. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s data breach guidance explains containment, assessment, notification and review. The generated plan includes your escalation pointer without deciding whether an incident is reportable.

Preview an Example and Export Your Plan

Select “Load example” to view a fictional small brokerage plan. Example Harbour Brokerage assigns settlement coordination to Alex Example, with Mira Example as the substitute. Its target is within 2 hours of activation.

The fallback has Mira check time-critical tasks in the approved secure workspace and contact the settlement agent through the verified business directory. The example also names who updates clients and who escalates an incident. These fictional choices illustrate the fields, without setting recovery standards for your practice.

The preview updates as you type and lists outstanding details, including missing substitute contacts and selected scenarios without actions. You can download an incomplete draft with those warnings still present. “Plan ready to review” means the completion checks pass, not that the plan meets every licence or contract requirement.

Download the HTML document to keep its line breaks and tables. Open that file in a browser to read or print it later. “Print / save PDF” opens the browser’s print dialog for a paper copy or PDF. Blank optional review clauses are omitted.

All document generation happens in your browser. Your plan details stay in this page’s memory and are not uploaded or saved to an account. Download before closing or reloading the page. “Clear plan” removes the entered details from the form and preview.

Rehearse and Maintain the Plan

Test one selected outage scenario against your service priorities. In a tabletop exercise, have the substitute walk through the recovery actions while the usual owner or system is unavailable. Check whether the substitute can find the contact route and complete the priority task within the entered target.

Record what happened in the optional exercise fields. State the outcome, any unresolved dependency and the next action with its owner. A discussion that identifies missing access is useful evidence of a recovery gap, even when the target was missed.

The review and exercise date fields start blank. Enter actual dates when you review or test the plan. Revisit the document after a change to staff roles, suppliers, cloud systems or file access. An exercise or real disruption can also reveal a failed assumption.

Keep an accessible copy where authorised staff can reach it if the normal system fails. Business.gov.au’s emergency management planning guide covers continuity preparation, emergency actions and recovery. Use it alongside the arrangements that apply to your brokerage.

What the Business Continuity Plan Covers

A business continuity management plan explains how priority operations continue during disruption. A disaster recovery plan concentrates on restoring systems and data. The recovery procedures support the business continuity plan’s service targets. Business resilience is broader: it includes the ability to prepare for disruption and adapt after it.

This free browser tool creates a business continuity plan for your entered brokerage services. It does not monitor outages, maintain backups or manage live incidents. Use your approved operational systems for those ongoing tasks.

Before using the completed document, work through this checklist.

• Name the plan owner and the activation trigger.
• List critical work in priority order, with a recovery duration for each service.
• Assign a responsible person and substitute with contact methods.
• Record system dependencies and approved recovery actions.
• Include external contacts and client communication responsibilities.
• Point incident assessment and notification decisions to the authorised procedure.
• Test the fallback and record the remaining dependency and next action.

When the Australian Privacy Principles apply, APP 11 requires reasonable steps to protect personal information. Restoring access must preserve those controls. Keep detailed access rules, retention procedures and breach assessment in your security procedures.